The Futility Infielder

Spankees

The sun arose Sunday morning and the earth continued to turn, but baseball's postseason will roll on without the New York Yankees. While this may violate what Yankee fans may feel is the natural order of things--not since 1995 has the team ended its season this early--the Yanks were emphatically spanked by the Anaheim Angels and ushered out of the playofffs yesterday, three games to one. The kings of the past several postseasons are dead.

For the third game in a row, the Angels came from behind, taking advantage of a porous and mistake-prone Yankee defense. They strung together an epic 8-run rally that bore a familiar resemblance to past pinstriped teams. Give a championship-caliber ballclub an extra out, as the Yanks did in the third inning and again in the fifth, and they will smell the blood in the water.

The Angels, who from manager Mike Scioscia on down deserve a huge amount of credit for doing what no AL team has done since 1997, were certainly helped by the fact that the Yanks didn't play up to their potential. Their hallowed starting pitching failed miserably, with all four starters allowing at least four runs and none of them getting out of the sixth inning. The staff ERA was an astronomical 8.21, and the Angels set a Division Series record with their .376 batting average. Defense was a factor as well; the Yanks allowed a .367 average on balls in play (an anemic .633 DER; see below) while the Angels held the Yanks to a .292 average on balls in play (.708 DER).

That eight-run inning put the Yanks down 9-2, but even mortally wounded, they battled back, twice coming within one batter of bringing the tying run to the plate. Fox tastelessly tried to unleash the ghosts of a past Angels collapse, showing haunting footage of the late Donnie Moore's 1986 playofff disaster (a disconsolate Moore, who gave up a Game FIve-winning homer to Dave Henderson when the Angels were one strike away from winning their first postseason series, committed suicide a few years later). The Yanks, for their part, were much more gracious in defeat--no Patrick Ewing "I still think we're the better team" defiance, no excuses offered. "We just got beat by the better team," said starting pitcher David Wells. Said pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre: "This four-game stretch is the best anybody has attacked our pitching in the seven years I've been here."

Even George Steinbrenner mustered an uncharacteristic bit of grace in defeat. "If we had to lose to somebody, I'm happy for Gene and the Disney people," admitted the Boss, referring to the late Gene Autry, who owned the Angels for decades without them winning a single playoff series. "For Gene's memory, it was a great day. He was always the nicest man I ever knew in baseball."

But just as surely, the Boss cannot be a happy man, not with the league's highest-paid team now free to schedule tee times in early October. Heads will likely roll, and the roster will be retooled yet again (New York Daily News gets the early jump on potential changes in the Yankee makeup; I'll have all winter to write about my views on the matter).

The Yankee brass and players are accustomed to winning it all; Derek Jeter termed this season a failure, and while it may sound harsh, the lingering image for Yankee fans is Darren Erstad's fifth-inning blooper falling between centerfielder Bernie Williams and a forlorn Alfonso Soriano--he of the spectacular near 40-40 season. For all of the individual accolades and milestones the Yankee players received, none matters so much as the big prize at the end of the season.

For Yankee fans, October will feel much more empty without our familiar pinstriped warriors. But this loss won't be mourned the way last year's Game Seven defeat was. That team, with a nucleus that had seen five World Series in six years, meant so much to the city in the wake of September 11, and came so close to winning it despite being more or less outplayed (but not outmanaged). While the losing hurt, most New Yorkers felt damn proud to have them representing the city. This year's team, with several newcomers, clearly couldn't muster the postseason magic of years past, and simply got their asses handed to them on a platter. Losing stings if you're a Yankee fan today, but most of us are still pretty confident we'll live to see the team get another shot or two in our lifetimes.

The last time the Yanks found themselves in a similar position, in October 1997, I passed an East Village bar with a chalkboard in the window that said "Only 107 Days Until Pitchers and Catchers. Go Yankees!" That spirit was enough to carry me and many other Yankee fans through the winter months, and we were rewarded with the finest ballclub most of us had ever seen. So I'll shed no tears for this year's Yankees. Instead, I'll sit back and watch the remainder of this year's playoffs, rooting for whichever AL team emerges from what promises to be an entertaining scrum, and start counting the days until pitchers and catchers report as soon as the final out of the World Series is recorded.

The postseason kings are dead, long live the postseason kings.