The 365-day circle of Red Sox humiliation and Yankees hegemony was essentially completed here in Fenway Park on Saturday night.
On the anniversary of Grady Little's decision to leave Pedro Martinez on the mound at Yankee Stadium last October, the Yankees crushed Boston, 19-8, to take a three-games-to-none lead in this year's American League Championship Series. No team in baseball history has come back from such a postseason deficit. These Red Sox won't be the first to do such a deed, not after the way their own bonehead blunders perfectly complemented Yankees slugging in this rout.
It's never over until it's over. Except sometimes. And this is one of those times. The Yankees pounded so many balls off the Green Monster that, by the seventh inning, the poor, old battered edifice was heard moaning, "No mas."
The symmetry of this season's Boston-New York battles seems complete now. In July, Alex Rodriguez and Jason Varitek had a brawl after A-Rod was hit by Bronson Arroyo. In this Game 3, A-Rod greeted Arroyo with an RBI double in the first inning and a titanic home run off him onto Lansdowne Street in the third. Before the night was over, Rodriguez had another double, a walk, five runs and three RBI.
So, the pitching ace that both the Yankees and Red Sox craved last winter -- Curt Schilling -- ended up being ineffective in this series, losing Game 1, due largely to a gimpy ankle. A-Rod, the other superstar that both teams sought in the offseason, performed in perfect health and has had a monstrous 14-for-33 postseason so far with seven extra-base hits. The other high-dollar hitter the Yanks acquired to counteract Boston was free agent Gary Sheffield, who had four RBI with a single, double and homer Saturday.
Meantime, early in this game the Red Sox committed two base-running blunders and a balk that may have cost them about four runs. Given all this extra slack, the Yankees blew apart a 6-6 tie and coasted to a crushingly decisive victory. In baseball history, 80 percent of all teams that have fallen behind 3-0 in games in a postseason series have gone on to be swept.
Last season, the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs were at the center of some of the most exciting postseason baseball of our time. Both seemed to have their respective pennants in their grasps then lost. In response, both radically improved their teams with high-priced and big-name stars. The idea that they might meet in the World Series this year again seemed plausible.
Now the mean old game of baseball has flushed that fantasy down the game's relentless reality tester. The ludicrously talented Cubs, who should have won the National League wild card in a walk, collapsed in late September, losing eight of nine games when it mattered most. Now, the Red Sox, with perhaps their best team since Babe Ruth pitched for them, are in the midst of being humiliated and possibly swept by a gutty Yankees team with a patched-together pitching staff and $100 million slugger Jason Giambi not even on the active roster.
This game began amidst the kind of arcane analysis of baseball minutia that New England has used for generations to keep its mind off the one statistic that matters: 26 Yankees world titles since 1918, zero for the Fenway Park fellows. This Red Sox team, even more than others in the past, hits far better at home than on the road. Some improvement might be expected in such a famous hitter's paradise, but the Red Sox home-road differentials have been astronomical. The team hits 44 points higher in Fenway (.304-.260).
The Red Sox' split personality on offense helped them almost immediately in Game 3. In the first two games at Yankee Stadium against Mike Mussina and Jon Lieber, Boston's hitters went 1 for 37 in the first six innings. So any early runs scored by the Yankees seemed doubly hard to answer. However, in Fenway, the Red Sox shrug off early onslaughts by others.
That proved lucky for Boston, because the Yankees treated right-hander Bronson Arroyo as though he was a human batting tee, scoring three runs in the first inning, the last two on a homer by Hideki Matsui, who continued his torrid postseason.
Boston might have done damage in its own first inning after back-to-back singles by Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, but Ramirez ended the inning with a classic base-running gaffe, being thrown out at third by right fielder Sheffield. Actually, replays showed he was safe, but he deserved to be out so, perhaps, ump Joe West rang him up on general principle.
That blunder may have cost Boston two runs. The next Red Sox inning began with a Varitek walk and a Trot Nixon home run into the first row of the right field bleachers. Such retrospective reasoning is always suspect. Maybe the same sequence of events would not have transpired. But big leaguers, practical fellows, not logicians, tend to believe it. They're constantly haunted by these hypothetical reconstructions of what "might have been" without some inning-ending brain cramp like Manny's. Before the second inning was over, the Red Sox had pummeled Yankee starter Kevin Brown for four runs and knocked him out.
In the morass of a Fenway Park slugfest, mental mistakes often tell the tale, even though they don't show up in the box score. Ramirez's foolish failed first-to-third gamble simply started a Red Sox trend. In the third inning, Boston reliever Ramiro Mendoza balked home a run for a 6-4 Yankees lead. But it wasn't just any balk. Mendoza stepped backward off the rubber then, almost in the same motion threw to the plate. Future generations can discuss his motives. Without that balk, the run wouldn't have scored.
The Red Sox topped themselves, however, in the bottom of that inning. With the bases loaded and one out against reliever Javier Vazquez, Orlando Cabrera doubled off the bullpen fence in right-center. Two runs scored to tie the game at 6 and slow Bill Mueller, running from first base, should have been held at third base. Keep that big-inning going. But third base coach Dale Sveum sent him home -- or at least didn't tackle him. Mueller was out by 10 feet. A subsequent groundout would have scored him. So, in three innings, the Red Sox had probably cost themselves three runs while giving the Yankees one extra score.
Such sins seldom go unpunished. To start the fourth inning, Mendoza hit No. 9 hitter Miguel Cairo with the first pitch. This exceeds the incomprehensible since the next three Yankees hitters earn about $60 million a season. Manager Terry Francona, in disgust, took the ball and bequeathed it to obscure long reliever Curtis Leskanic of whom Red Sox fans say: "Time to panic. Call Leskanic."
Leskanic was in rare form. After a walk to Rodriguez, Sheffield deposited his hanging slider over the Green Monster for a three-run homer. Then Matsui doubled, ending Leskanic's brief but memorable night. With the game now nearly two hours long and verging on the absurd, Francona did the only natural thing -- he called for a knuckleball pitcher who was supposed to start Game 4. Hey, what else? That didn't work either. Tim Wakefield issued an intentional walk, then watched Ruben Sierra drive a two-run double up the right field gap for an 11-6 New York lead.
After that, the Yankees used the rest of the night to get personal. With the game out of hand in the seventh inning, Sheffield, Matsui, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada all bashed two-out hits to pad their margin. In most games, that's considered almost bad sportsmanship. When it's Yankees against Red Sox, such mortifications are almost the heart of the matter.
