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Indians watch playoff streak end By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | ||||||||||||||||||
CLEVELAND -- They won. But what did they win?
Their season was over. But it sure didn't feel like it.
For the first time since Felix Fermin, Junior Ortiz and Jeff Mutis wore their uniforms in what seems like a lifetime ago, the playoffs will go on without the Cleveland Indians.
And that, said Charlie Manuel, "is an empty feeling."
"It seemed like we were peaking," said the manager, still wearing virtually his entire uniform Sunday night, four hours after his own team's final out. "That's what makes this kind of tough. It would have been interesting to see how far we would have gone."
But we'll never know now. The Mariners are going to the playoffs. The A's are going to the playoffs. And the Cleveland Indians -- a team that had grown used to clinching its division around St. Patrick's Day -- is left to wrestle with the emptiness.
For five melancholy Octobers, the Indians lost their final game and had to deal with that pain all the way home. But this year, this Sunday, was different. On this Sunday, in this grand finale, the Indians did what they had to do. They pummeled Toronto, 11-4. They beat David Wells, a man who had lost to them once in 13 starts over the previous five years. They got a magical, cinematic home run out of Manny Ramirez in what might have been his final at-bat ever with the Indians. They got another improbable David-versus-Goliath start out of Steve Woodard, a man who is now 2-0 this year when he gets to pitch against Wells or that Pedro guy -- and 2-10 in 19 starts against the rest of the species. They thought they'd written themselves a happy-ever-after ending to a season that often looked like a big-bad-wolf kind of story.
Only one problem: They weren't in charge of this script.
Nope. The Mariners and A's had final say on this one. And those clubs also did what they had to do, as the Indians could only huddle around the massive rear-projection screen in their clubhouse, trying to will this tale to turn out all different.
It was the worst kind of torture imaginable. And hanging over the whole experience was this horrifying thought: What if all this sweat, all these tears, all those trades, all that sleep deprivation, all that energy they expended over the last two months just to play again in October got them nothing more than a playoff date with the nearest fishing hole?
"You don't want to not get in now, because we can see the shore," said Sandy Alomar. "You don't want to swim and swim and swim and then die on the shore. That's the worst way you could ever go. You swim that far, throw a lifesaver. You fight this hard to get in, you want to make it."
But they didn't make it. They didn't make it because they didn't start to fight until it was too late, until after they'd stumbled through their first 103 games with a record of 52-51.
They didn't make it because they couldn't survive an inhumane schedule that forced them to play 23 games in the season's final 20 days -- including three day-night doubleheaders in a week.
They didn't make it because they lost way too many games they couldn't afford to lose. They lost 21 games in which they scored six runs or more (as opposed to just three in their 100-win season of 1995). They lost nine games they led after the seventh inning. They lost two games in the ninth inning to the Twins just in the last week. They lost a game in Boston in which they took a 7-0 lead in the first inning. ("Yeah," Manuel said sadly. "That one comes to mind pretty quick.")
They didn't make it, too, because they made more trips to the E.R. than George Clooney. And that forced them to run through 30 pitchers and 13 starting pitchers. And worst of all, it forced them to play seven weeks without the fearsome Ramirez.
"People ask: What if Manny hadn't missed those games? But that just gets back to that big 'if' we've been talking about," Manuel said. "I'll say this: I think Manny would have contributed some things in those 42 games. But how many would he have made a difference in? That's something I don't know." And we'll never know. But we do know this: If you just look at the American League right now, today, here in the first week of October, there might be no better team than the Cleveland Indians.
And after battling to live through two months on their own little Survivor island, the Indians would have been as primed for the wars of October as any team out there.
"It's like we've been playing a playoff game every day for two months," said Travis Fryman. "When you work this hard, you'd like to see a reward for this kind of effort."
But that reward turned out to be the same reward the Cubs get and the Phillies get and the Devil Rays get: A ticket home to watch the playoffs in living color in the den. And all the time they need to work on their fairway woods.
"I guess we can look back at all the games we lost by one run (and they went 17-24 in those games)," said Sandy Alomar. "I guess we can question this and that. But that's in the past. We can't go back and get those games and win them now. The only thing we could do today is win our game. Our game was the only thing in our hands."
And that was the part of this day that went just fine.
Except it began with Woodard giving up a two-run, 450-foot home run to the second man he faced, Alex Gonzalez. Oops. At that point, with Wells about to head for the mound, nobody in the park envisioned the demise of the Indians would eventually be handled by Seattle and Oakland.
But Alomar yanked off his mask and headed right to the mound. Even as Gonzalez was trotting around the bases, Woodard's catcher was telling him: "Don't worry about it. It just means we've got to score against David Wells. If we don't score a run, we don't deserve to go, anyway."
From that moment on, not only did Woodard stop giving up two-run homers, he stopped giving up any kind of hits. He retired the next 17 hitters. By the time he finally allowed another baserunner, with two outs in the sixth inning, his team held an 8-2 lead. That was going to be plenty.
"I'm sure nobody in the world today thought Woodard would beat David Wells," Alomar said. "But he beat Pedro last week. And he beat David Wells today. That shows you baseball is a very weird sport."
It couldn't have gotten much weirder than it got on this day. Wells almost didn't start this game at all, after the gout in his right toe flared up before the game. Then he gave one of his worst efforts of the year, against a team he has owned so thoroughly he probably has a second mortgage on Jacobs Field.
He'd allowed the Indians one earned run all year in 17 innings. And the nine men in Cleveland's lineup started the day with a career average of just .245 against him (.224 if you subtracted Sandy Alomar's .429).
But on Sunday, they went 7-for-12 (.583) against him. Lofton started the rampage with a 400-foot double leading off the game. Jim Thome (3-for-22 against Wells before Sunday) finished it with a laser-beam homer that whooshed from home plate to the sixth row in about a tenth of a second.
"David Wells and I hunt together," Thome said. "He comes down to my lodge. We'll have a lot to talk about this winter -- after today."
The Indians then piled it on, scoring in double figures for the 21st time. They even tossed in a scene straight out of Hollywood in the seventh inning, as Ramirez walked to the plate for his final at-bat of the year.
No one had to tell these 42,594 paying customers what this at-bat meant. The moment Ramirez's name was announced, they rose and they clapped and they wouldn't stop -- for 40 seconds.
Ramirez -- who will never lead the league in hot-doggery -- never even looked up. He stepped out of the box. He flexed. He pawed at the dirt. He tapped the plate with his bat. Then he finally stepped back in and mashed the second pitch 452 feet to center field. It came down between two trees in the forest that envelopes the outfield picnic area. It was Ramirez's 38th home run of a season in which he missed 44 games, his fifth of this week and his 25th since he came off the disabled list July 13. Now he's an extremely marketable free-agent. And no one knows if he'll wear this uniform again. So if this was a modern-day, dollar-sign-filled version of Ted Williams' storied Fenway Park farewell, Manny played the part brilliantly.
"The ovation was great enough, but then this guy goes deep -- 450 feet," Alomar said. "I said, `You've got to be kidding me.' I wouldn't even get up to give him a high-five. I said, 'Manny, I'm not gonna give you five because you're not human. You're an alien.'"
Finally, they wrapped it all up at 3:43 p.m., on maybe the goofiest-looking season-ending play ever -- a thunker of a pop-up by Todd Greene just beyond the mound, which reliever Ricardo Rincon decided to catch. Even though that meant plowing over third baseman Travis Fryman.
So as the 454th consecutive sellout crowd at the Jake erupted in short-lived euphoria, the Indians stomped out of the dugout -- only to find Fryman and Rincon crumpled in two heaps in the infield. Rincon got up first. But Fryman was down for a full minute and a half -- as teammates huddled around him and the crowd grew quiet.
Turned out, though, he'd just had the wind knocked out of him. So eventually, he climbed shakily to his feet, and the Jake exploded one more time.
"I was thinking, here I got through the whole season without any physical problems, and now, on the last play of the season, I got hurt," Fryman said. "But once I started to breathe again, I looked up, and everyone was standing around. And I heard Sandy say, 'Let's go. He's all right.' I appreciated the concern."
So they finally shook hands. Then they streamed back to their clubhouse, throwing caps into the crowd as they left the field. And once they arrived, the big-screen TV in the middle of the locker room was showing both the Seattle and Oakland games, thanks to the miracle of picture-in-picture technology.
But on this day, the Cleveland Indians needed bigger miracles than that. Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. |
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