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Yankees vs. A's |
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Monday, October 9
Zito pitches Yankees into heap of trouble
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- And so the Joe Torre Yankees must go now to a place they have almost never been.
To Game 5. To a win-or-go-home baseball game.
In someone else's ballpark, no less. In a ballpark 3,000 miles away, no less.
They have no choice now. On Saturday night, they lost a game the '98-'99 Yankees never lost:
An 11-1 loss to the Oakland A's with Roger Clemens on the mound.
An 11-1 loss that forced them to fly across the country all night to play Game 5 Sunday in Oakland.
An 11-1 loss to a 22-year-old left-hander so youthful, he travels around the country with a big stuffed dog.
That would be Barry Zito, another one of those many A's who seem to drop out of the sky like an asteroid to play like they've just escaped from a Hall of Fame plaque.
"He impressed us," Torre said of a kid who was 8 years old when Clemens won his first Cy Young. "Today was obviously a must win for them. And he pitched like a pro."
Zito is 17 months removed from the Southern Cal campus. He is 15 starts into his big-league career. But Saturday night, on the Broadway stage at Yankee Stadium -- in a game in which his only assignment was to save his team's entire season -- he turned into Sandy Koufax.
One run. Seven hits. Five and two-thirds innings of magnificent baseball in which he always seemed to be in total control.
Over the last six postseasons, only one pitcher younger than Zito (age 22 years, 5 months) has won a game that could have ended his team's season. That was Cleveland's Jaret Wright, who also did it against the Yankees, in Game 5 of the 1997 Division Series, at age 21 years, 9 months.
But Jaret Wright was just a raw fire-breather who could throw a baseball through a car wash without it getting wet. He didn't have the polish Barry Zito has. All Zito had to do Saturday was pitch against a five-time Cy Young Award winner, in the middle of the Bronx Zoo, with a season's work on the line. To watch him, though, you would have thought he was facing Oregon State in a Pac-10 tournament game in front of 1,200 people.
"I pitched against Clemens last time I was here," Zito said of the game in August in which he also outpitched the Rocket. "So I kind of got over the fact that I was pitching against him back then. But this was a huge game. It was definitely a playoff atmosphere. It was magical out there."
And he was magical himself. But then people like Zito make the A's what they are. Other teams spend five years nursing their No. 1 picks to the big leagues. Zito -- the ninth pick in the 1999 draft -- made it in 13 months.
"Of all our No. 1 drafts, I think we're all especially proud of the Zito draft," said A's GM Billy Beane. "No team other than ours thought he was a top 10 pick. And I doubt, if we hadn't taken him, he'd even have gone in the top 15.
"When we drafted Barry Zito, he threw 88 to 91 miles per hour. It's easy to hide behind the radar-gun readings in the draft, because if you draft a guy who throws 95, it's easy to exonerate yourself from criticism. But the idea is to draft guys who can win. If you look at left-handers who win, they're guys who miss bats and throw 88 to 91. So with Barry, we just accepted what we saw. And what we saw was a guy who'd had success at every level and missed bats. With a guy like that, you throw the gun away."
With that win Saturday night, Zito's record in professional baseball rose to 22-10. His record in the big leagues is 8-4. Since September 1, he's now an imposing 6-1, with a 1.71 ERA. And his record in monstrous postseason games is now a very big 1-0.
On Saturday, he had help, though. He had Olmedo Saenz, another one of the people who make the A's what they are.
Saenz spent eight years kicking around the minor leagues, seemingly going nowhere fast. Then the A's signed him as a six-year minor-league free agent before the 1999 season. And he hasn't stopped hitting since.
On Saturday night, he replaced Matt Stairs in the lineup. He also supplanted Eric Chavez in the cleanup spot. And in the first inning, after Clemens walked Terrence Long on four pitches to start the game, then doled out the Yankees' regularly scheduled walk du jour to Jason Giambi, Saenz did what Oakland cleanup hitters hadn't done all series.
He gave them reason to think walking Giambi automatically wasn't such a brilliant idea after all.
He smoked Clemens' first pitch off an advertising board on the facing of the second deck in left field for a three-run homer; 3-0, Oakland. And this game was never the same again. It was the first hit by an A's cleanup hitter in the series.
"I didn't feel any pressure, just because I was hitting cleanup," said Saenz, whose 77 big-league RBI now include 32 that have either tied games or put the A's ahead. "I just like being in the lineup. I said to myself, 'I'm just going to enjoy the moment.'"
But the A's talent finders who discovered him in the wilds of the Pacific Coast League might have enjoyed it more. Two winters ago, they scarfed him up after a 29-homer, 102-RBI season for Calgary, a White Sox affiliate. And now he's just one more piece of a puzzle that includes some of the most unlikely characters ever.
"We grind numbers, we grind history, we grind scouting reports, and we work our butts off," Beane said. "And we start with those six-year free agents. It's been a source of pride for us. Every year, we find one guy who really helps us. Last year, it was Olmedo. This year, it was Jeff Tam. Before that, there was Matt Stairs and Gil Heredia.
"They're all guys who were castoffs with other organizations. And they've been critical for us. It's our form of guerilla warfare."
Now, however, this whole series -- this whole season, for that matter -- has turned into their form of guerilla warfare.
The plot lines looked way too easy after the Yankees won Games 2 and 3:
Young A's Can't Compete With Veteran Yanks.
Low-Budget Wonders No Match For $112-million Designer Team When It Counts.
But now those plot lines don't look so easy anymore.
"There are probably a lot of people who don't believe this," Saenz said. "But that's baseball. Like everyone says, you never know what might happen."
Oh, the flaws of the A's have shown up in this series. But the flaws of the Big Pinstriped Machine may have shown up even more.
Such as offense.
Once Clemens left, trailing 5-0 in the sixth, this game seemed over -- because the Yankees don't score enough runs to win those games anymore.
Since Aug. 27, they're now 1-15 when they give up five runs or more.
"We just really have been flat," Torre said. "And when I say flat, I mean we haven't been able to sustain anything offensively."
In fact, they also proved last night that the only way they win these days is if their starting pitcher pitches well and lasts deep into the game.
Torre no longer trusts anyone in his bullpen except Mariano Rivera and, on select occasions, Mike Stanton. And his offense isn't outslugging anybody. They haven't scored more than four runs in their last 11 games. So it's Clemens, El Duque and Game 5 starter Andy Pettitte against the world. And Clemens, for one, hasn't been up to world-beating.
Over the last two Octobers, dating back to last year's ALCS against the Red Sox, the Yankees have lost three of the four games Clemens has started. In that same span, when anyone else has started, they're 9-0.
But the Yankees' other critical problem is that there aren't enough of those Anyone Elses anymore, either. Because Torre can't afford to start David Cone or Denny Neagle these days, Clemens was forced to start on three days' rest Saturday. He hasn't won a game on three days' rest since June 8, 1988. And it showed, even though Clemens, typically, said: "I felt great."
On Sunday, it's Pettitte's turn to go on three days' rest. He did go 1-2 with a 2.02 ERA on three starts this season with three days' rest. But how deep in the game can he get on short rest, no matter how much extra sleep he gets after flying to Oakland a day early? That's a very significant question for the Yankees.
"I really can't worry about it," Torre said, "because he's my starter tomorrow. When we made this (decision), we gave it a lot of thought. ... You make that commitment, you go for it."
So Torre rode El Duque for 130 pitches Friday. And if necessary, he'll ride Pettitte, too.
But make no mistake. This is a team in trouble. It didn't want to load those suitcases onto the plane Saturday night. It didn't want to make this trip. And the A's, on the other hand, don't mind one bit -- considering where they could have been Sunday night if they'd lost Saturday.
"I'm glad we're doing it the way we do it," Beane said. "We go home to our own beds. Our pitcher (Heredia) goes on four days' rest. Theirs goes on three. I'd like to think we're more mentally prepared to go out there. I'd rather do it this way than have the off day. Of course, I could change my mind if we lose."
It is hard to bet against Pettitte, who is 7-4 lifetime in the postseason. But nobody would have bet he would ever be in this spot, either. So we know where the pressure will fall come game time.
"I think the pressure is definitely on them," Zito said. "We're just this scrappy team with a bunch of young kids that has kind of come out of nowhere. And now we're crashing the party of the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves dynasties. There's no pressure on us. We get to play this game at our place. We couldn't have written the script for this game any better."
Only once in Torre's five seasons as Yankee manager has his team had to play a game like this: Win and advance, or lose and wave goodbye. That was Game 5 of the 1997 Division Series against Cleveland.
The Yankees lost that game. To Jaret Wright. And they didn't even have to fly 3,000 miles through the middle of the night to play that one.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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