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League Championship
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Wednesday, October 25
Stark: The great El Duque finally goes down
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- In baseball, no one wins forever. This isn't the game of the '67 UCLA Bruins. This isn't the game of the '72 Miami Dolphins. This isn't the game of Rocky Marciano.
So Tuesday night, in the loudest place on earth, in the eardrum-splitting confines of Shea Stadium, two of the most remarkable streaks in postseason history were brought crashing to their inevitable demise.
First, there was the streak of Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez.
Ten times he'd gone to the mound for the Yankees in October. All 10 times his team had won.
|  | | Orlando Hernandez is now 8-1 lifetime in the postseason after suffering the loss in Game 3. |
When he took the mound at Shea on Tuesday night, his career postseason record stood at 8-0, with a 1.91 ERA. Never before in the history of baseball had anyone run up numbers like that in the month when champions are made.
And then there was the streak of the New York Yankees.
For four of the past five Fall Classics, they've been rampaging through opponents as if they were still writing out lineups with Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio in them. Fourteen straight World Series wins. Fourteen.
It is the longest World Series winning streak of all time. It is the longest championship-series winning streak of all time in any major sport. But it wasn't going to go on until Derek Jeter was 80, until George Steinbrenner ran out of money, until Mariano Rivera's postseason ERA crept over 1.00.
All streaks are made to be ended. And Tuesday night at Shea, the Mets pulled the plug on both of these magical streaks -- with a two-run eighth-inning mugging of El Duque, with a 4-2 win over the no-longer-omnipotent Yankees, with a victory in the face of one of the greatest strikeout performances in modern World Series history.
How long had it been since the Yankees lost a World Series game? So long, Jeter was hard-pressed to remember anything about the last time.
"Let's see," he said. "It was '96, right? The Braves. At home."
Yes, sir. It was October 21, 1996. Greg Maddux shut them out for eight innings. Mark Wohlers struck out the side in the ninth.
It was so long ago that the people who played for the Yankees that night included Wade Boggs, Cecil Fielder and Mariano Duncan. They're all retired now.
After that came four wins in a row against the mighty Braves, four more in a row against the '98 Padres, another sweep against the '99 Braves, two more wins against the Mets in The Bronx.
Fourteen games. Zero losses.
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The end of the streak
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The Yankees' 14-game World Series winning streak was stopped with their loss in Game 3. Below is a rundown of that streak:
1996: Yankees 5, Braves 2
Down two games to none, David Cone got out of a big bases-loaded jam in the sixth inning and went on to beat Tom Glavine
1996: Yankees 8, Braves
Down 6-0 in the sixth, the Yankees rally. Jim Leyritz tied the game in the eighth with a three-run pinch-hit homer off Mark Wohlers and the Yankees won it in 10 innings.
1996: Yankees 1, Braves 0
After losing the opener 12-1, Andy Pettitte beat John Smoltz with eight shutout innings to complete a sweep of the three games in Atlanta.
1996: Yankees 3, Braves 2
Jimmy Key beat Greg Maddux while MVP John Wetteland recorded his fourth save of the Series.
1998: Yankees 9, Padres 6
Tino Martinez broke a tie in the seventh inning with an upper-deck grand slam off Mark Langston, one pitch after umpire Richie Garcia failed to ring Tino up on an apparent 2-2 pitch down the middle.
1998: Yankees 9, Padres 3
The Yankees knocked out Padres starter Andy Ashby in the second. El Duque picks up the win.
1998: Yankees 5, Padres 4
MVP Scott Brosius hit a game-winning three-run homer off Padres closer Trevor Hoffman in the eighth.
1998: Yankees 3, Padres 0
Andy Pettitte finished off the sweep with a masterful outing.
1999: Yankees 4, Braves 1
El Duque got the win as four Yankee hurlers combined on a two-hitter.
1999: Yankees 7, Braves 2
David Cone pitched seven innings, allowing one hit, while the Yankees scored three in the first and two in the third.
1999: Yankees 6, Braves 5
Chuck Knoblauch's two-run homer in the eighth off the top of the fence in right tied it and Chad Curtis' home run (his second of the game) won it in the 10th
1999: Yankees 4, Braves 1
Roger Clemens got the win and Series MVP Mariano Rivera his second save to go with a Game 3 win.
2000: Yankees 4, Mets 3
Jose Vizcaino capped off a thrilling game by singling in the game-winner in the 12th inning, his fourth hit of the game.
2000: Yankees 6, Mets 5
In a game marred by the bat-throwing incident involving Roger Clemens and Mike Piazza, Clemens dominated the Mets for eight innings before the Mets made a valiant effort by scoring five runs in the ninth.
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Run that streak up the flagpole one last time. Now let's all salute.
Except the Yankees themselves.
"Right now," Jeter said, in the Yankees' quietest World Series locker room in a baseball generation, "I don't think anybody's concerned about that streak. We're concerned about tomorrow. We'll reflect on that later. Not now."
"Those wins are special," said Jorge Posada. "That streak is special. But that streak didn't matter tonight. We've got to go out and win tomorrow."
The qualities that made the Yankees capable of a streak that long are the same qualities that made them so thoroughly incapable of celebrating its passing Tuesday. It isn't about history for this team. It's all about winning this game, this night. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And that's what makes El Duque the perfect Yankee. You would have had a better chance Tuesday of enticing him to sail back to Cuba than you would of enticing him to say one positive word about all his great personal accomplishments.
So even in the face of defeat, he is the only pitcher ever to start his postseason career 8-0?
"I'm not interested in individual records," he said. "I don't seek anything individual."
So this was the 204th World Series game in Yankees history, and El Duque's 12 strikeouts in this game were an all-time franchise record?
"That's not important," he said, sternly. "What's important is that I couldn't get (Benny) Agbayani out. What does 12 strikeouts mean?"
Well, they mean, for one thing, that even on a night when he finally took a World Series loss, he was as special as ever.
His first six outs were strikeouts. He saved four of his final five strikeouts for situations in which the Mets put runners in scoring position. His fastball dipped and sailed. His slider was so deceptive, he got Mike Piazza to chase two of them that were at least a foot outside. And his feel for every situation, every pitch, every raise of his eyebrows, was its usual astonishing self.
And this was a night he was supposedly pitching with the flu.
"If he's not feeling well," manager Joe Torre chuckled, "I'm going to have everybody catch what he has."
But in the sixth inning, pitching with a 2-1 lead, it appeared as if El Duque suddenly hit a wall. Piazza smoked a double over the third-base bag. The first four Mets reached base. The game was tied. The bases were loaded. No one was out. The bullpen cavalry was up and tossing. And then ...
El Duque pitched out of it. Strikeout. Strikeout. Ground ball to short. No more runs. No Mets lead.
Hernandez sprinted for the dugout, fist pumping, tongue wagging. He isn't a man who often lets his emotions show on the mound. But sometimes, even El Duque can't help himself.
"He gets out of a no-out, bases-loaded jam -- that should have been a momentum swing," said Jeff Nelson. "You expect us to go out and score one or two runs for him after that. But it just didn't happen."
For 14 magical October evenings in a row, those things always happened. But not this time. Dennis Cook survived trouble in the seventh. John Franco pitched out of a jam in the eighth.
And then, much to the shock of everyone, out of the dugout to start the eighth popped El Duque. He'd thrown 121 pitches through seven innings. Not once all season had he thrown that many pitches through seven and then gone out to start the eighth.
It was such an easy call to take him out that Torre had actually had pitching coach Billy Connors call the bullpen and tell Mike Stanton he was going into the game.
But El Duque had other ideas.
"He wasn't wishy-washy about it," Torre said. "He was very animated. But he felt very good."
Torre said he'd been planning to give Hernandez the hook, just based on his pitch count -- "but when he came back at me the way he did," the manager said, "that was an easy choice."
But afterward, El Duque himself grew animated in a whole different kind of way when Torre's account of the conversation was relayed to him.
Asked at first about that "animated" discussion, he snapped: "We didn't have an animated discussion about it."
Asked later what he'd said to Torre, he replied: "I didn't say anything."
Still later, he backed down enough to say: "Simply, I wanted to pitch."
But when asked again by yet another media inquisitor how the conversation with Torre had gone, he retorted: "I didn't say anything to Joe. And if I did tell him something, I don't have to tell you. What I speak with my teammates, I don't have to reveal to you."
When informed that it had been Torre who revealed this conversation, not the media, Hernandez ended the exploration of this topic with an angry: "Joe did. I DIDN'T."
He's a complicated man. He's led a complicated life -- a life much different than yours or ours. So when he works so hard at revealing so little of himself, you have to force yourself to recall where he's come from.
But when he goes to the mound in October, you expect nothing short of greatness. And finally, in that fateful eighth inning, his magic wore off.
He struck out Robin Ventura -- who had homered and doubled off him earlier -- to start the eighth. But then Todd Zeile worked the count full -- and ripped a bouncing ball to the left of second that barely hopped past Jeter's glove.
"I thought I was going to catch it," Jeter said. "It just bounced over my glove."
Agbayani was next. He got ahead in the count, 1 and 0. El Duque smoothed the dirt around the mound, as 55,299 people tried blowing out their vocal cords and noise screeched out of a new sound system you could probably hear in Vermont.
He came back with a fastball that "just got too much of the plate, up in the zone," Posada said. Agbayani thumped it up the gap in left-center. Zeile pumped around to score. A two-run rally had begun. And the great El Duque was finally going to lose one.
Asked later if he was running on fumes by then, Hernandez replied: "No. I was at my same velocity."
When his catcher was asked if he thought his pitcher had had enough by then, after 130 pitches, Posada said, "He could have thrown 200 more. He didn't want to come out, man. He never wants to come out."
Only one other pitcher in World Series history had ever struck out this many hitters and lost. That was a fellow named Walter Johnson. That was 76 years ago.
"I don't focus on individual things," El Duque said one more time. "What I'm disappointed about is, the team lost."
And that, of course, is a story in itself. Had the Yankees not lost Tuesday, they might never have lost -- not in this World Series. Remember that of the 20 teams in World Series history that have gone up 3-0, all but three went on to sweep. That's irrelevant now -- for this year.
So an amazing streak ended Tuesday. But a potentially great World Series had just been reborn.
"We won the first two games, but you have to win four," Jeter said. "They have a good team, and they know they're good. They know they can beat us. And tonight, they did."
Streaks end. The World Series goes on. And all of a sudden, this one is more interesting than ever.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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