“So this is what it’s like to be a Yankees fan,” I thought at the beginning of baseball season.
There was Kris Bryant, with his Lee Godie eyes and the way his follow-through on a well-executed swing brought him forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were already posing for a bronze statue. (Indeed he may be, having won the National League Rookie of the Year Award last season and moved on to being odds-on Most Valuable Player this season.) There was Anthony Rizzo, with his tippy-toe highlight-reel catches along the grandstand wall down the first-base line. There was hunch-shouldered shortstop Addison Russell, racing to the opposite foul line to make catches that could only be called, yes, Jeter-esque. Then there was my personal favorite, Javy Baez, who fielded with all the elan of a matador Hemingway might’ve written about in Death in the Afternoon—making bare-handed pickups and throws from third base on bunts down the line, slapping no-look tags on would-be base stealers at second, and, in one particularly spectacular play, tagging a runner in the baseline and whirling to throw to first for a double play as if he were some sort of baseball dervish—yet one who batted with all the delicacy of a rodeo bull fresh out of the chute.
Well, in the October 12 clinching game of their first-round series with the Giants, they executed a graceful turnaround worthy of Baez himself. After winning the first two games at Wrigley Field, in San Francisco they weren’t taking pitches; in fact, they were swinging at terrible pitches. In a Cub-like switch of personalities, Baez—who homered for the only run scored in the Cubs’ opening win—was showing more patience at the plate than Rizzo. There was no clutch hitting. Lackey’s pitching was off, just at the time he was expected to thrive under pressure. They looked terrible, down 5-2, and with haunting parallels to 2003, with the Giants’ Johnny Cueto set up to start the final fifth game, and with Madison Bumgarner ready on two days’ rest to come out of the bullpen, much as Josh Beckett did in the seventh game in 2003.
