Rain delayed the start of Friday night’s Yankees-Orioles schedule-filler by an hour and 27 minutes. Then during a pitching change with two outs in the seventh, the umpires called the tarp back out, leading to another hour-plus delay.
Things started off well for the Yankees during those first seven innings. Alex Rodriguez crushed a three-run homer into the second deck in left field in the first. Derek Jeter got his team-record 2,722nd hit, a single to right, leading off the third. His next time up he extended his new team record with another single to right, this one driving home Robinson Cano with a two-out run that pushed the Yankees’ lead to 4-1 after four.
Then the pitching fell apart. Andy Pettitte wasn’t sharp, needing 103 pitches to get through five innings. After giving up a second run with one out in the fifth, he loaded the bases, then made a great play on a chopper to the third base side for the second out. The ball tipped off Pettitte’s glove and headed toward the foul line, but Andy scrambled after it, picked it up with his bare hand and made a spinning, falling throw around the runner for the force at home. Unfortunately, Pettitte then hit Melvin Mora in the right elbow to force in the third Baltimore run.
Damaso Marte replaced Pettitte in the sixth and coughed up three more runs and the lead, plus a fourth which scored on a sac fly off Jonathan Albaladejo. In the seventh, Edwar Ramirez gave up three more, all with two outs, at which point the mid-game rain delay struck.
When the tarp came back off around 12:45 am, there were just a few hundred fans left. Ronan Tynan, out to sing “God Bless America” for 9/11, sang it to almost no one on 9/12. Down by six runs, Joe Girardi wisely put his bench in the game to protect his starters for the playoffs, leaving only Melky Cabrera, Brett Gardner, and DH Hideki Matsui in the lineup.
Jeter’s hit was a nice moment. The stadium was packed in anticipation of it, and he delivered, bringing about a huge ovation. His teammates came out of the dugout to congratulate him, and he tipped his helmet to the crowd and signaled to his family in their suite. Unfortunately, it was buried in a miserable morass of a rain-soaked 10-4 loss to a bad team. If nothing else, it worked well as a metaphor for all of the hype the hit was buried in. I’m genuinely pleased and impressed by Jeter’s accomplishment, but the Yankee hype machine nearly killed those emotions. The Yankees are an easy team to root for, but they can be a hard organization to like.
