This is the part of the Yankee Stadium experience that truly is unique to this corner of The Bronx, this precinct of baseball.
This: the sound. The gasp that accompanied the long fly ball off the bat of Adam Jones, and the hush that followed when it cleared the fence in left-center, turning a 1-0 Yankees lead into an eventual 2-1 Orioles victory.
This: the sound. The silence that greeted the 1-2-3 bottom of the ninth that followed and, most especially, the respectful quiet the 40,218 folks in the stands took with them to their cars and to the subway station. Up and down the sport, it is a different sound when this happens, one of anger, one of rage, one of fire-the-manager and trade-the-closer.
Just not here. Not in Mariano Rivera's office. Not even on a day when he kicks a plug out of the wall, when he spills coffee all over his desk, when he mistakenly crashes the computer system. There is no soundtrack for that here, even when Rivera blows a save, when he serves up a homer that turns a game upside-down and ends what had been a pristine Yankees week on a sour note.
"Whenever that happens, you're really, really surprised," Yankees manager Joe Giardi would say later, shrugging his shoulders. "That's how good he is."
Said Rivera: "It's hard."
He thinks it's hard? Ask the rest of the men in his line of work how they would describe it. Ask Jim Johnson, the Orioles' closer, who was about as perfect as you can be as a closer last year and this year has averaged close to one blown save every 10 days or so, even if he did mow down the Quadruple-A portion of the Yankees lineup yesterday. Ask the Mets, who are working on their eighth closer (at least) since Rivera started finishing games for the Yankees 16 years ago.
Ask fans of any of the other 29 teams in baseball, who know the feeling of forever holding their breath through one ninth inning after another, who come to forever listen for the other shoe to drop, who know all too well the sound and the fury that can accompany an aggravating ride home.
If Rivera thinks it's a hard gig, it is a hard gig.
"There was a good vibe in our dugout," Orioles manager Buck Showalter said, but even he conceded that when Rivera is the one patrolling the ninth inning, "You don't like your chances."
Twenty-nine times in 30 tries before yesterday, neither did anyone else. Rivera's Farewell Tour has been practically perfect, a dual reminder not only of what the Yankees will be missing come next March, but all that they've had since 1995, too. And as the season has progressed, Rivera had even seemingly commandeered a few whiffs of good fortune, too: Nick Markakis drilled a pitch yesterday that looked headed for a collision with the fair pole before drifting foul by a few feet. Then Markakis drilled a pitch that nearly decapitated Rivera for a single.
And then Jones chased Markakis home.
And then silence descended on the big ballpark in The Bronx.
"They put the ball in play," Rivera said. "That's the way it is."
It was the 75th blown save in Rivera's career, so he has been down this road plenty, if not nearly as much as the crowded pile of contemporaries who have come and gone these past 17 years. If memory insists every one of those 75 looked like a live-action typo at the time, it's eloquent testimony to how truly dominant he has been in that time.
This won't affect him. And as galling as this loss probably seems to the Yankees, it won't destroy them, either. In a week when so much attention was diverted elsewhere, to baseball outposts in Tampa and Charleston and Scranton where guys who aren't yet on the team were enjoying summertime adventures, the ones who still are — for now anyway — were two outs away from finishing off a 7-0 week, seven days after it seemed midnight had struck.
Yankees fans can rue that all they want. Unlike every other fan of the sport, they know they can't kill the closer. Not until next year, anyway.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
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