How can one baseball team withstand? When does resilience devolve into sheer exhaustion?
The Yankees seem determined to find out.
Joe Girardi's group followed its Worst Loss of the Season on Thursday night with … the Even Worse Worst Loss of the Season on Friday night. A seemingly comfortable lead intersected with a battered bullpen at Yankee Stadium, and the result couldn't have been any uglier: 12-8 Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, dropping the Yankees (75-66) behind both Baltimore (75-65) and Cleveland (75-65) — with all of them trailing Tampa Bay (77-63 ) — in the American League wild-card race.
"They're all tough right now. What are you going to do?" asked Andy Pettitte, whose quality start went for naught. "It was a tough loss, that's for sure."
The Yankees' immune system is turning upon itself. The bullpen, a season-long strength — multiple seasons, really — is a mess; adding injury to, well, injury. Before Friday's game, the Yankees diagnosed David Robertson with right shoulder tendinitis and shut him down for a few days. During the game, Boone Logan departed with left elbow tightness, although not before he gave up a game-tying grand slam to Yankees nemesis Mike Napoli.
Moreover, the short right-field porch, an ally since the Yankees opened this new place, became a momentary enemy when Napoli's poke to right hit the top of the wall and bounced into the stands.
Oh, and on Saturday, the Yankees need lefty David Huff to shine in his first start for the club. And if the offense could put up another eight runs, maybe the pitching could actually make that stand up, unlike these past two nights.
Asked if he thought his team was reaching critical mass, Girardi responded, with a smile, "As long as we're breathing and we can wake up in the morning and show up at the ballpark, no. It's when we can't do that, that I lose a little faith."
With Mariano Rivera out for the night due to excessive recent work, and with Shawn Kelley also out of commission due to a right triceps problem, Girardi had to get creative when Pettitte reached his 100-pitch limit upon completing six innings with an 8-3 advantage. The key clearly was for Phil Hughes to eat up some outs, and once that bridge collapsed, with Hughes getting just one out, allowing one run and leaving the bases loaded, the domino effect went into place. While the southpaw Logan has enjoyed success against righty hitters this season, you'd still rather go with a right-hander against the ultra-dangerous Napoli, who tied the score with one swing.
"It exploded on us, you know?" Pettitte said.
While rookie Preston Claiborne picked up the last out in the seventh to preserve the tie, he allowed a Will Middlebrooks single and Shane Victorino homer with one out in the eighth, giving Boston its first lead of the night. Later, the fallen phenom Joba Chamberlain allowed a couple of runs to come home on his watch, putting the reborn Yankees offense into a hole from which it couldn't escape.
This Yankees season has been one we won't soon forget. From their injury-plagued spring training to their defying of expectations for the first two months, from the multiple players suffering second ailments to Alex Rodriguez's epic battle with team management to Alfonso Soriano's return, they kept us vastly entertained, and they seemed poised to add a September rally, too.
We've left them for dead several times, so we're reluctant to do so again. But gosh, how much more can the Yankees overcome?
"It's going to be fine," Pettitte said. "Obviously, you hate to struggle. The guys in the pen have been great all year. But we've had two bad games. You've got to love the way the guys are swinging the bat. The offense is playing great. We're not going to pitch like that. We're just not."
Remember the 1990 movie "Flatliners," when Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland and others flirted with death? The posters read, "Some lines shouldn't be crossed."
The Yankees are dancing on that line. They're taunting baseball death. We'll learn soon enough whether they've gone too far this time.
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