There have been too few feel-good moments across the first four months of the season, and so it was a fine thing to savor this one. Jose Altuve — also known as Public Enemy No. 1 — swung at the first pitch he saw in the ninth inning. This has often been a terrible thing as far as Yankees fans are concerned.
It was not this time. Altuve hit it well, but hit it right at Anthony Volpe at short. Volpe — owner of the night’s biggest hit — flipped it to Gleyber Torres, who stepped on second. Twenty-seventh out of a tense 4-3 win over the detested Astros. Second straight win of the homestand. And a vilified villain, put at last in his place. For the moment anyway.
Maybe come October we will look back at this and smile at our naïveté, thinking this might offer some kind of seasonal turning point. Maybe we’ll really want to circle the game in red ink. Lots of work left to do, but lots of season left, too. And if good things are going to happen they’re going to happen in small, digestible increments.
In a week that started with such fraught worry, this will do just fine.
“Good at-bats from everyone,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “They answered back, and we made some good defensive plays. Everyone was doing their part, we had some key double plays.
“It’s just one of those games, as it’s unfolding, it’s a really good ballgame. And it’s good to get that one.”
Since we are spending the week doing some graduate-level work on freezing cold takes, it seemed a good time to revisit this gem from Boone, offered up on Oct. 5, 2021, not long after the Red Sox had chased the Yankees out of the playoffs with a 6-2 win in the AL wild-card game at Fenway Park.
“The league has closed the gap on us,” Boone said that night. “We’ve got to get better in every aspect.”
In the moment is almost read like a quote from The Onion since, in the moment, it officially commemorated the 12th straight year that someone other than the Yankees was going to win a World Series.
Perhaps this was a quote that Joe McCarthy might’ve been able to deliver with a straight face in 1940, when the Tigers officially ended the Yankees’ four-year reign as world champions. Or maybe Casey Stengel might’ve saw fit to do likewise in 1954, when Cleveland halted the Yankees run of five straight World Series titles despite 103 Yankees victories that year. Or maybe Joe Torre might’ve thought it was to say something like this in 2002, when the Angels ended their run of five trips to the World Series (and four titles) in six years.
Aaron Boone in 2021?
It feels like the right time to remember that because the Astros — the team that truly is the hunted, and has been the hunted for seven straight years — darkened the doors at Yankee Stadium Thursday night for the first time since they dimmed the lights on the 2022 season with a four-game sweep of the ALCS, the last two games coming here, and reminding the rest of baseball (and maybe the Yankees, too) of how much the gap has widened between the now two-time champs and everyone else.
Especially the Yankees.
It isn’t just that the Astros reported for work Thursday with a better record than the Yankees, because that’s kind of been routine in recent years.
Thursday, it was the Astros who had the pleasant press conference, reintroducing Justin Verlander who will immediately reassume his role as the anchor of the Astros’ title-tested rotation. Verlander had nice things to say about his time as a Met and nicer things to say about what he hopes to accomplish as an Astro, which will officially start Saturday.
And it was the Yankees who, for a third straight day, reported deflating — for lack of a better word — news. Tuesday it was Brian Cashman’s in-it-to-win-it declaration after doing nothing at the trading deadline, which is probably not soon to join Churchill’s we-will-fight-them-on-the-beaches speech anytime soon. Wednesday it was Cashman announcing that Domingo German, who 15 minutes ago had emerged as a model of personal redemption, would be checking into a facility to deal with alcohol abuse after an incident the day before.
And Thursday Boone announced that the Yankees were shutting down Anthony Rizzo, who had been experiencing “fogginess” in recent days, a condition Boone said the Yankees now believe dates to a collision with Fernando Tatis Jr. back on May 28.
There will be time enough to do a forensic study on how in 2023 it is possible to let a concussion go undiagnosed for two-plus months (although his slash line since then of .172/.271/.225 sure makes a lot more sense). For now, it means that one of the proven pieces of protection for Aaron Judge in the Yankees’ lineup will not anytime soon be rounding into form, which has been the monthslong hope of Boone.
On Thursday, though, all was well in The Bronx. There were 44,019 people inside Yankee Stadium who lent their voices to the cause, and gave the joint the feel of a playoff game. The Yankees won a big game. Is it the start of something big? On this night, at least, all seemed possible again.
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