WE KNOW now that Randy Johnson is never going to be the pitcher the Yankees thought they were obtaining, an April-through-October dominator.
That is fine now. They don’t need that today. All they need is for him to be better than Kenny Rogers. A lot better.
The Yankees are now in the same precarious spot as last year, tied at a game apiece in the Division Series and – on paper anyway – having a huge Game 3 starting pitching edge. But in Game 3 last year, the Angels’ Paul Byrd pitched poorly, yet Johnson was even worse. The Yankees lost, when victory very likely would have meant advancement rather than the first-round ouster they suffered.
Now Johnson is facing Rogers, who has been miserable in the playoffs and even worse against the Yankees. Maybe the Yankee offense will take care of everything by brutalizing Rogers, who usually looks as calm in October as someone on the run in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But, remember, the Yanks scored seven runs in Game 3 last year and it wasn’t near enough.
Because Johnson was so horrible early that he made it a battle of bullpens, and the Angels had the better power arms to win in that style.
Now so do the Tigers. Joel Zumaya ratcheted his fastball as high as 103 mph yesterday to strike out three of the five batters he faced. Detroit’s pen collectively authored 3 2-3 innings of one-hit, no-walk shutout relief to subdue the supposedly unstoppable wrecking machine that is the Yankee offense. The Tigers won 4-3 to reduce this to a best two-of-three series and obliterate the idea of an easy Yankee sweep.
Instead Johnny Damon was talking about the desperate notion of “playing in front of our fans again,” either in a Game 5 Sunday or in an ALCS Game 1 Tuesday. He said this after the Yanks exposed enough trouble areas to make the notion of a Tiger upset not as farfetched as it seemed at about 1 p.m. yesterday.
Gary Sheffield looked terrible at first base and Hideki Matsui did not get to a seventh-inning leadoff bloop by Marcus Thames that Melky Cabrera very well might have, and that single led to the decisive run. The Tigers are doing much better pitching to the Yankees’ freest swinger, Robinson Cano, than the Yanks are doing to his Tiger counterpart, Curtis Granderson, who delivered the winning triple because Mike Mussina left a 0-2 fastball designed to be up and in over the plate.
And Alex Rodriguez went from good at-bats in Game 1 to striking out three times in Game 2 and hearing the kind of boos that tend to paralyze his effectiveness for weeks at a time.
Yet all these issues would minimize if the Yankees’ largest player can come up huge. Randy Johnson was sent ahead to Detroit before Wednesday’s rainout. So he was alone – or with all of his friends on the Yankees – for most of the past two days; mopey in Motown. And, in many ways, he will be alone again tonight. As Jorge Posada said, “it all depends on Randy.” Johnson has faced Detroit twice this year, shutting out the Tigers for six innings on May 29 and carrying a three-hitter into the ninth on Aug. 31.
But he has not pitched since Sept. 23, the last of three straight poor starts that proceeded the revelation of renewed back troubles. Johnson had an epidural and supposedly a strong bullpen session Wednesday.
“We expect nothing but the best,” Posada said.
They really can accept nothing less. This is now a series, no longer just a punch line for the Yanks. Tigers manager Jim Leyland, as a motivation for his team, noted how Detroit was being treated like the “junior varsity” in this Division Series. Well, it is now time for Johnson to restore that imagery, to rule in a battle of The Big Unit vs.
the junior varsity.
A decade ago the tough-minded Yanks won a championship in spite of horrendous postseason work by a lefty named Kenny Rogers.
They seem a lot less likely to survive if the second most disappointing lefty starter of the Joe Torre era, Randy Johnson, is a postseason bust again.