HOUSTON — It is amazing how quickly, even more than four decades later, that George Brett is back there. As if Hal McRae is wiping out Willie Randolph with a slide at second right in front of him now, or he is squaring off against Graig Nettles, or he cannot believe the damn Yankees are building another roadblock to his dream.
Brett brings it all up in a phone call once you ask him to step back, once you put him in the time machine and ask him what it feels like to be a baseball Sisyphus and keep pushing that boulder up the mountain just to have the same group push you back before you reach the summit.
“I really believe deep down inside that everyone always talks about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and it is a great rivalry, but for two teams in different divisions to have a rivalry, and I think it was the best rivalry in baseball then, well, it was the Yankees and Royals, and they hated us and we hated them,” Brett said.
He does not use the verb lightly. Brett sticks with “hate.” It is in his voice as he remembers 1976 and 1977 and 1978, and losing to the Yankees each time in the AL Championship Series, one step before the World Series. And it is there with how much more euphoric it all felt when they finally beat the Yankees in 1980 to reach their first World Series.
And it is still there when I nudge the conversation back to the reason for the call. The Yankees — like Brett’s Royals — keep losing to one team specifically in the playoffs, being eliminated by the Astros (like Kansas City to the Yankees) three times. They have come in the odd years from 2015-19. The past two were one step before the World Series, in the 2017 and ’19 ALCS.
And here are the Yankees back again for try No. 4 against the Astros in the playoffs, another ALCS, another climb up the mountain with the summit in sight, the same boulder pushed, the same obstruction.
“I’m sure the Yankees with Houston, it’s starting to feel just like us, there is bad blood between the teams. Right?” Brett said. “Because the team that loses is certainly getting pissed. And the team that wins is going to be, ‘Bring them on. We’re not intimidated by them.’ ”
The Astros are most certainly not intimidated. The Yankees are most certainly pissed. In the 2015-22 range, the Yankees also have been twice eliminated by the Red Sox. Boston is the historic rival. Yet at this moment — like the Brett Royals versus the Steinbrenner Yankees — the team that the Yankees and their fans despise the most isn’t even in their division.
Of course that loathing is about losing to Houston at the biggest moment. But it is this venomous because of the sign-stealing scandal of 2017. There are members of the Yankees organization who are just never going to stop believing that Houston cheated in that series and that it was the difference in winning all four home games to advance to win their still only World Series title. And the conspiracy theory that will have the shelf life of plutonium is that Jose Altuve was wearing a buzzer underneath his jersey to alert him what type of pitch was coming when he hit the walk-off homer against Aroldis Chapman to eliminate the Yankees in the 2019 ALCS Game 6.
“That even adds to it,” Brett said. “You get beat fair and square, you got to live with it. You find out someone cheated, you get pissed. Really pissed.”
Brett said, after losing in a decisive fifth game (the ALCS was five games then) in both 1976 and 1977, that “when the Red Sox played the Yankees in that one-game playoff [in 1978 to determine the AL East champ], I was pulling for the Red Sox because I’m saying, [expletive] we can’t always lose to the Yankees. So I wanted to play somebody different and sure enough, the Yankees win and next thing you know, we go to New York and play the Yankees and we lose. You know, we just wanted to play somebody different. And then finally after losing in ’76, ’77, ’78, we don’t make the playoffs in ’79, then in ’80, we made it again, and we won the first two games at home, and I think that made all the difference. If we lose one at home, I think we are doomed because of the past history. We went to Yankee Stadium and I hit the homer off of Goose [Gossage, a three-run, eighth-inning shot to turn a 2-1 deficit to a clinching 4-2 win]. That took the burden off of our backs.
“In ’76, we were just happy to be there because we never had been there, and [Chris] Chambliss [hit the pennant-clinching walk-off] homer and we end up losing, but it was a great experience. In ’77, I thought we had the better team and we lost again [in a decisive fifth game]. Then they beat us again [in ’78]. It took that fourth time.”
The fourth time began poorly again for the Yankees on Wednesday night. Houston won 4-2. The Astros have home-field advantage, so the Yanks have to win at least one on the road if they are going to end the hex. And Brett recalled how vital it was in his mind for the Royals to win all their home games in the playoffs against the Yankees because, “New York is a hard place to play. It’s real hard to play. The fans are as obnoxious as hell, screaming obscenities at you the whole time and throwing [expletive] at you on the field. It’s not like coming to Kansas City. Kansas City has to be the easiest place to play in the world. You go to Yankee Stadium and you got a bunch of New Yorkers who can be very, very rude. Some of the [expletive] that they were saying to me was embarrassing. But that’s sports, right? You go into someone else’s town and you’re trying to beat their team and these people live and die for that team. You know, they’re not gonna say nice things about you.”
There it all was in his voice again — as if he were taking third base at Yankee Stadium in the late 1970s once more. And then finally in 1980. They finally beat the Yankees to play (and lose to) the Phillies in the World Series. Philadelphia’s catcher was Bob Boone. His son, Aaron, was just 7 years old, and he can give you the play-by-play verbatim off the top of his head of the five-run, eighth-inning rally that began against Nolan Ryan that got the Phillies back into a decisive NLCS Game 5 against the Astros. But all he can remember from the other series is the Brett homer off Gossage.
So what does Brett have for Bob Boone’s son about being a baseball Sisyphus and sticking with it until the full mountain is climbed? Even after not wanting to see the Yankees in 1978. At some point, you do have to face your demons — and conquer them.
“You have to believe your team can win,” Brett said. “If you have any doubt that your team is going to lose, you are going to lose.”
