Believe it or not, the Knicks were once a bigger deal than the Yankees. The baseball team kept winning championships, and the basketball team kept failing to win them, and it did not matter.
“We had both on our network, MSG,” Dave Checketts, former Garden president, once told me, “and the Knicks were the bigger team.
“I even remember George Steinbrenner saying he’d wait to announce something until the Knicks’ playoffs were over. It was good to hear.”
But Checketts admitted that the fascination with the ’90s Knicks was, in part, tethered to their repeated and failed postseason duels with the greatest player ever, Michael Jordan, whose Bulls eliminated the Knicks five times between 1989 and 1996; Chicago lost a Game 7 at the Garden in ’94 when MJ was off playing minor league baseball.
During contentious labor talks between NBA players and management in 1998, Jordan sat directly across from Checketts, looked him dead in the eye and said, “You’re still trying to beat the Bulls, aren’t you?” Everyone in the room laughed. “I was so tormented by then,” Checketts said, “even I could crack a smile.”
All these years later, nobody can compare today’s Houston Astros, with one championship, to yesterday’s Bulls, with six. Except when it comes to their favorite New York foes. Entering Saturday’s Game 3 of the ALCS in The Bronx, Houston is halfway home to eliminating the Yankees for a fourth time since 2015. And yes, even without Minute Maid Park fans exercising their right to chant, “Who’s your daddy?” at the visiting team, the Yanks are now officially tormented by the Astros.
After Alex Bregman’s three-run homer decided Game 2, Yankees starter/victim Luis Severino credited himself for a good pitch and blamed the building’s opened roof and the winds blowing out to left. Sevy didn’t show much savvy when he called the Astros “lucky” that the same conditions kept Aaron Judge’s harder shot to right in the ballpark.
Someone should immediately propose a rule that no team that strikes out 30 times in two playoff games is allowed to complain about anyone’s roof, opened or closed, with the docking of a first-round pick for all offenders. Or that no manager — in this case, Aaron Boone — is allowed to claim that outdoor conditions in an opponent’s indoor home “kind of killed us” when said opponent has prevented said manager’s team from holding a lead at the end of 80 of the 82 innings the teams have played in a single season.
Bregman said it best after Game 2 was played with the lid off Minute Maid Park: “You just got to play.” You just got to lead your team into the arena, play the game, and accept the result, especially when nobody is illegally stealing signs and banging a trash can to convey the intel.
So the excuse-making from Boone and Severino was unbecoming, really, during what should be a classic heavyweight fight. The manager said over the summer that the Yankees would have to “slay the dragon” in October, and hey, the dragon is right there in front of them, breathing fire their way. Injuries did compromise Boone’s team, no doubt, but his healthy Yanks include the best player in the sport, Aaron Judge (164 starts this year, including playoffs), and two aces in Gerrit Cole and Nestor Cortes (65 combined starts).
In other words, Boone has enough here to run the table in The Bronx and send the ALCS back to Houston with a 3-2 series lead. But that’s only if the Yankees clear a psychological hurdle in Game 3 and evict the Astros from their heads, because right now that’s where they are living, and quite comfortably.
The great Mariano Rivera once called Sandy Alomar Jr. “lucky” for hitting a series-changing homer off him in 1997, and it didn’t sound any better then than it sounded from Severino on Thursday night. And Boone’s whining about the roof didn’t sound any better than many hapless visitors to The Bronx have sounded over the years when whining about those pinstriped pop-ups clearing the wall in right.
Maybe the Yankees didn’t appreciate that little taste of their own right-field medicine. Or maybe they just got beaten yet again by a tougher team that can still win despite the fact one of its stars, Jose Altuve, is off to an historically bad 0-for-23 postseason start, and another, Yordan Alvarez, has made no noise this series.
Either way, Judge surprised nobody by having the most gracious take on the two-run eighth-inning homer that wasn’t. While every Yankee was swearing his shot was a no-brainer homer off the bat — Statcast reported that it would have gone out only at Yankee Stadium, ironically enough — Judge knew the wind would knock it down. “I hit it to the wrong part of the park for sure,” he said. And that’s all that needed to be said.
The Astros beat the Yankees with the roof closed one day, and the roof open the next. Houston is now 4-0 against the Yankees in one-run postseason games, 8-1 against them in playoff games staged at Minute Maid Park, and 7-2 against them overall this year. If the Yankees don’t start hitting immediately, they will start packing shortly.
But this is still a doable proposition with Cole and Cortes taking the ball for Games 3 and 4. The Yankees have overcome 2-0 deficits in a postseason series six times in their history, and they have a legit chance here to make it seven. But for now, the Astros are haunting the Yanks the way the old Jordan Bulls haunted the Knicks.
And the only way to change that is for Aaron Boone and his players to forget about wind patterns and exit velocity, barrel up the damn ball and blow the roof off October by winning four of the next five games.
