Yankees 7 – Blue Jays 6
TORONTO – If Mariano Rivera were wearing cleats last night, Joe Torre and Ron Guidry would have had a fight on their hands.
Sitting in the right-field bullpen, Rivera watched Ron Villone and Octavio Dotel combine to surrender three runs in the ninth to the Blue Jays. Suddenly, a four-run bulge was one.
Then with two outs, Mike Myers gave up a hit. Now, the potentially tying run was on first and the winner was at the plate against Jose Veras.
“Thank God I didn’t have my shoes,” Rivera said when asked how he felt being helpless, since he isn’t going to pitch until Friday at the earliest while he recovers from a strained right forearm.
Had Rivera been wearing spikes he may have climbed the bullpen mound, gotten ready and inserted himself in a game that was slipping away by the second.
Instead, he watched Veras retire Aaron Hill on a stress-free fly to left that sealed a 7-6 Yankee victory in front of 32,846 at Rogers Centre.
“Thank God we won, that’s what counts,” Rivera said.
Having climbed out of a 3-0 hole against a dominating A.J. Burnett, the Yankees led 7-3 going to the ninth and hung on after Troy Glaus clubbed a three-run homer off Dotel.
The victory lowered the Yankees’ magic number to three and hiked their lead over the idle Red Sox to 10 games. Any combination of Yankee victories and Red Sox losses totaling three gives the Yankees their ninth straight AL East title.
The Yankees achieved the victory without Johnny Damon, who was thrown out by plate umpire Bill Miller for arguing a third strike on Hideki Matsui in the fifth inning from the on-deck circle.
“I figured we needed something,” Damon said half-kiddingly about his first ejection since Aug. 30, 1997. “I wanted him to get help [on a check swing].”
The white-knuckle ninth inning reinforced what Rivera means to the Yankees. However, without two-run homers from Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, the Blue Jays wouldn’t have been hitting in the ninth.
“We got life, we got a little angry when Johnny got thrown out, but Alex got the blood rushing a little bit,” Torre said of A-Rod’s two-run blast in the sixth inning that woke the tired Yankees and reduced the deficit to 3-2.
“We were dead,” A-Rod said of his mates, who had played four games in two days against the Red Sox and didn’t arrive at their hotel until 4:30 yesterday morning.
“[Burnett] dominated us as much as anybody dominated us all year. It was nice to get a bloop [from Bobby Abreu] and a blast and the captain came up with the big hit.”
Given the green light by Torre, Jeter smoked a 3-0, 96 mph fastball over the left-center field wall to give the Yankees a 4-3 lead.
It was A-Rod’s 34th homer this year and career No. 463, which puts him in 29th place on the all-time list, one behind Dave Winfield.
The victory went to Darrell Rasner, who improved to 3-0 with six gutsy innings on three days rest. Rasner loaded the bases without an out in the first and didn’t give up a run.
Torre said before the game he wanted to stay away from Scott Proctor and Kyle Farnsworth because they worked Saturday and Sunday. But Torre used Proctor in the eighth after Brian Bruney hurled the seventh.
When Proctor departed, Rivera had to believe he wasn’t going to miss his cleats. But it didn’t take long.
MAGIC NUMBER: 3