Amid the thunder tumbling from all the precincts of Yankee Stadium, the manager of the Minnesota Twins looked like he’d just eaten a pile of spaghetti — only to realize it was a plate of earthworms covered in marinara sauce.
He looked left, looked right, searching in earnest for a friend. Or maybe just an answer.
This could have been Ron Gardenhire, who really patented this look across so many hopeless days and nights at Yankee Stadium for so many years. It could have been Paul Molitor, who only got one crack at it but was perfect playing the role, the same way Topol was just as powerful as Zero Mostel at Tevya in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
But it was Rocco Baldelli this time, watching one of his most reliable pitchers, Tyler Duffey, succumb to the Yankees, watching his team scurry right behind him. The Yankees had just scored their seventh run of the third inning. It was 8-0.
By the time the Twins and Yankees were done with the rest of Game 2 of this AL Division Series, the score would be 8-2, the Yankees would own a 2-0 lead in this best-of-five series, and the Twins would lose for the 15th straight time in the playoffs, and find themselves once again standing a foot and a half shy of another October abyss.
Baldelli took the long stroll out to the mound to pull Duffey. He was greeted by a loud crash of boos from 49,277 onlookers because Yankee Stadium didn’t see any good reason to push the pause button on the party that had begun to buzz all about the Bronx. October is a stressful obstacle course, after all; when you get a breather, a laugher, you tend to savor every second of it.
“Regardless of what happens,” Baldelli had said a few hours earlier, “the TVs will be on in the clubhouse, the music will be playing on low to medium volume, and guys will be just getting changed and getting ready for tomorrow.”
It was Baldelli’s mission to shield his team from its dreadful history with the Yankees, but there is only so much one man can do. This Twins team had won 101 games this year, and seemed in much better position to put up a fight than some of the past pretenders in this parade.
There was one problem with this line of logic:
It isn’t history that’s suffocating his team, it’s the here-and-now. It’s the reality that the Yankees’ lineup is too deep for any of the pitchers Baldelli might throw at them, that the Yankees’ first two starters did just enough to smother his own team’s bats, that the Yankees’ bullpen is forever lurking to be a beastly buzzkill.
Maybe these things won’t matter as much if the Yankees find themselves in Houston next weekend playing an Astros team in the ALCS that owns glories in both the past and present tenses. That will seem a far fairer fight, on a lot of levels. The sins of Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer shouldn’t be visited upon the shoulders of Miguel Sano and Max Kepler, after all, and the truth is they haven’t been, even as the Yankees have ransacked the Twins for two straight days.
Sometimes it’s as simple as this:
The Twins are a very good baseball team.
But the Yankees are an elite one, which has discovered an even higher level so far in October. One of the features of that third-inning explosion was a grand slam off the bat of Didi Gregorius, who’s scuffled most of the season and seemed perfectly lost at the plate. A seeing-eye, line-hugging dribbler got his day off to a good start in the second.
Then he’d made the baseball disappear into the gleeful masses in right field an inning later, and if it were possible for a baseball team to engage in a collective shoulder slump, that’s what the Twins did. Later, Baldelli would say (as Gardenhire always did) that he expects better things once the scene shifts to Target Field.
“Our guys know we can turn it around,” he said. “We’ve had a few spurts where we weren’t playing as well as you want and our guys simply carry on. We haven’t had many mood changes. I expect more of the same. I don’t think becoming reactionary in any way is going to help us get where we want to be. Being who we are is.”
Still, the Twins are a loss away from extinction, again, at the hands of the Yankees, again. Baldelli might as well encourage his team to keep the TVs on, turn the radios up louder, do something different, anything. Maybe that won’t stop the Yankees, either.
Maybe, in this hammer-and-nail rivalry, nothing ever will.