So Game 5 of this ALDS crucible pits Yankees ace Gerrit Cole against the Rays' lean, long fireballer Tyler Glasnow. Cole is on the mound, on three days’ rest for the first time in his career, for pivot points like this. This is why he got nine years and $324 million from the Yankees over the winter. This is why you buy an ace if you can't grow one. This may also be why the Yankees can't win a World Series until they get him some help.
Glasnow may be the Rays' top choice for tonight, but Blake Snell, who won the AL Cy Young two years ago, would have been a fine option, even if the Yankees won his Game 1 start. The Yankees have Cole as leading man of the rotation and a bunch of extras who have no speaking parts in this drama. So while Luke Voit pulled a Joe Namath and guaranteed a win in this deciding Game 5, Cole is the one who has to cash the check Voit wrote. And it makes you wonder what happens to the Yankees in these playoffs even if they win this one.
For all their talent, for all the power in their name, game, and history, the New York Yankees are still a baseball team as much as a brand, bound by physics and the truisms that have defined the sport since we rode horses and trolley cars to work.
Topping these realities is that a team needs good pitching to win games – and good pitching doesn't mean one star and a village of variables. It means depth and length and things the Yankees simply don't have in their rotation right now. Glasnow may not sport a spiffy ERA after his last game, but he fanned 10 Bombers in just five innings. At 6-foot-8, he's just a mass of limbs and elbows with a fastball that short-circuits radar guns. Meaning this game, despite Voit's hubris, is not a fait accompli.
History has treated us to fine performances. Jack Morris comes to mind, as does CC Sabathia's astonishing stamina and dominance with the Brewers, and the bad memory of the Yankees blanked by a young Josh Beckett, at Yankee Stadium, to end the 2003 World Series. The Marlins only scored 17 runs in six games in that Fall Classic, and won 10 fewer games than the Bombers during the regular season, but pitching felled the favored Yankees, still considered a juggernaut while playing in their sixth World Series in eight years.
Some fans may point to some performance by Walter Johnson or Bob Feller or even Cy Young, but if we're keeping it to the last half-century, it's hard to think of more than one team that won a World Series on the superhuman arm of one pitcher. That would be the 1988 Dodgers, a squad without a single .300 hitter that beat two much better teams in the Mets and A's thanks to Orel Hershiser, who had arguably the greatest season - when you also consider his postseason - of any pitcher in history.
Hershiser, who won the NL Cy Young with a 23-8 record and set the all-time mark with 59 straight scoreless innings during the regular season, somehow got better in October; he hurled complete games and shutouts, notched a save in Game 4 of the NLCS and still somehow tossed a four-hit complete game to win Game 5 of the World Series, putting the 104-win Athletics to sleep for the winter while moonwalking away with the World Series MVP.
Can Cole do something like that for the Yankees? With pitch counts and pricey investments, there's no way the Yanks would let Cole play Hershiser's version of hopscotch in the playoffs, dipping into games he didn't start or tossing two complete games, chucking well over 100 pitches, on three days' rest. Since this is Cole's first foray into the thin air of short rest, he isn't built for that, as he hasn't been trained for it. Today, bullpens are expected to take games over after the sixth inning – or perhaps, tonight, much sooner.
The good news is the Yanks would face the Astros next. No team stews with more hatred for Houston than the Yanks, as they've been bounced from the ALCS twice by the convicted sign-stealing gang. Making the discord more intense is the fact that the Astros don't even belong here after going 29-31 during the season, including a wretched road record of 9-23. Thanks to the cavernous 2020 playoff field, the Astros backed into October. But the Astros would play this hand without their two aces Justin Verlander and Cole, making it at least a fair fight for the Yanks, even if they can only count on Cole to start a game with any real force.
October makes odd heroes. So maybe the Bronx Bombers, who have been here more than anyone, can have another Don Larsen or Bucky Dent or Aaron Boone moment. But they have to get by Tampa Bay, the best team in the American League this year, for us to even ponder their playoff odds, which history says are already stacked against them.
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
