It wasn't an easy call. Some of misinformed at the Game may have booed until they saw the replay. No one is sure if the umps this time had the same "magnified" shot available to them that TBS was showing to those in the TV audience. On that shot, the change in direction and spin are more visible. An inning or so after the play a TBS reporter - the dude with the horse blanket sports coat - went into the stands and interviewed some of the Yankee fans on the spot. Some didn't want to talk, still afraid the Umps might change the call from wrong to right. An usher, still professing to be a Yankee fan, revealed without hesitation that he not only saw the ball hit the pole, he heard it.
At any rate, the game progressed. I thought Buck Showalter should have stayed on the field a lot longer to emphasize just how wrong the call was. Earl Weaver would've made that argument last 25 minutes at a minimum, with the actual purpose being to get Sabathia and Girardi unnerved. By the time the Birds batted in the 8th, it looked like the Yankees had this one in the bag and the Orioles, finally, would go down without a fight.
If you were among the thousands of Yankee fans hoping that was true, you would have been wrong. All season long this Oriole team has started rallies when none appeared possible, and pulled out victories It happened so fast. Wieters singled and Machado, the amazing rookie, drew an unlikely five pitch walk. Lew Ford, the DH on this day instead of the veteran Jim Thome, then drilled a single past Jeter into left field and Wieters, faster than most catchers, raced home from second without even drawing a throw. Suddenly it was 3-1, the Orioles had men on base, and the pesky Robert Andino was striding into the batters box.
In just a wink Andino was quickly behind on the count. With nerves of steel, he somehow controlled his swing on a biting 0-2 Sabathia pitch in the dirt. He contained himself again on a nasty 1-2 curve and evened the count. Then Andino hit a Baltimore Chop, a high bouncing but slow ground ball that snuck past the mound on the left side of the infield grass. Sabathia retreated off the mound and caught the second bounce with his back to home plate. He turned to throw to third for a force, but no one was covering. He gathered himself and threw to second, but the still speedy 36-year-old Ford beat the throw with a hard gritty slide, loading the bases with only one out. Nate McClouth was next, with Game Four hero JJ Hardy on deck. The bad call two innings earlier now loomed huge, because the Orioles were still trailing by two runs on the scoreboard, a true outrage. You cannot give a class act pitcher like Sabathia a break like that and expect to live another day. The baseball gods simply won't go for it. Sabathia got McClouth to strike out, a huge huge out.
Like McClouth and dozens of other Orioles, Hardy also fell behind on the count and it looked like he was in huge trouble. During this series he was pulling off every outside pitch. It looked like a strike out, another strikeout actually, was looming. But Hardy had been fooling people with his clutch hitting since April and even here, with Sabathia in complete control, he managed to slap a terrifyingly slow grounder to the left side. That is Jeterland, and on almost any other night, it would be a ho hum out. But Jeter is hurt. He had left game four because of the leg injury. This, however, is the postseason. Hurt or not, Jeter charged the ball hell bent, made a clean pick-up and a crazy-great throw and that was that.
After the game some New York reporter asked Showalter if his respect for Jeter had grown in view of his willingness to play through pain. The taciturn Oriole manager might seem a quiet type, but in the same way that John Wayne was the quiet man right before he beat the You know what out of his prospective brother-in-law. "you know," Buck said, "I have about five guys hurt worse than that but you don't know about it because they haven't let on about it to the press." Buck stared the New Yorker in the eye for a bit, then continued on about how Jeter only had his injury outed because he had to limp a bit. Later on, hundreds, maybe thousands, turned out at Penn Station in Baltimore to welcome the Orioles home. After 15 years of losing, not many were happy this magical season had come to an end. How many times will the Lew Fords of the world challenge the big boys on so public a stage, and win the contest 11 out of 22 times. But there had to be game 23, didn't there?
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