Shots in the dark

Bay, then Youkilis blast off

April 25, 2009|Amalie Benjamin, Globe Staff

It was the first perfect night for baseball this spring, created by Red Sox ownership for just such a scenario, as Tom Werner joked before the game. There was no rain, there was plenty of warmth, and finally, it felt like the season had really arrived. With it came Red Sox-Yankees, replete with tight scores and heroes and villains and a season's worth of emotions tied up in one game.

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, a runner on, the Yankees up by two, and the closer's closer on the mound, Jason Bay reversed a Mariano Rivera cutter and drilled it to the yellow line in dead center field. And 38,163 fans rose to disagree with David Ortiz.

"It doesn't feel like it used to," Ortiz had said of the rivalry before the game. " 'Cause I've been in it too much. To me, it's just another game."

Except, in the end, it felt exactly like it used to.

First Bay struck to tie the score at 4-4. Then Kevin Youkilis launched a Damaso Marte pitch over everything in left with one out in the 11th for a 5-4 Red Sox victory. Somehow it all strangely made sense in the looking-glass world of the Red Sox and Yankees.

The home run brought a pile of red shirts to home plate. It was a mammoth shot, a fitting shot, the crowd filling the night with chants of "Yooouk" after a game that seemed lost much earlier. Starting pitcher Jon Lester, watching in his street clothes, said he and others in the clubhouse "ran down the stairs [to the dugout] like little kids."

"It's great," Youkilis said after the second game-winning homer of his career. "We get to go home. I think that's the best part about it."

Makes sense, especially 4 hours 21 minutes into a three-game series that promises to be utterly exhausting.

Overlooked in the euphoria was a lapse by the Sox bullpen, which had allowed one run in 17 2/3 innings before the seventh, when Hideki Okajima surrendered hits to the first four batters in the Yankee order, including Mark Teixeira's bloop RBI single that broke a 2-2 tie. Robinson Cano's sacrifice fly off Manny Delcarmen made it a two-run game.

"Until you win the game, it's really hard to jump up and down and get all excited about anything, so once Youk hit that ball, it was a relief and we could enjoy it a little more," Bay said. "Winning that game makes all the difference in the world in enjoying it."

There wasn't much to enjoy early for the Sox. They stranded 14 runners and grounded into four double plays in the first five innings. There were chances missed. Far too many.

"Early in the game, we had it seemed like a million chances to score a lot of runs and just didn't," Dustin Pedroia said. "They turned I don't know how many double plays, but it seemed like a ton. It was definitely frustrating, seemed like it was one after the other."