About all the Los Angeles Angels managed to prove in all but two of the final six games of their 2009 is that you can't get to the World Series by playing like the 1962 Mets with a smattering of the 1964 Phillies. Unless the other guys play likewise.
Only one region of these United States didn't want the Angels to get to the World Series, and it had a marvelous time by way of Yankee Stadium Sunday night. And why not? How often do you get to see live slapstick in the House That Ruthless Built?
It's not that the Empire Emeritus didn't have their Keystone moment or two, of course, but these Yankees played the straight men to the Angels' stoogeness most of the American League Championship Series. It may have been the first time in years that the Yankees have played the straight men for anyone.
The sad part was that the Angels weren't going for laughs. Not these kind. "I would have laughed in your face," Sunday starter and loser Joe Saunders told a reporter who asked if he thought his mates were that capable of that much field calamity.
They weren't going for laughs when Chone Figgins, all season long the kind of ignition switch with which you wish your car was equipped, spent the postseason resembling a flat tyre and a compromised axle. Already, the winter watchers are trying to calculate the millions he might have cost himself as a free agent by going 3-for-35 from the moment the Angels squared off against the Red Sox.
They weren't going for laughs when they spent the entire ALCS making errors all but one of which fed Yankee runs and all of which made Marvelous Marv Throneberry resemble Keith Hernandez.
They weren't going for laughs Sunday night when Saunders barely got through three and a third with only one more strike than ball in 83 pitches thrown, and manager Mike Scioscia — facing the dilemma that drove Gene Mauch to override his two best starters down the 1964 stretch of the stretch — ended up unable to trust anyone in his bullpen beyond Darren Oliver (who pitched brilliantly enough Sunday night) with a chance to take it to a seventh game on the line.
They weren't going for laughs when Vladimir Guerrero — who really hasn't been the same player since all those years pounding his legs to noodles on the Montreal cement have shown their damage — got bagged on a baserunning miscue you generally learn to avoid before your high school career is finished. It put a nasty smudge on a postseason in which he'd finally unhorsed himself after a long drought following a near-dramatic grand slam in a 2004 division series.
They weren't going for laughs when Scott Kazmir, one of the Angels' corps of starters pressed into bullpen service in do-or-die mode Sunday night, looked rattled enough — after second baseman Howie Kendrick covering dropped first baseman Kendry Morales's toss on a Nick Swisher eighth-inning bunt — that he threw Melky Cabrera's followup bunt, clearly marked for first base, clear into right field. Allowing the Yankees to yank out of reach a game the Angels had actually kept close enough to snatch — including closing the deficit to a run by prying a save-situation run out of The Mariano, in his home lair, for the first time in nine years.
They weren't going for laughs when their vaunted basepath boldness picked the wrong ALCS to go on early winter vacation. Abetted in portion large enough by their sleepiness at the plate, the Angels committed only four thefts and only one of those helped produce a run.
And they weren't going for laughs when they stood in against Andy Pettitte, a pitcher they normally manhandle well enough, and found Pettitte just elusive enough on a night he needed most to be, placing Pettitte into his own rarefied territory: the Yankee left-hander now has the most postseason wins in baseball history.
These Angels wanted to nail this season, this postseason, for the young pitcher whose shocking death after he unfurled six shutout innings in his premiere Show start gave them a cause and a focus. They did it for 97 regular season wins in spite of a rash of early-season injuries to their pitching staff and (what a surprise) to Guerrero. They did it in a striking division series sweep of the Red Sox.
Quite possibly, the Angels were exhausted at last from the tribulations that launched their season in earnest. They'll never use that as an excuse, of course. Say what you will about the Angels this ALCS but they're not exactly famous for making excuses. And without denying how impressive this year's Yankees happen to be, the Yankees have to be just a little surprised at how easy the possibly-exhausted Angels helped make their job.
Even if these Yankees are too professional to indulge the laughs for which the Angels weren't going.
Leave a Comment