Posted: 3:57 am
August 29, 2008
EVEN the man who hit the homer had to laugh at the hyperbole.
"Did it save the season?" Jason Giambi had just been asked.
"I'm not going to make it that melodramatic," Giambi said.
But it was a day custom-built for melodrama. The Red Sox have been playing games in Yankee Stadium just as long as the Yankees have, after all, since they were there at the beginning, back on April 18, 1923, and they've been coming back ever since.
And won't be back again, barring some kind of otherworldly September sorcery.
So this was it for the Yankees and the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, 85 years of history and hatred rolled into one nine-inning farewell. And by the time Giambi walked to the plate in the bottom of the seventh yesterday, it seemed the Red Sox were going to treat the occasion with all the disrespect of a drunken houseguest, maybe put a reverse move on a 30-year-old memory of a Massacre.
The Yankees were down 2-0 in games and 2-0 in runs, they had fallen seven games out of the wild-card hunt and were seven outs shy of tumbling further south with 29 game left. John Lester had - Giambi's words - "stuck it up out [butts] all day," but he was burned when Jason Varitek couldn't glove a two-strike Cody Ransom foul tip, and Ransom followed with a double.
That chased Lester. And it brought up Giambi, given a day off by Joe Girardi because the manager - his words - "wanted to try some different things," which was a euphemistic way of saying the Yankees first baseman - my words - "hasn't been hitting worth a damn," especially in clutch spots, for most of the past month.
"I know Jason is capable of giving us a home run there," Girardi said later, proving just how easy managing a big-league club can be sometimes, because that is exactly what Giambi promptly did, drilling a 1-iron off Hideki Okajima that traveled 450 feet if it traveled an inch. That blast tied the ballgame and set Giambi up later for a game-winning, bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth single, and invited melodrama of every shape, size and timbre.
