NEW YORK – Even if you were to take every great Yankee who has ever donned pinstripes and allow Joe Girardi to pencil them into the lineup for one night and they still would not have been able to hit Cliff Lee.
All postseason, the left arm of Lee has been utterly dominant. He shut down the Rockies twice and then the Dodgers in the League Championship Series. The 0.74 ERA that Lee came into the
World Series with was among the greatest in the history of the game.
It was Lee that would give the defending world champion Phillies their best chance of beating the Yankees.
In Game 1, he did just that.
With pinpoint control and accelerated pace from his first pitch of the night to Derek Jeter, Yankee hitters one-by-one went up looking for a good pitch to hit and wound up swinging at air or taking weak hacks and either grounding or popping up.
Lee is not a flamethrower, so the Yankees were not overpowered. Instead, the hired gun Philadelphia acquired from Cleveland before the trade deadline used his incredible prowess and intelligence to systematically break down baseball’s most powerful offense, relegating them to a bunch of minor leaguers.
Jeter struck out on three pitches to begin the night, and Mark Teixeira went down swinging to end the bottom of the first inning. At that moment, you know Lee brought his good stuff to this World Series dance party.
His counterpart, CC Sabathia needed to match zeroes with him in order to have a chance. He would hold up his end of the bargain until the third inning. With two strikes, Sabathia left a fastball over the plate that Chase Utley hooked down the right field line for a solo homerun to give the Phillies a 1-0 lead.
In a game with these two pitchers, especially one as great as Lee has been pitching, one run may as well have been four.
Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada each struck out swinging in the bottom of the fourth, giving Lee seven strikeouts and outside of Jeter’s double down the right field line, not one ball was hit hard.
In baseball, there is an old saying that a control pitcher such as Lee can make a hitter a “comfortable 0 for 4”. Seeing his fastball at just over 90 MPH and a cutter that bore in on right-handed hitters mixed in with his changeup and deadly spike curveball and all the Yankees could do was shake their heads.
Utley sealed the game in the sixth inning when he crushed another Sabathia fastball deep into the right field bleachers for his second homerun of the night to increase the margin to 2-0. No way were the Yankees going to come back from that.
Pitching in his first World Series and inside Yankee Stadium you would have figured that a combination of those two things along with the Yankees themselves would be enough to crack a dent in Lee’s invincibility that he has shown thus far in the postseason.
Yet, it did not matter. None of it mattered.
Seven innings in, Lee was still going strong. To show how good he had things going, when Robinson Cano laced a ball back up the middle, Lee somehow fielded it behind his back, flipping to first for the out.
It was as if he could do no wrong.
Effortless.
On these nights, you simply tip your cap and acknowledge the performance. Lee was the winner of this fight on points, giving him a unanimous decision. Sabathia pitched seven strong innings, and in most other games that would have been good enough to deliver a winning performance.
Unfortunately, it was not good enough to defeat Lee.
The Phillies offense would score the knockout in the eighth inning. With a beleaguered bullpen, it was on Lee to carry them. Charlie Manuel summoning anyone would be akin to lighting gasoline with a match.
It would have been easy to remove him with a four-run lead in the eighth, but Manuel stuck with his starter and down 1-2-3. The Yankees would amount a token rally in the bottom of the ninth when the Phillies lead ballooned to six, but Lee would strikeout Rodriguez for the third time and then Posada to conclude matters.
One run, six hits, no walks and 10 strikeouts over his 122 dazzling pitches that only increased his ERA to 0.54, reaching the point where his day to pitch means almost certain victory.
Whether he starts on three days’ rest in Game 4 is anyone’s guess. The rest of Philadelphia’s rotation is not strong enough to beat the Yankees two times if his next start is only going to come in Game 5.
The Yankees can only hope they see just once more after tonight.
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