Game Three: Yankees 8, Indians 4
NO CHAMPAGNE IN CLEVELAND TONIGHT!
All weekend long I’ve had to endure the cat-calls and derisive chatter from the not-so-much baseball fans at my shop here in good ol’ Louisville, Kentucky. As a proud Yankee fan, I’m an easy target. These guys, not meaning any real harm, just love to chide me when the beloved Bombers lose. I just grin and take it, knowing that the Yankees will be competitive every year, unlike their Cincinnati Reds or… New York Mets. (wink, wink)
Even my Red Sox friends admit readily that they’d much rather face the Indians than the Yankees. New York and Boston were built to play against each other, so they match up exceedingly well.
The Yankees finally stood up tonight. They finally played well enough to win, even though it wasn’t a perfect performance by any means. Johnny Damon stole the show with the go-ahead, game-winning 3-run tater, while Alex Rodriguez started hitting. It gives us hope for tomorrow and beyond, in a weird kind of quasi-religious, spiritually cathartic way.
The baseball talking heads can say what they want about the George Steinbrenner-Joe Torre thing, but do ANY of us faithful Yankee fans think that Torre will be back next year, regardless of whether they win or not? To me, it’s been pretty much a foregone conclusion all season that this is it for The Yankee Skipper.
Why else would Joe Girardi be lurking in The Stadium shadows, all the while refusing offers to manage other ball-clubs? I guess I could be wrong, but to me, it just makes sense.
Still, tonight, we might have seen the "changing-of-the-guard" in another sense: the replacement of the old with the new, under the most adverse of all conditions; down 0-3 in the game and 0-2 in the series while facing elimination. This is the stuff legends are made of…
Who does Joe go to?
A seasoned veteran? Nope…
A high-priced free agent? Nope…
He rightly goes to rookies Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain, and then finishes it off, for good measure, with the greatest closer in the history of the sport.
Well… you can’t change EVERYTHING…
GO YANKEES!
Thurman Munson Should Be In The Hall Of Fame 
Wang tomorrow… I wish I could go to the game because you know my track record with him! Hopefully we can live to see another day because this team has fought so hard this year!!