Written by Mike Vaccaro at New York Post.com
After a while, the unexpected becomes routine, and the crazy becomes customary, and that’s when you know you’re in the middle of something special.
After a while, it doesn’t matter who the hero of the moment is — Brett Gardner at the wall, Bryan Mitchell on the mound, Tyler Austin at the plate — because you simply know he’s going to arrive, even if it means dropping out of the sky, even if it means hopping off your program.
This time it was Austin, the rookie, who cleared the right-center field wall with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning to give the Yankees a 5-4 win over Tampa Bay, their fifth in a row, nudging them within two games of the wild card (and four games of the first-place Red Sox in the East).
“It’s amazing what these kids have been able to do for us,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “It’s hard to explain. We didn’t have a lot of our relievers [available] tonight, but this is what this team does. It worked out.”
It worked out, and keeps working out, because sometimes a good stretch becomes a terrific streak, and when that happens, it really starts to feel like anything is possible. The Yankees even took a run off the board Thursday night, Girardi urging the umpires to reconsider a balk called on Jonathan Holder that would have scored a run for the Rays in the fifth.
And the umps overturned the balk.
That doesn’t happen when you’re scuffling, when you’re struggling, when you’re playing the way the Yankees played for much of this season, when they seemed to expend so much energy just trying to keep their noses above sea level. But it happens now. Would-be devastating losses like the one the other night against the Jays become feel-good wins instead. It’s impossible to explain. But no one has to.
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