This was the difference be tween the Yankees and the Red Sox in this second week of August, the difference between the best record in baseball and the outside of the playoffs looking in, the difference between a game that would be nice to win and a game that needed to be won.
“You could definitely feel something,” Daniel Bard would say. “Like the season was on the line a little bit.”
For one team, it might have been. The Yankees have spent 4½ months building the kind of cushion that allows a team to start thinking about playoffs with seven weeks to go. They’d already beaten the Sox two of three on the weekend and extended their lead over Tampa Bay.
This would have been a nice win.
For the other team, it was something else. The Red Sox have proven their character plenty this year, fighting to stay in the playoff picture despite a roster that has often looked like a triage unit. Thursday night they’d actually crept within five games of the Yankees and three of the Rays, but a third straight loss would have blunted that momentum completely.
Now here was Bard, standing tall on the mound in the bottom of the seventh. Yankees surrounded him on the basepaths. Jon Lester, in one last hurrah, had struck out Curtis Granderson before yielding the ball to Bard, but the tying runs were still on second and third with one out.
And if the 49,476 in the stands didn’t sound as desperate as they would’ve had the teams’ predicaments been reversed . . . well, this was still a hell of a spot for the Sox. A hell of a spot for young Bard.
“There was a playoff feel to it all, no doubt,” Bard said. “It was that kind of game. Especially for us.”
It was right here that the Sox went about the important business of rescuing their season. It was here that Bard took on Derek Jeter and Nick Swisher with the Yankees fixing to step on the Sox’ neck.
This is what Jeter saw: three fastballs. Ninety-seven. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.
This is what Swisher saw: three fastballs. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-nine.
The last one also had a tail to it. Ted Williams couldn’t have hit that ball using Bam-Bam Flintstone’s bat. Six pitches. Six vapor trails. And the Sox had escaped with their 2-0 lead intact.
It wouldn’t stay that way to the end, Mark Teixeira crushing a 97-mph heater in the eighth to cut the lead in half, Jonathan Papelbon rescuing Bard in that inning then escaping his own mini-jam in the ninth by fanning Teixeira with Jeter standing on second.
But the result was a 2-1 win that, as Lester said, “leaves a great taste in our mouths.”
Even manager Terry Francona, so often unwilling to go along with the hype — real and imagined — that accompanies these Red Sox-Yankees dramas, admitted, “That was a fun game, a really good game against a really good team.”
It also felt like an elimination game for the Red Sox, even if there’s too much time left to look at things so narrowly. As dominant as the Yankees have seemed, as consistent as the Rays have been, they haven’t yet been able to flat-line the Sox.
The damage this weekend was minimal. The Sox needed a split. They got a split. They head for Toronto with their season intact and their team getting healthier. The Yankees may not feel their breath on the backs of their necks yet. But they didn’t bury the Sox, either. Not yet.