[Follow our AL wild card game live between the Yankees and Red Sox.]
When requested how the Yankees might get previous the Boston Red Sox in a wild-card sport that might lengthen or finish a season that has had numerous ups and downs, Bucky Dent had some tongue-in-cheek recommendation: “Use Mickey Rivers’s bat.”
That transfer labored for Dent 43 years in the past; who’s to say it wouldn’t for a Yankee on Tuesday evening?
Like the current staff, one measly sport at Fenway Park decided whether or not Dent and the 1978 Yankees would proceed their season. That time it wasn’t a playoff sport, however moderately a 163rd common season sport as a tiebreaker made mandatory after the Yankees erased Boston’s 14-game division lead down the stretch. There have been no wild playing cards again then, and but the Yankees and the Red Sox discovered themselves in a do-or-die state of affairs on Oct. 2.
Ultimately, the Red Sox drew the brief straw. Dent’s seventh-inning, two-out, three-run homer off Mike Torrez — launched with Rivers’s lent lumber — was on the heart of Boston’s demise. The Green Monster-clearing blast put the Yankees up by 3-2 and silenced the house crowd.
“It felt great,” mentioned Dent, admitting that he didn’t understand the ball was gone till the umpires gave a sign. “I remember running toward home and I could hear the sprinkling of Yankee fans cheering.”
The Yankees gained the sport, 5-4. Dent’s homer impressed Red Sox Manager Don Zimmer to coin an unprintable nickname for Dent, giving him a brand new center title for baseball followers in New England. All these years eliminated, Dent nonetheless considers the obscene moniker a “badge of honor.”
But he was not the one Yankee central to their foes’ downfall. Reggie Jackson offered insurance coverage with a homer, and Ron Guidry dealt six and a 3rd innings of two-run ball after demanding to start out on three days’ relaxation. Rich “Goose” Gossage allowed two earned runs over two and two-thirds innings of aid, however he held the road and induced a Carl Yastrzemski pop fly to finish the sport and full Boston’s epic collapse.
Fast ahead to 2021, and the Yankees are about to play one other win-or-go-home sport at Fenway. The state of affairs just isn't precisely the identical because it was in 1978, however Dent sees the similarities and is aware of what the fashionable Yankees are in for.
Dent remembers the seriousness of Game 163. Players tried to remain unfastened throughout batting observe, however a heightened depth stage could possibly be felt as the sport progressed. “It was one of the greatest games I ever played. It’s the most pressure game that I’ve ever been in in my entire athletic career,” Dent mentioned. And but, he insisted he felt no jitters throughout his most well-known at-bat.
“I wasn’t nervous. You have that adrenaline, and you know it’s a big moment, but you just kind of block all that stuff out and focus on what you’re trying to do to get a base hit,” Dent mentioned. “I didn’t really think about negative things.”
Guidry, who gained the American League Cy Young Award in 1978, mirrored on the tiebreaker with comparable bravado — and was certain most of his teammates would, too.
“I never got nervous,” he mentioned bluntly. “You have to understand the characters that we had on that team.”
Now Gerrit Cole is the Yankees’ ace with a Cy Young case. He will toe the rubber in Boston, reverse Nathan Eovaldi. Cole has pitched to combined outcomes in opposition to the Red Sox this 12 months, however his efficiency Tuesday would be the just one anybody remembers.
Guidry mentioned the Yankees’ present No. 1 starter must go “out there with that mentality of, ‘I’m Gerrit Cole, come get me if you want me.’ And then you let the chips fall where they may.”
“Look, you either do it or you don’t,” Guidry mentioned when requested if he thought in regards to the stakes at hand in 1978. “No. If you start thinking about that, then yeah, you’ll bring pressure on yourself. But my job was to keep the game close. That’s all I tried to convince myself to do. You keep the game close, somebody gets a big hit, it should work out. And if you don’t, then you gave it your best. That’s all. Like I said, I do it or I don’t. There’s no in between.”
With Dent’s homer and Guidry’s left arm main the best way, that plan went as easily because the Yankees might have hoped. After vanquishing their archrivals, the 1978 Yankees defeated the Kansas City Royals within the American League Championship Series and the Los Angeles Dodgers within the World Series, with Dent being named probably the most precious participant of the World Series.
“If we wouldn’t have won everything, then probably all of these things I accomplished wouldn’t have meant as much,” Guidry mentioned.
The postseason is a crapshoot, and this Yankees season has been a relentless curler coaster. The journey might screech to a halt Tuesday in Boston, or it might finish with a parade down the Canyon of Heroes in a couple of weeks’ time.
However lengthy it might be, Guidry and Dent plan to observe alongside. And as for the latter’s actual recommendation? Don’t lose sight of the duty at hand in enemy territory.
“You just gotta be locked in,” Dent mentioned. “You gotta be in the moment the whole game. Any time you’re playing in a game like that, you can’t drift off.
“Any mistake can cost you the game. That’s the way our team went about their business.”
