The Weirdest Walkoff You've Ever Seen (Postgame Notes 12 June 2009

Michael Kay, for all of his faults, said it best: How many times can you fail, and still win?

Because that is, more or less, what happened tonight.

The Yankees failed in many, many ways.

They didn't get good starting pitching, with Joba walking pretty much everyone he saw and throwing 43 pitches in one inning.

They didn't get great bullpen pitching--Tomko was awful, Robertson was good, all right, Coke couldn't hold the lead and Rivera still can't pitch in tie games, even in the eighth.

They got some offense (I mean, dude, they scored nine runs), but they could never build more than a one run lead.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, they had the tying run on second base and the winning run on first, with two out and Alex Rodriguez at the plate. And A-Rod, as we have so often seen, popped up.

Except, this time, Luis Castillo dropped it.

Luis Castillo dropped it, and Mark Teixeira had the grit and the good sense to run hard on a routine pop up, and he and Derek Jeter BOTH scored.

How often do we see a pop up and automatically draw the conclusion? How often do we forget they actually have to see it into the glove? K-Rod forgot; he did a fist pump as A-Rod popped it.

This wasn't so much a game the Yankees won as it was a game the Mets lost; though, to be completley onest here, I think any question about ghosts moving across the street has been resolutely answered.

Anyway, what it means is that instead of the Yankees having lost four in a row, they've opened this portion of interleague play with a win and keep from falling any further behind in the standings.

Yankees fans can sleep just a tiny bit easier tonight.

Luis Castillo may want to watch his back. The Mets fans are apparently not very happy.