Subway Series sweep just what the Yanks needed

August 24th, 2022

Bill Parcells, a great football coach who is also a great baseball fan, once said that when a game looks even, bet the team that needs it more. The Mets needed these last two Subway Series games, too, because the Braves are still after them hard. But the Yankees needed them more. And they won them both -- two victories that must feel to their fans as if they are the two biggest the Yankees have had against the Mets, at least in the regular season, all the way back to the two teams’ first Interleague game 25 years ago.

It’s one of the reasons why the new Yankee Stadium tried hard to sound like the old one on Tuesday night, a night when the Stadium saw its biggest crowd (49,217) in nine years.

“This was as close to a playoff game as you’re going to get,” said after the Yankees had won on Tuesday might, after two games (4-for-8, two homers) when he again looked like the best and most important player in the sport.

After the way the Yankees looked the first few months of the season, when they were beating everybody, it had started to look -- since the All-Star Game especially -- as if they couldn’t beat anybody. We saw what they looked like when Judge didn’t carry them. We started to see what they looked like when their bullpen was no longer dominant, as their relievers continued a troublesome recent trend of getting hurt.

Mostly we saw what the 2022 Yankees looked like when they stopped getting big hits and big outs, and slowly -- improbably -- started to come back to the field in the American League East after seeming to have been ahead by about a hundred games a couple of months ago.

There are a lot of bad numbers on the way things turned around on the Yankees, and why they suddenly stopped being such a powerhouse. But the one that is most dramatic, courtesy of John Labombarda at the Elias Sports Bureau, is this one:

After going 44-16 in their first 60 games, they proceeded to go 29-31 over their next 60. In baseball history, there have been plenty of other teams that won 44 of their first 60. No other team had ever been under .500 in their next 60. The next two worst records after a start like that belonged to the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers and the ’84 Tigers. They were 33-27 after 44-16. If there’s any good news in here for the Yankees and their fans, it’s that both of those teams went on to win the World Series.

Last weekend, the Blue Jays came into the Stadium and won the first three games of a four-game series. But then the Yankees avoided a sweep on Sunday with a 4-2 victory. It turned out they liked that score. A lot.

Because Judge hit No. 47 on Monday night and the Yankees again won 4-2, this time in a game started by the great Max Scherzer. Originally they were scheduled to face Jacob deGrom on Tuesday night. But the Mets are still being as careful and as cautious as they can be with deGrom, and they ended up pushing him back to a start against the Rockies. The Yankees instead went up against Taijuan Walker on Tuesday, and they won 4-2 again, in what turned out to be as dramatic a game as they’ve played all season. They didn’t walk it off, the way they did with Josh Donaldson’s extra-inning grand slam last week against the Rays. It just felt that way.

They got another home run, No. 48, from Judge. With a depleted bullpen, they got an amazing 60-pitch performance out of a young reliever named Clarke Schmidt. They saw Wandy Peralta get the last out of the game, against Francisco Lindor with the bases loaded in the ninth -- a few moments after Lindor had scorched a foul ball that would have cleared the bases if it had stayed fair; it would have been another night the ’22 Mets had “drama in their back pocket,” as their radio voice Howie Rose says.

Three victories in a row. All by the same 4-2 score. The Yankees suddenly looking like the same team that had been beating everybody. Frankie Montas somehow got into the sixth after putting runners on base all night long. Andrew Benintendi, who hit a huge seventh-inning home run against the Jays on Sunday, got another RBI. The Yankees, who had played such excellent defense for most of the season, saw Isiah Kiner-Falefa start a slick double play in the eighth, after seeing Oswaldo Cabrera throw out Brett Baty at home earlier in the game.

With all that, they needed some luck, and the place had to hold its collective breath after Lindor’s ball went foul in the top of the ninth.

“A good way to finish what’s been a tough stretch for us,” is the way manager Aaron Boone put it afterward.

A great way, actually. In a great setting, that made you wonder what it would be like if these two teams faced each other in a real Subway Series, for the first time since 2000. Both teams wanted these games, obviously. The Mets needed them, too. The Yankees needed them more.

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Mike Lupica is a columnist for MLB.com.