Yanks 11, Tigers 6

Funny thing. I had two wildly different emotions during tonight's game.

The first: sixth inning, 6-1 Yankees, Aaron Small cruising, man on first, nobody out, Pudge on deck. Routine grounder to Jeter, easy double play--only a horrendous bounce shoots the ball off Jeter's wrist and into right-center field. Runners advance, still nobody out.

So: instead of bases empty, two outs--thus allowing Small the luxury of going after Pudge, and if Pudge takes him to Lake Michigan, oh well--the Tigers now had runners on second and third, nobody out, and Pudge still up.

Not a soul at the park or watching would fail to guess what, approximately, would happen next. Triple, single, and all of a sudden it was 6-4 with Mariano Rivera a long, long way off.

Of course the Kardiac Kid himself, Kyle Farnsworth, would eventually be summoned. Of course (now the score 6-5) he would surrender a single, two walks and a fielder's choice . . . but, to his credit, did get a strikeout with the go-ahead run on third. It was here that I thought: ah, the Yanks will win. And so they did, albeit two innings later.

What I wasn't prepared for was three innings of Rivera, the first such sighting in ten years, going back when he was John Wetteland's set-up man. Giambi hit the go-ahead run the eleventh, which opened the floodgates . . . but the player of the game was Rivera: nine outs on twenty-five pitches. I've had this feeling with Larry Bird, with Tom Brady, with Jeter, with Reggie Bush . . . the notion that I was watching just one more small piece of immortality unveiled before me.