2009 Yankees: A.J Burnett Outduels Pedro Martinez to Even World Series at 1-1

Welcome back to the next chapter of 2009 Yankees: The Last Championship - a week-by-week remembrance of the year in which they gave us their most recent World Series title. A.J. Burnett made up for his poor Game 5 outing against the Angels with a dominant and clutch Game 2 performance against the Phillies which enabled the Yankees to avoid falling into a dangerous 0-2 hole in the World Series.

NEW YORK (Oct. 29, 2009) - Across the scope of his abbreviated three-year tenure with the Yankees, A.J. Burnett would be considered a disappointment. They paid $82.5 million to sign him for what was supposed to be five years, and they ended up trading him after the 2011 season for what essentially turned out to be two nothing players.

But if you focus just on this particular night in the Bronx, Game 2 of the World Series against the Phillies, and consider how important his performance was in the biggest start of his entire 17-year MLB career, you could make the case that Burnett earned that massive contract.

The Yankees had been dominated in Game 1 as Philadelphia ace Cliff Lee - Burnett’s good friend and fellow native of Arkansas - threw a complete-game six-hitter with 10 strikeouts as the Phillies cruised to a 6-1 victory over CC Sabathia, the free agent pitcher the Yankees paid almost double that of Burnett.

Losing Game 2 probably would have been a death knell for the Yankees because winning four of five against the defending World Series champions, with the next three in their electric ballpark, was not a promising endeavor.

“It wasn’t pressure,” Burnett said, though that might have been a bit of a fib. “I knew it was a big game. It’s no lie, it was the biggest game I’ve ever thrown in for this team. But at the same time, you can’t let that affect you. And I tried not to let it affect me.”

However he accomplished that, it worked. Burnett gave the Yankees seven superb innings allowing just one run on four hits and two walks with nine strikeouts - very similar to what Lee had done the previous night - and he outdueled future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez as the Yankees evened the Series with a tense 3-1 victory.

Burnett watched with grudging admiration as Lee mowed down the outstanding Yankee lineup, and he happened to catch Lee’s post-game interview on a TV in the clubhouse and one thing he heard the 2008 NL Cy Young award winner say was a key for him was his belief in himself.

“Actually, I sat and watched his interview and he talked about confidence, and he talked about belief in his stuff,” Burnett said. “And all I told myself was the same thing. I went out with confidence and that was huge for me tonight, going up against Pedro, because you know what he’s going to offer. He’s going to throw strikes and he’s going to make our guys work a lot. I wanted to come out and feed off this crowd and feed off the energy and not try to just be calm. I think I’ve done a good job of being calm in situations, but I wanted to make it a point to come out with some fire tonight, and I think I did that.”

The previous night, Lee could not have looked more confident. He gave up a hit in four of the first eight innings but no Yankee ever touched third base. It wasn’t until the ninth inning with the game already decided that the Yankees scored their only run as Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon singled and Jeter came home on a Mark Teixeira grounder. Lee then whiffed Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada to finish his 122-pitch complete game.

It was an unsettling night for the Yankees because they knew they were going to need to score against a dynamic Phillies lineup that had a collective .832 OPS in their four-game divisional series defeat of the Rockies, and an .848 OPS in their five-game NLCS flogging of the Dodgers when Philadelphia outscored Los Angeles 35-16.

Burnett had to be great, and that had been elusive for him throughout his up-and-down first season in pinstripes. He went 13-9 in his 33 starts with an ERA of 4.04 and a terrible WHIP of 1.401 that was largely a function of leading the AL with 97 walks. There were plenty of very good to decent outings - three runs or fewer in 25 of them - but also some big-time clunkers including one against these same Phillies way back in May.

So you can imagine the trepidation in the fan base as Burnett took the mound for a game the Yankees really needed to win, especially after he’d pitched poorly in his last outing when the Yankees failed to close out the Angels in Game 5 as Burnett gave up six earned runs.

“It’s a terrible cliché, but it was a must-win,” Teixeira said. “You don’t want to go 0-2 into Philadelphia. With my time at the Braves, I know how tough they are at home. Especially in the World Series, their fans are going to be all over us. It’s going to be a great couple of games there, but if we went in there 0-2 it would have been a tough road for us.”

Burnett started the game with a first-pitch strike against leadoff hitter Jimmy Rollins, and he would do that for the first 11 men he faced including Rollins again in the third, and as Rollins said afterward, “That’s not like him. That was, like, ‘Wow, he’s on.’”

Yet still, the Phillies struck first. Burnett retired the first five men with ease, but Raul Ibanez hit a ground rule double and Matt Stairs - who was in a 4-for-51 slump dating back to the regular season - singled him home and already the sellout crowd was murmuring.

But while the Yankees’ offense did nothing against Martinez in the first three innings, Burnett settled in and worked around two walks (one intentional to Chase Utley) in the third, then got help in the fourth from his personal catcher, Jose Molina, who picked off Jayson Werth at first after he’d led off with a single.

“I saw from the first pitch on that he was taking a big lead,” Molina said. “I saw the ball in the dirt, I picked it up and he was still far from the bag. I got lucky and he was too far off.”

That play seemed to energize everyone as Burnett retired Ibanez and Stairs to end the inning, and then Teixeira opened the bottom of the fourth with a solo homer to right-center that woke up the crowd.

Burnett had two more uneventful innings before Hideki Matsui gave the Yankees their first lead of the Series. Pedro had whiffed Teixeira and A-Rod to start the sixth, but he tried to sneak a 1-2 curveball past Matsui and it wound up in the right-field bleachers.

“Because I was at two strikes, I was just ready for pretty much anything and trying to make adjustments,” Matsui said. “For that pitch, I think the location was fine; it was low. But I think it caught the inside part of the plate.”

Once he had the lead, Burnett was fired up and he pitched a 1-2-3, 11-pitch seventh which ended his night, and after Jerry Hairston and Melky Cabrera singled to send Pedro to the clubhouse in the bottom half, Jorge Posada greeted Chan Ho Park with an RBI single for a big insurance run.

Joe Girardi then turned to Mariano Rivera for a six-out save that wasn’t all that smooth, but it was good enough. The Phillies put two men on in the eighth before Utley grounded into a 4-6-3 double play. In the ninth, Ibanez doubled with two outs but Rivera whiffed Stairs on his 39th pitch to end the game.

“I don’t feel like I saved anything,” Martinez said. “I did everything I could to beat those guys. You have to give them a lot of credit. You have to give Burnett a lot of credit for the kind of game he was able to pitch. It’s just a loss. I just don’t see them beating us too often with just three runs or less.”

Pedro was right. Three runs would not have been enough to win any of the four remaining games and thankfully for the Yankees, after the sluggish start in the first two games, they were more than up to the task.

NEXT SATURDAY: The Yankees took a commanding three games to one lead thanks to a heads up baserunning play by Johnny Damon in the ninth inning of Game 4 that altered the course of the Series.