2009 Yankees: Johnny Damon Set Table, A-Rod Delivered Big Hit

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. 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.

PHILADELPHIA (Nov. 1, 2009) - There were two outs, nobody was on base, and the Yankees were spiraling in the top of the ninth inning in Game 4 of the World Series.

Yes, they owned a two games to one lead on the Phillies, having rallied the night before from an early 3-0 deficit to pull out an 8-5 victory, and they seemed on their way to winning for the second time at raucous Citizens Bank Park which would put them one victory away from their 27th world championship.

But suddenly, their 4-2 lead was gone as the Phillies hit a pair of solo homers - one by Chase Utley off CC Sabathia in the seventh, the other by Pedro Feliz with two outs in the eighth off Joba Chamberlain - to pull even.

The ballpark was shaking with excitement, and all the momentum was now coursing through the home team dugout, especially after star closer Brad Lidge - who had allowed no runs on one hit in his first five appearances in the 2009 postseason - retired Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter to start the top of the ninth.

It certainly seemed inevitable that the Phillies were not going to be denied, and they would find a way to scratch another run home and square things up and turn it into a best-of-three scenario.

And then it happened, a sequence of plays that had Phillies’ fans choking on their hoagies and turned the Series irrevocably in New York’s favor, with Johnny Damon - a perpetual postseason hero no matter what uniform he wore during his 18-year career - right in the middle of the chaos.

“It all happened so fast,” Lidge lamented afterward, with fast being the operative word.

Damon worked a masterful at bat as he singled on the ninth pitch, after he’d barely stayed alive on a couple foul balls. With Mark Teixeira up, Damon took off on Lidge’s first delivery and stole second with a feet first slide, and as soon as he popped up, he quickly realized that no one was covering third base.

That’s because the Phillies had pulled their infield around to the right to Teixeira’s pull side. Third baseman Feliz was in the shortstop position, and he actually took the throw to second from catcher Carlos Ruiz. Neither shortstop Jimmy Rollins nor Lidge thought to cover third, a tactical mistake that proved costly. Damon immediately took off before anyone knew what was happening and he easily beat Feliz to the bag, essentially stealing two bases on one play.

“We always tell our baserunners, whenever you’re on first and somebody’s playing a shift on one of our hitters, you always get your head up on second base to see if anyone’s covering third,” third base coach Rob Thomson said.

Clearly rattled, Lidge hit Teixeira with a pitch, and Alex Rodriguez stepped into the glaring spotlight and lined a double down the left-field line to score Damon with the go-ahead run.

“There’s no question, I’ve never had a bigger hit,” said Rodriguez who, after his great work against the Twins and Angels, had been just 1-for-13 in the Series to that point. “Facing Brad Lidge, he’s a great competitor. He’s had a lot of success of late here. Just trying to make contact there.”

With the crowd silenced, Jorge Posada made even bigger contact as he followed with a huge lead-padding two-run single to left that made it 7-4, a score that stayed right there when Mariano Rivera needed only eight pitches in the ninth to close out the shell-shocked Phillies.

“You know how people always tell you that they’ve been in baseball for 40 years, 50 years, and things happen every game that they never saw?” Yankees bench coach Tony Pena told Jayson Stark, then of ESPN. “Well, I’ve never seen that before.”

It was a stunning breakdown by the Phillies, and Posada was correct when he said of Damon, “He really won the game for us.”

That’s because Damon, who had hit just .222 with a .263 on-base in the first 12 postseason games, finished with three hits, two runs scored and an RBI in this one.

“That whole play I was hoping I was still the Johnny Damon of 21 years old, not a 35-year-old guy,” Damon said. “I’m just glad that when I started running, I still I had some of my young legs behind me. I know that I still have some decent speed left in the tank. I knew Pedro’s speed also. In this situation, I was trying to be aggressive and trying to get into scoring position, and it just worked out that way where there was a throw, the third baseman covered and the pitcher did not. So I kind of had to see all that stuff develop.”

And because it worked out, the Yankees were on the precipice of glory.

The Yankees had won Game 3 after Andy Pettitte put them in a 3-0 hole in the second inning. Jayson Werth homered, and then in succession, Pettitte yielded a double, a walk, a single, a bases-loaded walk and a sacrifice fly.

Meanwhile, Cole Hamels breezed through the first three innings and it was looking like the Yankees were in for another rough night, similar to Game 1 when the Phillies’ other great lefty, Cliff Lee, locked them down. But as had been the case throughout the postseason, it was A-Rod, enjoying his first true October success, who got the Yankees’ jump started when he ripped a two-run homer in the fourth following a walk to Teixeira.

And in the fifth, three more runs came home. Pettitte, who had to bat because the game was in an NL park, stunned everyone with a tying RBI single after Nick Swisher had led off with a double. Derek Jeter singled and Damon made his first contribution in the first three games with a two-run double that pushed the Yankees into a 5-3 lead.

Swisher and Werth traded sixth-inning solo homers, but the Yankees remained in control when Damon walked in the seventh and eventually scored on a Posada single, and Matsui hit a solo homer in the eighth to put it out of reach.

When Game 4 started, the Yankees felt they had a distinct advantage in the pitching matchup with CC Sabathia going against Joe Blanton, even though 2009 turned out to be the best season of Blanton’s 13-year career.

In 2008 he made three starts - one in each round - during the Phillies march to their first championship since 1980, winning two including Game 4 against Tampa Bay in the World Series. He followed that with a 12-8, 4.05 season, but he was not part of the rotation for the division series against the Rockies and in his lone start against the Dodgers in the NLCS he’d given up four runs in six innings.

As expected, the Yankees pounced on him quickly as Jeter led off with a single, Damon doubled, and they both scored on outs for a 2-0 lead. Back-to-back doubles by Shane Victorino and Utley got one run back in the bottom of the first and the Phillies tied it in the fourth and at that point, Blanton was outperforming Sabathia.

That changed in the fifth as a walk and three singles produced two runs, Jeter and Damon each driving in runs, and Sabathia protected that 4-2 lead until Utley homered in the seventh, ending his night. Chamberlain struck out his first two men in the eighth before Feliz’s tying home run, setting the stage for the drama in the ninth.

Damon was quick to point out that A-Rod was, “the reason why we’re sitting here and we’re in Philadelphia right now. I felt like without him, who knows where our road may have stopped at.”

No doubt, A-Rod had been colossal, but on this night, the confluence of Damon’s incredible at bat, his speed, and his awareness on the bases was the point when the Series shifted in the Yankees favor.

Some Yankee fans appreciated Damon for his time in New York, but for others it was just too hard to forget the role he played in that nightmarish 2004 ALCS when he helped ignite the Red Sox to their historic comeback.

Those were the Damon-named “idiots” and Jeter couldn’t help himself when he was asked about the heads up baserunning Damon exhibited. “Well, he called himself an idiot a few years back,” Jeter said. “But he was smart on that play.”

NEXT SATURDAY: In the conclusion of the 2009 Last Championship project, Andy Pettitte finished off what he had intended to do when he returned to the Yankees after his brief dalliance in Houston. Win yet another World Series.