2009 Yankees: Making Quick Work of the Twins in the ALDS

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 Twins snuck into the postseason by stealing the AL Central division title from the collapsing Tigers, winning it in the 163rd game of the year. But reality hit Minnesota hard because the reward was a matchup against the Yankees who continued their ownership of the Twins with a three-game sweep.

If it wasn’t already a daunting enough task for the Minnesota Twins to have to be opening the postseason against their long-time nemesis at Yankee Stadium, facing CC Sabathia and a Yankee team filled with stars, they had to do so while running on fumes.

At the close of play on Sept. 13, the Twins were 71-72 and trailing the Tigers by 5.5 games in the middling AL Central division, staring at a fourth season in the last five without a playoff appearance.

But from that day forward, the Twins went on an epic run by winning 15 of their last 19 games including the final four to pull into a first-place tie with crumbling Detroit, necessitating a 163rd game in Minnesota to decide which team would win the division.

Because the Metrodome - in its final year as the home of the Twins before their move to beautiful Target Field - was booked for a Monday Night Football game for the Vikings, the baseball game had to be pushed back a day. That wait probably helped the Twins catch their breath after their frenetic finish, while it helped the Tigers regroup following their collapse.

The result was a thrilling winner-take-all affair which Minnesota pulled out 6-5 in 12 innings when Alexi Casilla slashed an RBI single to blow the roof off the ballpark and end four hours and 37 minutes of tension and drama.

“I don’t recommend everybody playing 163 games every year,” said Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, whose team had also done that in 2008, though they lost that one to the White Sox and thus missed the postseason. “I was proud of the way both teams never quit and kept getting after it. I told (Tigers manager) Jim Leyland after the game, that was one of the best games I’ve ever been involved in. Just watching two teams butting heads and going after it and never giving up and all the ups and downs - it was just fantastic baseball.”

He wasn’t kidding; it was a great game, but the Twins’ reward was a matchup with the 103-win Yankees, and in the 21st century that was - and still is today - an ominous prospect.

The Yankees had knocked Minnesota out in the divisional round in both 2003 and 2004, and between 2002 and the end of the 2009 regular season New York won 47 of the 63 games between the two teams. Extending through the 2024 regular season, the Yankees were 123-44 against the Twins, had lost the season series in just one year (2023) and had eliminated the Twins from the postseason in 2009, 2010, 2017 (AL wild-card game), and 2019.

The Twins had every right to believe that this series would be different, though. They could not have been carrying any more momentum with them when they arrived in the Bronx for Game 1 the next night, and as catcher Joe Mauer said, “We’re not done yet. We’re going to go there and we’re going to give it our all again and we’ll see what happens. Right now it’s a great feeling.”

But Mauer was looking and sounding vastly different several nights later as the Yankees swept the Twins into oblivion by winning 7-2 and 4-3 in 11 innings at Yankee Stadium, and then closing the baseball life of the Metrodome with a 4-1 victory.

“It feels like we were just throwing champagne over everybody and celebrating,” Mauer said. “Game 2 and Game 3, we feel like we could have easily won, so that’s a little frustrating right now.”

The opener on Oct. 7 started well for the Twins as they grabbed a 2-0 lead in the third inning against CC Sabathia, but then Derek Jeter answered with a two-run homer in the bottom half, and the Yankees rolled from there.

Nick Swisher hit a go-ahead RBI double that scored Robinson Cano from first base in the fourth, and in the fifth Alex Rodriguez kicked off what became the signature postseason of his career with an RBI single followed by a two-run homer by Hideki Matsui and the Twins were finished.

Sabathia went 6.2 innings and dealt with traffic via eight hits, but every time he needed to make a pitch in a big spot, he did as the Twins went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position.

“Even when he gets in trouble, he’s capable of getting a big strikeout, getting out of jams,” Jeter said. “We have a lot of confidence when he’s on the mound. He pitched another great game for us - exactly what we needed him to do.”

As Mauer said, the Twins should have won Game 2. They broke a 1-1 tie in the eighth inning by scoring twice off Phil Hughes and Mariano Rivera, but closer Joe Nathan - who converted 47 of 52 save opportunities during the regular season - gave up a leadoff single to Mark Teixeira in the bottom of the ninth and then a tying two-run homer to A-Rod.

The Twins had a great chance to take the lead in the 10th but left two men on base, and so did the Yankees in the bottom half as Johnny Damon lined into an inning ending double play with men on first and third. In the 11th, the Twins had the bases loaded with no outs, only to see David Robertson record three straight outs to escape disaster, and on the fourth pitch he saw in the bottom of the 11th, Teixeira hit a line drive down the left-field line that hit the top of the wall near the foul pole and bounced into the seats to walk it off for the Yankees.

“The emotions in this game were unbelievable,” Girardi said. “We got what we needed when we needed it. It’s great to win a game like that.”

The teams flew to Minnesota and the Yankees finished off the sweep behind strong work from Andy Pettitte who retired 17 of the first 18 men he faced; a lockdown save from Rivera; and timely hitting from A-Rod and Jorge Posada who broke up a shutout bid by former Yankees bust Carl Pavano with a solo homer each in the seventh inning that turned a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead. And then Posada and Cano delivered insurance RBI singles in the ninth, allowing Rivera plenty of leeway to finish it off.

A-Rod, who had struggled in the postseason for much of his Yankee tenure, went 5-for-11 in the series and he said, “It finally feels good to contribute and advance. We have a lot of baseball left.”

They certainly did because as Girardi said, this was only one step in the journey and it was only going to get tougher from here, especially with the Angels up next in the ALCS because in the other divisional series, Los Angeles made just as quick work of the Red Sox as the Yankees had of the Twins.

They swept three straight over Boston by the scores of 5-0, 4-1 and 7-6, the clincher coming at Fenway Park when they rallied from a 5-2 deficit with two runs in the eighth and three in the ninth off Jonathan Papelbon.

The Angels had given the Yankees fits ever since 2002 when Mike Scioscia’s team won the first - and still only - World Series title in franchise history. Along the way, the Angels eliminated the Yankees from the postseason in 2002 which ended New York’s streak of four consecutive AL pennants, then did it again in 2005.

In 2009 they split 10 regular-season games, but the Yankees finished with a flourish by winning three of the last four, and after the last of those games - a 3-2 victory on Sept. 23 in Anaheim which gave them their first series win out there since 2004 - Teixeira said, “If we have to come back here, we won’t have to answer questions about how we haven’t played well here. That’s a good feeling.”