City offers rare playoff double
NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- Curse the Yankees and Mets all you want; you've got to love any city that can serve as host for two baseball playoff games in the same day/night. In this spirit, I love New York.
The Yankees and Tigers will play Game 2 of their Division Series at Yankee Stadium this afternoon at 1:09 p.m. Tonight at Shea, it'll be the Mets and Dodgers. All playoffs. All the time. October in New York. Let's play two.
This rare doubleheader was supposed to be played yesterday, but the Yankees were rained out last night. This was a crushing disappointment for your humble correspondent, who went to great lengths to see two playoff games in one city in the same day.
I grew up in Massachusetts during one of the great postseason droughts in Red Sox history. I was a freshman in high school when the Red Sox finally made it to the World Series for the first time in 21 years (1946-67). New York saw a lot of October baseball during those years, but in New England, the postseason was something watched on grainy black-and-white TVs. We saw lots of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford outlined against a Stadium facade ever-lined with championship bunting.
That's why yesterday in New York promised to be such a thrill.
Two playoff games; same city; same day. I felt like Dick Vitale at the ACC tournament or Boris Yeltsin at an open bar.
My tour de playoffs started at Grand Central Station just after noon. Paid $10 (six rides for the price of five) for a subway card and went downstairs to the 7 Train bound for Queens -- also bound for Flushing (Like Butte, Mont., and Belchertown, Mass., signage for ``Flushing" always provokes a smile. Brings out the seventh-grader in me). A lot of dad/son combos boarded our train car as we rolled north toward Queens.
In less than a half-hour, the 7 dropped us across the street from Shea -- that 1960s relic that got old and dirty faster than any of the stadiums built during the dual-purpose, concrete donut era. Yesterday afternoon was spectacular in New York. Sunny. Dry. Mid-to-high-70s.
The Dodgers were stretching and getting ready to hit when I first walked on the playoff logo that had been stenciled into the grass behind home plate. Derek Lowe had a bat in his hand. I remembered that when he was with the Red Sox, Lowe used to say, ``I hit .500 in high school, but everybody hit .500 in high school."
Red Sox West stalked the premises. Grady Little was in the interview room (this was his first playoff appearance since that fateful night at Yankee Stadium in 2003), Bill Mueller stood near the third base dugout, and Dave Jauss talked with a reporter from Fox. Nomar Garciaparra walked up the steps of the third base dugout, carefully placing two feet on each step as he ascended. Just like the old days.
Ron Darling, who pitched for Yale and the Mets, sat in the auxiliary press box at Shea. He works for the Mets television broadcast flagship. He's their Dennis Eckersley. Darling started Games 1, 4, and 7 of the 1986 World Series (remember who lost that one?) and most recently starred in a Farrelly Brothers flick.
``Hey, Ron, loved you in `Shallow Hal,' " I told him when we exchanged greetings. Like everyone else in New York who encounters a Boston scribe, Darling wanted to know what happened to the Red Sox this year.
The game started a little after 4 p.m. and in the bottom of the second, we saw a baseball rarity: two Dodgers base runners gunned down at home plate on a single throw. Los Angeles third base coach Rich Donnelly sent Jeff Kent -- and J.D. Drew followed -- around third on Russell Martin's single to right and a stunned Paul Lo Duca tagged both men out. If Martin lost his mind and kept running, Lo Duca could have had the first unassisted triple play in the history of catching.
Making his first postseason appearance since winning the final game of the World Series for the Red Sox, Lowe cruised into the fourth with a 1-0 lead, then surrendered a pair of majestic homers to Carlos Delgado and Cliff Floyd. Nomar had a chance to tie the score in the fifth, but grounded to short. A couple of innings later, when it was starting to get dark, Nomar came up again and tied the score with a two-run double.
It was 6:30 p.m. and the Mets and Dodgers were tied in the bottom of the seventh when I walked out of Shea and started the trip toward the Bronx. TV guy/Hall of Famer Joe Morgan traveled the 9 1/2 miles via limo. Other reporters drove over the Triborough Bridge. Not me. In the spirit of the Subway Series (imagine if the Red Sox had won the American League and played the Boston Braves in 1948), I walked back to the elevated train stop.
I was standing on the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge -- which connects Shea with the 7 Line, when the Mets pushed the eventual winning runs across the plate. From the platform on the Shea side of the bridge you can look into the stadium. Probably what it would feel like to peer into Fenway from atop the CITGO sign. It was from this Roosevelt Bridge platform that I saw Delgado and David Wright drive in the Mets' winning runs.
Our train was pretty empty when we left Shea at 6:37. Just a few parents, intent on beating the traffic, toting reluctant kids. Twenty-six minutes later, we exited at Grand Central and climbed two flights to catch the 4 (Uptown Express) to 161st Street in the Bronx. The platform for the 4 train was jammed with Yankee s fans and not one of them made reference to the Mets. When we arrived at Yankee Stadium -- 58 minutes after leaving Shea -- a man with a BlackBerry told me the Mets had won.
It wasn't raining at 8:09 when Mike Mussina was scheduled to throw the first pitch against the Tigers, but the lords of ESPN and Major League Baseball announced a Yankee Stadium delay because they knew it was going to rain. Initially, we appeared to be in a non-rain delay, but the skies opened just before 8:30. If I'd known this was going to happen, I could have stayed all nine at Shea and still had time to walk from Queens to the Bronx. They officially postponed the game at around 10 p.m.
It'll be easier to turn the double play today. Yankees at 1:09. Mets at 8:19. More time between games. It's October in New York. Let's play two.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is dshaughnessy@globe.com. 
