Indians are boss

NEW YORK - A team that had overcome adversity, dodged bullets, and stepped through minefields merely to make it to October ran out of time, luck, and answers last night. The Yankees are once again first-round playoff victims, falling, 6-4, to the Cleveland Indians in their American League Division Series.

The Indians, who won the series in four games, will meet the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series, which opens Friday at Fenway Park. The Yankees? Who knows? Suffice it to say that every newspaper in America will need to set aside plenty of space in the transactions column over the winter, starting with the future of free agent manager Joe Torre.

Owner George Steinbrenner wanted much more than a playoff berth, and with baseball's highest payroll and with the Yankees owning the best record in baseball since Memorial Day, there was the expectation of much more. Instead, the Yanks have now gone out in the first round three straight years and, going back to their epic collapse against the Red Sox in 2004, they have lost 13 of their last 17 playoff games.

"It's such an empty feeling," said Torre. "But I'd like to say how proud I am of what they did. They dug themselves out of a hole [in May, when the Yankees were 21-29]. They became a team. This club has a great future."

But it is the Indians who will be advancing. They jumped on Yankee starter Chien-Ming Wang for four runs in the first two innings, built a 6-1 lead after four, and nursed things the rest of the way behind four pitchers.

Grady Sizemore homered to lead off the game and reached base four times, scoring twice. Victor Martinez also knocked in a pair of runs for Cleveland, which will be making its first trip to the ALCS since 1998.

"It's exciting," said Sizemore, who hit .375 in the four games. "This is what you dream of."

Asked about his homer on the third pitch of the game, he said, "You want to jump on them early and try to take the wind out of their sails."

Despite falling behind early, New York had its chances. Plenty of them. The Yanks had at least one base runner in each of the first seven innings and over that span left eight on base. Overall they left 10. Robinson Cano, Bobby Abreu, and Alex Rodriguez whacked home runs, but all were solo shots.

The winning pitcher was Paul Byrd, who survived five innings before handing things over to the reliable Tribe bullpen. Byrd, a 15-game winner, was manager Eric Wedge's choice all along. Wedge could have gone with C.C. Sabathia on three days' rest, but he resolutely stuck with Byrd and it paid off. Both Sabathia and Fausto Carmona will be fully rested for the ALCS.

"I thought what he did was he controlled the game," Wedge said of Byrd, who gave up eight hits and two runs and struck out two, both K's coming from Rodriguez. "He was aggressive. He worked ahead. He made pitches when he had to."

The Yanks simply couldn't put together the big inning, scoring singletons in the second, sixth, seventh, and ninth innings. Perhaps the lowlight of the evening - other than Wang's pathetic pitching - came in the sixth, when Cano went deep and two subsequent singles put runners on the corners with one out. Derek Jeter, the one Yankee whom New York fans would want up there, took two balls and then grounded into an inning-ending, 4-6-3 double play.

"We kept going at them and going at them," Torre said. "We just couldn't get over the hump. But squandered opportunities are sometimes based on the fact that the other team is pretty good. They're impressive. Very impressive. They're going to give the Red Sox some problems. I'm impressed with what they have done."

Rodriguez homered in the seventh to make it 6-3, but Rafael Betancourt mowed the Yanks down in the eighth and white-knuckle closer Joe Borowski gave up a towering homer to Abreu in finishing the ninth, with many of the 56,315 in attendance having already left the building, preferring not to witness the Indians' celebration at the end of the 4-hour-3-minute game.

Torre, his Yankee future apparently hanging on the outcome of every win-or-go-home game, went with Wang as his starter, even though Wang was on three days' rest. He thought Wang would be OK pitching in Yankee Stadium, where he was 10-4 with a 2.75 ERA. If possible, Wang was even worse in the Stadium last night than he was in Game 1 at Cleveland, when, fully rested, he gave up eight runs and nine hits in 4 2/3 innings.

After nine batters, five hits, two runs, one hit batsman, and 32 pitches, Torre had seen enough.

"He didn't locate," Torre said. "And this ball club will let you know it if you don't locate."

Torre summoned Mike Mussina, who was 3-0 with a 3.49 ERA in September and had been considered - sort of - to start Game 4. Mussina, who last pitched Sept. 28, gave up a run-scoring double play to Sizemore and an RBI single to Asdrubal Cabrera (both runs charged to Wang). But he yielded two runs in the fourth when Martinez slapped a single to left with the bases loaded. That made it 6-1.

The Yankees avoided further damage in the inning with a double play and then chipped away with the solo homers. But the Cleveland bullpen held the lead, and Borowski whiffed Jorge Posada to end the game and the Yankees' once-promising postseason.