Knew How To Hold 'Em...

The game of baseball is full of ironies.

For example, let’s take last night’s Yankees/Tigers game.

Down and presumably out Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers lost 12 games a row prior to the Division Championships. He used to be a Yankee, and couldn’t beat the Yankees to save his life since he got traded. And, at 41, he was the third oldest pitcher ever to start in a post-season game.

And he was up against the one of the Yankee’s most fearsome pitchers, Randy “Big Unit” Johnson.

The Yankees were supposed to be able to call this one in. Even though Johnson had a herniated disk and was playing courtesy of an epidural block, he was still throwing well enough, pain free, for manager Joe Torre to trust him for this critical game.

It was supposed to be a cakewalk, and the Yankees would be able to spray each other with champagne, then hunker down to prepare themselves to face Oakland for the pennant.

But Rogers was on a mission. His mission was to pitch the game of his life. His mission was to show the Yankees what they gave away.

And he shot them down, 6-0. He struck out eight, allowed five hits and one walk. The boys in pinstripes have one of the best defensive lineups in the game, not a single starter batting below .300, and Rogers shut them down and slammed the door.

"He threw the ball awesome. That's not the Kenny I remember," Alex Rodriguez said in a post-game interview. "Give him a lot of credit. He was phenomenal.”

One of the Yankees compared Roger’s performance to that of Hall-of-Famer Sandy Koufax.

But don’t count the Yankees out yet. They have a team full of veterans and the post-season experience to know how to regroup and, literally, come out swinging.

"We just have to believe how good we are," said outfielder Johnny Damon. "I think we're the best team out there, we just have to show it to ourselves."

And Damon should know a thing or two about coming from behind. When he was with the Red Sox, they were down 0-3 against the Yankees in the World Series and…well, you know what happened next.

Sometimes it just takes one guy to be the catalyst to set the rest of the team on fire.

Another irony if this catalyst would be Damon.

Meanwhile, across town, another improbability is in the making. The Mets, with their starting rotation hobbled by the season-ending injuries of both Orlando “El Duce” Hernandez and Pedro Martinez, find themselves up 2-0 against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now, even though I’m a Mets fan, I was cringing when it worked out that the Mets would face the Dodgers in the playoffs, because LA has had the Mets’ number all season. All they had to do was throw a lefty pitcher up there and the Mets’ bats went limp.

Now the Mets are down to three decent starters, Tom Glavine, Steve Trachsel and the rookie John Maine. But Manager Willie “Captain Hook” Randolph apparently knows how to work his full-to-bursting bullpen, and isn’t shy about yanking any of his starters if they aren’t getting the job done.

Yes, this is the time of year to grit your teeth, to play your heart out through injuries and bloody socks and whatever. The Red Sox made magic happen, as I mentioned above, and the Diamondbacks, through injuries, went with basically only two starters the whole of their World Series (In another irony, those two pitchers were Randy Johnson and Curt “Bloody Sock” Schilling), but it would be another Miracle Met finish if they could pull this one out of their butts.

I can’t wait to see what happens.