The night when bugs changed the course of Yankees history
CLEVELAND — A legendary managerial run capped. A phenom upended. Baseball lore enhanced.
For such tiny bugs, the Lake Erie midges can certainly pack a wallop.
When the Yankees and Indians face off Thursday night at Progressive Field, in Game 1 of the American League Division Series, it’ll mark the first postseason meeting here between these two clubs since Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS, which will forever be remembered as “The Midges Game.”
“The Bug Game” will work, too.
“The Bug Game” will work, too.
“It’s one of those things you don’t think about much until it comes up,” Joba Chamberlain told The Post on Wednesday in a telephone interview. “It’s hard to believe it was 10 years ago.”
It was exactly 10 years ago from this Game 1 — Oct. 5, 2007 — when Chamberlain’s amazing rookie season hit the most unexpected of road blocks. When Joe Torre’s drive to save his job faltered fatally. And when everyone in attendance saw something unprecedented and unmatched: a team’s fortunes dramatically altered by an insect invasion.
“It helped us win,” said Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia, who started Game 1 for the Indians in that series.
“It was surreal,” said Indians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti, then the team’s vice president of baseball operations.
Antonetti and Bart Swain, the Indians’ longtime director of baseball information, agreed independently that while the midges have made their presence known every now and then throughout the years, no other day comes close to that day’s infestation.
Chamberlain had earned his first call-up to the big leagues that August and became an instant sensation. In 19 regular-season appearances out of the bullpen, he allowed just one earned run over 24 innings, striking out 34 and walking six. So when he relieved Andy Pettitte with one out in the seventh and quickly retired two batters, the Yankees figured they were en route to a series-tying victory.
Not so fast. As Torre and Tom Verducci detailed in their 2009 book, “The Yankee Years,” the “perfect swarm” resulted from the cleanup of Lake Erie about 10 years prior, the unusual humidity — the first-pitch temperature was 81 degrees — and the unorthodox first-pitch time of 5:09 p.m. The 45-minute period after dusk represents the midges’ primary party time.
The midges arrived in the top of the eighth.
“I was at the plate when they first started coming out,” Doug Mientkiewicz, the Yankees’ first baseman that night, said Wednesday. “I kept stepping out. Derek [Jeter] thought I was trying to mess with [Cleveland starter Fausto] Carmona’s rhythm.”
Then things got really crazy in the bottom of the eighth, as Chamberlain tried to get three more outs and set up Mariano Rivera for the save.
“I remember Joba rubbing the back of his neck,” Mientkiewicz said. “His whole neck was covered.”
In the Indians’ dugout, “It was shocking to us,” said Derek Shelton, then the team’s hitting coach. “I think people that grew up in Cleveland realize that those would come out in humid weather, but no one on our bench realized it.”
Multiple times, Yankees head trainer Gene Monahan came to the mound to apply bug spray to Chamberlain. Yet as Torre told The Post in an interview this season, “Little did we know that the stuff Geno was spraying on Joba’s face was like chateaubriand for those bugs.’’
And Chamberlain’s performance suffered greatly: Grady Sizemore drew a leadoff walk and advanced to second on a wild pitch. Asdrubal Cabrera sacrificed Sizemore over to third. After Travis Hafner lined out to Mientkiewicz at first, another Chamberlain wild pitch plated Sizemore with the tying run.
Chamberlain had thrown just one wild pitch in the regular season. Then he threw two in one inning.
“I second-guessed myself for not pulling the team off the field,’’ Torre said. Severely, it appears; Mientkiewicz reunited with Torre on the 2009 Dodgers, and he said, “Talking to him there, he said his biggest regret was not pulling us off the field.”
Nevertheless, Chamberlain said, “For all of those years Joe has managed, it wasn’t on him. It was on me. If I would’ve said, ‘I can’t get through this,’ it would’ve been different.”
Besides, after Chamberlain avoided further damage in the eighth, Carmona (who later reverted to his real name, Roberto Hernandez) cruised through a 1-2-3 top of the ninth in similar circumstances.
“The most amazing thing for me was the juxtaposition of Joba and Roberto Hernandez,” Antonetti said. “[Hernandez/Carmona] was locked in, and he had bugs everywhere, and it didn’t affect him.”
The Indians scored the winning run in the bottom of the 11th, with Hafner delivering a walk-off single against Luis Vizcaino. While the Yankees rebounded to win Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, they suffered elimination in Game 4, and Joe Girardi succeeded Torre in the manager’s office. Chamberlain, meanwhile, bounced between starting and relieving and never regained that sheen. Now 32, he told The Post on Wednesday that he has retired.
Could we see a déjà vu in Friday’s Game 2, with a scheduled 5:08 p.m. first pitch and warm temperatures?
“You can’t necessarily predict these like clockwork,” Jason Nicholas, the chief meteorologist for Cleveland 19 News (a CBS affiliate) said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “There are a lot of contributing factors: The soil temperature, the water temperature. A lot of things go into when the midges come out and how large of a crop. I can’t say, ‘Watch out for scattered midges on Friday night!’ ”
Such a midge procession, Nicholas said, results from a weeks-long buildup of conditions. While rain is forecast for Friday, it has been dry in the area lately. “That might help keep the midges away,” Nicholas said.
Which is fine for everyone here. Let’s take some other, mind-blowing development and allow Chamberlain and his fellow participants their exclusive memory.
Major League Baseball auctioned the unhelpful can of Off, Chamberlain recalled, and he met the winner the subsequent spring training in Tampa. Still, he said, “I haven’t watched [the game] all the way through.”
“The kids I’ve managed ask me about that,” said Mientkiewicz, who managed the last five years in the Twins’ minor league system. “I can always say I was part of The Bug Game.”
— with Dan Martin
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