Tonight, on Twitter, @rebexarama asked us all what we considered to be the greatest MLB postseason of all time.
****

They played baseball.

Three words, simple, common and forgetful. A bland statement of fact. A sentence in a form so simple even a first grader can deconstruct it. An action, by a group of human beings, completed. Nothing inherently lyrical, no poetry, no literary devices need apply.

In October 2001, in the United States of America, these three words mean everything.

***

How do you identify America?

In a country as large as this one, one that spans four time zones in the mainland alone, one where going from Boston or New York to New Mexico feels like going to another country, what are the things we all have in common?

There’s hamburgers and the summer barbecues–Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day. There’s navigating through airport security.

And there are sports–but even here, we must be careful. Hockey means one thing in Massachusetts or Michigan and quite another in Mississippi. Football and Basketball are more universal, but more recent.

Baseball, however, has been around in something resembling it’s current form since the Civil War.

Even when the South threatened to break away and form it’s own country, when we nearly became the Divided States of America, we had baseball.

It hasn’t always been equal–we can thank Jim Crow for that–but it has always been there, in some form. Old Hoss Radbourn, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, Rickey Henderson, Cal Ripken Jr, Colby Rasmus all played or play the same game.

Want to identify America? Next time you board an airplane, count the baseball fields you fly over. You’ll lose track, eventually, I promise.

***

Baseball has done so well, remained for so long, because, in its ideal form, it is emblematic of the same thing that America, too is supposed to be emblematic about–that unbridled optimism.

The idea in baseball isn’t that you’ve only got two minutes to stage a massive comeback and if the opposition recovers possession, they can run out the clock and bury you. No.

The idea in baseball is that you come up to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, your team down by a run, there’s a man on base and you can still win the game on one swing. Until that last out is made, you simply do not know. Ninety-nine times out of 100, you might lose that game, but there is that one time you don’t, so you cling to that hope, that chance.

Sometimes it’s worth it.

***

2001, for example.

Down two games to none in a best of five series, your team flies cross-country, and ends up winning a game because your starting shortstop somehow ended up on the wrong side of the infield, because Jeremy Giambi thought he was a faster runner than he was, because Shane Spencer missed the cut off man.

Nine times out of ten, the shortstop isn’t out of position and that run scores, but this time, the game you have to win to move on, the baseball gods decide to smile.

Move forward, past the ALCS where you beat in five games the team that won 116 regular games–smashing your team’s own record set not even five years before.

Move past that and to a World Series that pits Goliath–three-time defending World Series Champions and seemingly invincible–against David–an expansion franchise, somehow reaching the World Series in only its fourth year of existence.

Watch as David takes a two-games-to-none series lead, and the series then shifts back to New York.

****

New York in October 2001.

The skyline, I remarked to a friend, looked as though someone had knocked a tooth out.

Three thousand dead among the most populous city in the United States–percentage wise, that might be like a tooth. Impact wise, it’s much closer to being thrown from a 90 mph vehicle with massive abdominal trauma and unknown head wounds.

Yet the city decides–almost collectively, almost as one–that instead of bed rest and self pity, it will bounce back. It will go on, resuming regular life as best it can, honoring its heroes and remembering its lost, but keeping one precept in mind:

Want to defeat the terrorists?

Live, laugh and love.

****

This is where the World Series comes, the home team down two games to none.

The third game, when President Bush throws out the first pitch, is a catharsis for more than just New York, but it is the games after that, where one gets the urge to call Spielberg on speed dial.

It’s not that the Yankees hit a two-out, bottom-of-the-ninth, game tying home run; it’s that they did it twice, and the hitters–Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius, are names that had already been associated with postseason heroics.

Two nights, they did it. One night is improbable enough, but when Scott Brosius came up to the plate in the ninth inning of Game Five, I wonder how many like me, how many listening to the game on the radio, thought that John Sterling had to be lying.

Nine times out of ten, it doesn’t happen even once. What are the odds for twice? Ninety nine out of a hundred? Nine hundred ninety nine out of a thousand?

***

Game Seven is a monster of it’s own.

It comes down to this: Mariano Rivera, who already then was being hailed as the greatest postseason reliever in Major League history, threw into center field instead of second base, and instead of the out, there were bases loaded…

Then Luis Gonzalez bloops one, and it’s over. A one run lead erased in the ninth inning, and David, who had been knocked down, bruised and beaten in enemy territory, returns to the desert to celebrate.

In that one instant, all (except most Yankee fans) baseball fans who ever hoped against hope, rooted for David, prayed that maybe the little guy could take one, just once–they got their wish.

Even if Arizona does not win another World Series for a while, they will still have the honor of being the champion of 2001–and the way that World Series was played, this is no small accolade.

***

That said, it is not the drama of the back-and-forth, the walk-off wins or late inning heroics that make the 2001 postseason matter.

It is not Jeter’s flip play, or the story of the expansion team making it to the big time.

It is not the ultimate defeat of the Yankees or even my bias as a Yankee fan.

For New York, for Arizona, for the United States, what made the playoffs matter boils down to three simple words.

They played baseball.

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Is it too early for this? I think not.

Here are my top ten Yankee moments from 2000-2010–feel free to leave a comment with any you think I missed!

10. Subway Series A lot of you might argue that this is too far down on the list, but the 2000 Yankees team was perhaps better lucky than good. If the most remembered moment of that series involves Roger Clemens throwing the barrel of a bat at Mike Piazza, then, well, it’s probably not a very good World Series.

09. Jobamania Not since, perhaps, the coming of Derek Jeter had a Yankee rookie been so heralded. In one year Joba Chamberlain had risen from the lowest levels of the minors to becoming one of the most recognizable names in New York, and perhaps most of all, along with Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, signalling the first ripened fruits of a reborn Yankee farm system.

08. Boston Massacre(s) A rare regular-season five game series in Boston in 2006 that saw the Yankees sweep will always bring smiles to the faces of Yankee fans. As nice as it was, however, the four game sweep in August 2009 may have been even more meaningful–the law of averages coming full bore after an 0-8 start and a sweep that included perhaps the best regular season game all year–a 15 inning scoreless affair ended with an Alex Rodriguez home run.

07. Jeter Flies into the Stands (h/t Matt Lorenzo): This one moment perhaps sums up what Derek Jeter means to the Yankees. During a regular season game in 2004, Derek Jeter attempted to catch a foul ball, and in doing so ended up diving into the stands along the third base line. He emerged bruised and bloody but never the worse for wear; the Yankees went on to win the game in extra innings.

06. Aaron Boone Plays a Pick Up Basketball Game At some point between the 2003 and 2004 seasons, Aaron Boone played a pick up game of basketball and tore his ACL, and the Yankees needed a third baseman. Enter Alex Rodriguez. Fans love him or hate him, but his mark on the team this decade–from playoff goat to playoff hero, from HAH! to Cynthia to Madonna to Kate, from hip surgery to 500 home runs, his mark on the team is indelible.

05. Mariano’s 500th save…and first RBI It might be this moment, much more than the 2000 World Series and even more than the Luis Castillo dropped pop up that best exemplifies the differences between the Yankees and the Mets. More importantly, it exemplifies just how much Rivera has meant for the Yankees–whatever the fault with the save statistic, only one other pitcher in MLB history has that many, and unlike Rivera, he does not have a stellar postseason record. Every year this decade Yankee fans appreciated Mo just a little more and in 2009, he was the only closer not to blow a lead in the postseason. It’s not a coincidence.

04. Babe, Bucky, Boone, any Questions? One swing on an October night in 2003 summed up everything it meant to be a Yankee, and everything that, until 2004, it meant to be a Red Sox. Eighty-four years, summed up in ball that sailed over the left field fence. Never mind the ultimate consequences, that one moment, those few minutes–if one ever asks you why you are a Yankee fan, just find a video of that swing.

03. Nine Innings From Ground Zero. Nevermind the ultimate result of the 2001 World Series–what matters is that in October 2001, the Yankees played. They fell behind Oakland two games to none and then won three straight, partially due to perhaps the greatest play of Derek Jeter’s defensive career; they beat the 116-win Mariners in a five game ALCS (remember the No-game-six chants?), and then, most remarkably of all, they managed to perform the same feat in back-to-back World Series games: Tying each game with a two-out, two-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Even today, so many years later, no one in New York will be surprised at all when you tell them that it was Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius that hit those home runs. The most chilling moment, however, may not have been the home runs, but instead when, in game five, the entirety of the Stadium started chanting Paul O’Neill’s name, a moving send off to one of the Yankees’ most beloved right fielders.

02. Goodbye, Hello I must confess, if you had told me as recently as 2005 or 2006 that the Yankees would ever leave the old Stadium, I would not have believed you. Still, despite the flaws, they pulled it off as well as such things can be pulled off–the farewell ceremonies were done while the Yankees were still in the playoff hunt, they got the glory of one more All Star game in New York City, Mariano Rivera threw the last pitch, and then, when they moved across the street, they won it all in year one. The old Stadium was not baseballl’s cathedral because of its aesthetics; it was baseball’s cathedral because of everything that happened on the field. If 2009 is any portent, the ghosts moved across the street, and the Yankees wasted no time in Christening their new digs.

01. 27 This isn’t much of any debate. The Yankees won two World Series titles in the decade, and they actually won more games when they missed the playoffs in 2008 than they won in the 2000 season. In 2009 the Yankees were the best team in baseball, played like it, and had a postseason to remember. Whether it was Alex Rodriguez carrying the line up on his back through the ALDS and ALCS, Matsui’s rampage in the clincher or Mariano Rivera simply playing G-d, the 2009 World Series may very well be the most satisfying World Series for Yankees fans since the 1996 team upset the defending Atlanta Braves.

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