I have something to admit before I actually start this post. The ladies at our Cardinals blog Aaron Miles’ Fastball do a weekly feature in which they pick a player to write a love letter to. I think it’s a great idea and since I’m fresh of ideas of my own, I’m stea– er, borrowing the idea for this post.
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Dear Raul,
Thank you.
You exceeded all expectations this season and provided Yankee fans with some of the most exciting moments we’ve witnessed in quite a while. In fact, some of them seemed like they belonged to a bygone era known as the late 1990′s/early 2000′s.
Your heroics in the American League Division Series took us all back to the days when there seemed to be nightly heroics in the playoffs.
In the regular season, you also had some amazing moments. More specifically your performance against the Oakland Athletics on September 22.
What a game that was!
We all thought your tie-breaking home run in the bottom of the fifth inning of that game was amazing but that was nothing compared to the tie-breaking home run in the 13th after the A’s took a four run lead. To be honest, I was close to shutting the game off after they took that lead but something stopped me.
Did I know you guys were going to come back and win? No. But I had a feeling something was probably going to happen and I didn’t want to miss it.
When that pitch from Pat Neshek left your bat, I leapt off the couch up in my den and started jumping up and down. I screamed out, “I knew it!!!” then yelled “Woo!!”
What we didn’t realize was that was just a precursor to what was going to happen in the Division Series.
With the Yankees down 2-1 in Game Three and with the way most of the team hadn’t been hitting the ball all series, things looked pretty dire in that bottom of the ninth inning.
When Joe Girardi inserted you in the game in the place of Alex Rodriguez people were floored. After you hit that 1-0 offering from Jim Johnson into the right field seats, people were on their feet.
But you weren’t done. Nope. You wanted to give people another reason to scream a string of expletives, in a good way, of course.
And you didn’t waste any time in that 12th inning. Poor Brian Matusz came in to pitch and only had to throw one pitch. As the ball was travelling into the seats, my Twitter feed blew up. If I could have taken a screenshot, it would have been a blur. But here’s a sample of what people were saying.
“HOLY SH**”
“HOLY F***** SH**”
“NO F***** WAY”
“HE DID IT AGAIN”
“HOOOOOOOOLY SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT”
And the exclamation abuse was off the charts but with good reason, you took us back to 1999 with that performance. A pinch hit game-tying, game-saving home run in the bottom of the ninth and the game-winning home run in the bottom of the twelfth?
Amazing.
The year may not have ended the way we wanted but you were a big reason why we had things to cheer about. So again, thank you for 2012, thank you for coming to the Yankees and thank you for those moments.
We really appreciated it.
Love,
Yankee fans everywhere
