Prior to the opener, A-Rod was batting .159 over his last 13 postseason games. In those previous 27 playoff at-bats with runners on base, A-Rod was 0-for-27. And in his 18 most recent trips to the plate with runners in scoring position in the second season, A-Rod had not collected a single hit. That all changed on Wednesday, with two swings of the bat.
After hitting a pop fly in his first at-bat and whiffing in his second, the All-Star third-baseman dug himself out in his third chance against Twins starter Brian Duensing. With Derek Jeter at second, two outs, and the Yankees leading 3-2 in the bottom of the fifth inning, Rodriguez smacked a line-drive single to left. Jeter scored a crucial insurance run for New York, and A-Rod had his first postseason RBI in what seemed like an eternity to most fans in the Bronx.
Rodriguez celebrated the hit by sharing a fist-bump with first-base coach Mick Kelleher — something he’d done countless times. Not many of those fist-bumps carried quite as much significance as this one.
And A-Rod must have liked the feeling, because he came up for an encore performance in the seventh, this time with Jeter on third, two outs, and the pinstripes ahead 6-2. An 0-1 curveball from righty reliever Jon Rauch hung around Rodriguez’s letters, and he shipped it into right field for his second RBI single of the game.
With those two hits — both with runners on, both with runners in scoring position, both plating runs in a significant postseason game — A-Rod got the monkey off his back, silenced his critics, and gave the Yankees another reason to be confident in their chances of returning to the World Series.
Whether his past string of failures was evidence of Rodriguez choking in the clutch or nothing more than an aberration due to a small sample size is no longer significant. That’s in the past, and with a stellar Game 1, A-Rod is ready to look to the future.
Rodriguez’s fifth-inning fist-bump with Kelleher marked the end of his malaise. With the spotlight finally off his slump, there should be many more of them to come.