August 10, 2005: Aaron Rowand’s defense in Yankee Stadium steals spotlight, secures series for White Sox

In 2005, the White Sox’ Aaron Rowand finished tied for second among American League center fielders with 15 Defensive Runs Saved, one behind Tampa Bay’s Joey Gathright at the top of the leaderboard.1

At the bottom of the leaderboard was Bernie Williams of the New York Yankees, whose total of negative-26 Defensive Runs Saved was 16 runs lower than the next-worst center fielder, Tampa Bay’s Damon Hollins.

When the two teams met for the rubber match of a three-game series on Wednesday afternoon, August 10, at Yankee Stadium, this disparity decided the tightest of series between two eventual American League division winners.

On August 8 the White Sox entered the start of the series 13 games ahead of second-place Cleveland in the AL Central Division; the Yankees were 3½ games behind Boston in the East. All three games were decided by one run. The Yankees won the opener, 3-2, after which the White Sox knotted the series with a 2-1 victory behind seven scoreless innings by former Yankee José Contreras.

The finale followed suit, except it took a 10th inning to settle.

The game had been tied, 1-1, since Carl Everett’s one-out double off Yankees starter Aaron Small scored Pablo Ozuna from first in the third inning. It answered the run the Yankees scored in the first on Gary Sheffield’s one-out single off Chicago right-hander Freddy García, and the pitching duel carried into the late innings. Small completed seven innings, while García finished eight before turning it over to the White Sox bullpen.

Yankees manager Joe Torre called on his future Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera to keep the game tied in the ninth, which he did by retiring Rowand, Jermaine Dye, and Geoff Blum in order. Manager Ozzie Guillén responded by calling on lefty Neal Cotts to handle the heart of the New York lineup, and Bernie Williams had a chance to be the hero. He came to the plate with Hideki Matsui on first after a one-out single. A passed ball advanced Matsui to scoring position, but Williams flied out to right to send the game into extra innings.

An inning later, Williams was the goat.

Facing Rivera in his second inning of work with one out in the top of the 10th, Juan Uribe hit a line drive to right-center. With the option of taking a conservative route and holding Uribe to a single, Williams instead opted for a direct line. When he couldn’t close the distance, the ball bounded past him to the wall, and Uribe beat the relay throw to third for a triple.

The extra bases loomed large. Scott Podsednik fouled off a squeeze attempt before hitting a 1-and-2 cutter to Robinson Canó at second base. Uribe broke for home on contact, and his feet-first slide beat Jorge Posada’s tag for the go-ahead run. When the Yankees came to the plate in the bottom of the 10th, Tino Martinez came off the bench to draw a one-out walk off Cotts. That turned over the Yankees lineup, and Guillén called on closer Dustin Hermanson, who struck out Derek Jeter for the second out.

Canó came to the plate and launched a drive to deep center, but his bid for a walk-off homer died in the glove of Rowand, who flagged it down on the warning track to cap a series that was a triumph for both the White Sox and Rowand himself.

Rowand had already made waves in the Bronx by opening the series with a pair of sensational catches in each gap. He robbed Jeter of extra bases with a diving catch in left-center, followed by a full-sprint catch on the right-center warning track to do the same to Canó.

In the August 10 finale, Rowand made his mark with quantity. His game-clinching catch on the warning track was his seventh putout of the game, and his third in the further reaches of Yankee Stadium’s outfield. He ran down Gary Sheffield’s deep drive to end the third inning, and hauled in Matsui’s bid for extra bases in the right-center gap for the final out of the sixth.

Rowand’s ranging was the talk of the Yankees’ clubhouse after the game, although despite his being in his fifth major-league season and third as a starting outfielder, not everybody knew his name.

“That center fielder over there put on an absolute clinic,” said Álex Rodríguez, whose first guess at Rowand’s last name (“Roland?”) was off by a letter.2 “He probably took seven or eight hits away.”3

“He stole a lot of hits,” Jeter said. “If he didn’t make some of those catches, we probably score a few more runs.”

“He was all over the place,” Williams concurred. “He was a great part of their success during the whole series. It seemed like he was able to stop the offense at times.”4

As for Williams, his faltering came at a sensitive juncture. A week earlier, the Yankees made an unusual in-season announcement that they had declined his $15 million option for the following season, which came after a trade deadline in which the Yankees reportedly tried and failed to acquire a center fielder.5 At the same time, manager Torre was fielding questions about public criticism from Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who ripped Torre for a late-game pitching decision in the second game of the series. (“I’m very displeased with my manager tonight.”)6

For the White Sox, who won the series despite scoring only two runs in each of the three games, the series represented one of the formulas they had relied on to build their league-best 74-39 record.

“We can play under pressure,” Guillén said after the game. “We can play 1-0 games, 2-1 games against anybody. We can compete against any team. We compete very well.”

Rowand phrased it in a more self-effacing manner: “Just find a way to win, and don’t score any more than you have to.”7

The series loss knocked the Yankees to 5½ games back of the Boston Red Sox in the American League East at 60-52. After the White Sox left town, however, the Yankees rattled off five wins in a row to start a torrid stretch run. They won 35 of their final 50 games – including two of three against the White Sox at US Cellular Field on August 19-21 – to finish with the same record as the Red Sox at 95-67, but they clinched the division on the second-to-last day of the season when their 8-4 victory at Fenway Park on October 1 gave them the decisive 10th win in the head-to-head series.

Because the Yankees won the tiebreaker with Boston, they never faced the White Sox that October. Chicago swept Boston in three games to advance to the AL Championship Series, but the Yankees lost the Division Series to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in five. The White Sox continued winning, dropping just one game to the Angels in the ALCS and sweeping the Houston Astros in the World Series.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA200508100.shtml

Photo credit: Aaron Rowand, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL/2005-specialpos_cf-fielding.shtml.

2 Joe Gergen, “Rowand Covers Ground,” Newsday (Long Island, New York), August 11, 2005: A73.

3 Dom Amore, “Shoulders to Cry On,” Hartford Courant, August 11, 2005: C1.

4 Julian Garcia, “Bernie, Yanks Playing Catch-Up to Rowand’s Show,” New York Daily News, August 11, 2005: 62.

5 “The Yankees Decline an Option on Williams,” New York Times, August 3, 2005: D3.

6 George Vecsey, “Torre Finds There’s No Magic Elixir,” New York Times, August 11, 2005: D1.

7 Mark Gonzalez, “Legging It Out,” Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2005: 4, 1.