At the worst possible moment, as the Yankees were still trying to stop the Dodgers from taking them out the way they’d just taken out the Mets, the Yankees turned into the Jets. Top five, Game 5, up five. Bad things started happening to the Yankees then, starting with Aaron Judge dropping a ball he usually puts in his pocket before L.A. Mookie hit a slow roller toward the first baseman the way New York Mookie did one time against the Red Sox.
Things went wrong for the Yankees Wednesday night the way things have been going wrong for the Jets since they signed Aaron Rodgers, the way things always seem to go wrong for the Jets, especially lately. So this was the way October was going to end around here, with the Mets done and the Yankees done and the Giants needing to have a fork stuck in them and the Jets looking at 2-7 and the Knicks already starting to feel like the only game in town.
Then Garrett Wilson made one of the most thrilling plays that any New York athlete has ever made in any sport.
In a week when New York sports fans needed something great to happen, Wilson happened the next night, when he sure didn’t drop the ball.
You’ve seen the play by now whether you were watching Jets vs. Texans on Thursday night or not, because everybody has, the way everybody who follows the NFL has seen the one-handed catch Odell Beckham Jr. made 10 years ago against the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football. It was third-and-19 and Rodgers threw one in the general direction of the kid from Ohio State, left side of the end zone. And until the last possible second, the ball looked as if it was going to be one more incompletion for Rodgers this season, one more ball that Wilson couldn’t catch. Or drop even if it hit him in the chest.
But then Wilson went into the air and reached up with his right hand as he did proceeded to make a Beckham catch, one that will be replayed around here forever the way Beckham’s catch has been. Like it was a football version of Willie Mays’ catch in the World Series, the one he made about 100 years ago, running with his back toward home plate and once more making his glove the place where triples went to die.
It wasn’t an incompletion in the end. Didn’t have the Jets staring at fourth-and-long in a season that had started to feel like fourth-and-long. The ball stayed in Wilson’s right hand. The review said he’d gotten a shin down instead of a second foot. Touchdown, for the ages. On a night when you could have purchased a ticket to Jets vs. Texans for $12 on StubHub, the night after the Yankees season had died in Game 5 against the Dodgers, the Jets suddenly weren’t going to lose their sixth in a row.
No one knows how long this might last, or if it will last. These are the Jets we’re talking about and good stuff rarely lasts, so they might just be torturing their fans with false hope for the next month or so. But Thursday night, at long last, they finally showed some life.
We come to sports for a lot of reasons, starting with this one: Going to the game or turning on the game hoping that we might see something we’ve never seen before. On Thursday night, Wilson gave us that catch, a version of which we had seen before from a New York wide receiver but had no way of knowing if we’d ever see another one like it. Wilson came down with the ball and for this one night, the Jets had gotten up.
“Oh, my goodness,” interim Jets coach Jeff Ulbrich (and aren’t they all really interim?) said afterward. “I mean, I was talking to the ref when they were reviewing it. I’m like, ‘Just for the sake of posterity, you have to let it stand just so it goes down in history.’”
The week in pro football really had begun with the two teams who play their games at MetLife looking, if not dead, as if they were calcifying in front of our eyes. The Giants had gone to 2-6 in Pittsburgh. The Jets had gone to 2-6 in Foxboro against a backup quarterback, getting gassed in the second half by a backup quarterback named Jacoby Brissett. Then came the top of the fifth at Yankee Stadium going as wrong in a World Series as the bottom of the 10th had gone for the Red Sox at old Shea in 1986, almost 38 years ago exactly.
Are the odds still really bad for the Jets to make the postseason with eight games left? You bet they are, and not just because of their record, but because they ARE the Jets, a team haven’t made it to the postseason since right after the Yankees won their last World Series.
But this is a year when the Mets survived being 22-33 at the end of May and came within two wins of making it to the Series themselves. Who was putting down big money on them to be a wild card at that point in their season? The Yankees? They ended up having the best record in the American League despite having a stretch in the middle of the season when the best they could do was win 10 of 33 games.
Nobody is saying that Jets are now on their way because of one truly spectacular moment; a long way from being the team they thought they were going to be and Ambassador Woody clearly thought they would be — after all, he is on record saying this is the best team he’s ever had — the rest of the way. Just to get to nine wins from there, it would mean they go from a .333 winning percentage to a .750 winning percentage, starting on the road next week against the Cardinals.
Wilson holding on to the ball doesn’t mean he caught the Jets season with one hand and held on. Or saved it with one play. Or that Rodgers is going to look young the rest of the way instead of old. Or that this will turn out to be anything more than the latest iteration, in a whole string of them, what mostly feels like a lifetime of them, of the Same Old Jets.
But for one moment on Thursday night, in another primetime game — the networks still clinging to the notion that the country actually cares about Rodgers and the Jets — Wilson changed the story. One moment, one night, one victory his team desperately needed. We find out the rest of the way if it will translate into a season.
YANK TICKETS FROM THOSE TWO IDIOTS, DODGERS WERE A CLASS ABOVE & REX BEGGING FOR MORE …
Here’s what should be the last word on the two idiots who went after Mookie Betts at Yankee Stadium the other night:
The Yankees have to pull their season tickets.
Permanently.
The Yankees absolutely have to do more than ban them from Game 5 and actually refund the money for those tickets.
“I patrol that wall,” one of them, Austin Capobianco, said, sounding as weird and loopy as Col. Jessup in “A Few Good Men.”
Start with the fact that the idiots could have injured Betts.
But it’s more than that.
It’s more and actually much worse, because Capobianco told a reporter they’d actually planned to do something like this if the opportunity ever presented itself.
Which makes the whole thing idiotically premeditated.
If they’re allowed back into Yankee Stadium next season, then the penalty for punk behavior like theirs turns out to have been one game.
That’s not enough, and the Yankees can’t let it be enough, or the people in charge are softer than soft ice cream on this particular crime, two of their fans thinking it was OK to put hands on an opposing player.
By the way?
The guy who made the play that started it all, Betts, has now won three World Series with two teams, and continues to be one of the great players of all time, all over the field.
Tony Hinchcliffe, the bottom feeder who thought he was being so edgy telling that garbage joke about Puerto Rico at the Garden last Sunday — what’s happened since, cat got his tongue?
For the last time:
No Yankee fan can be shocked that the Yankees fell behind in this World Series, no matter how close some of those games were.
I said this the other day:
It was the seventh time in this century — seventh — that the Yankees lost three consecutive games in a playoff series.
Let’s face it, once they got to the World Series, they weren’t in the AL Central anymore, Toto.
In 2018, at the end of Game 5 of that World Series, the Red Sox got their last three outs against the Dodgers from one of their aces, Chris Sale.
The last one came on a pitch low in the strike zone that Manny Machado waved at.
The other night, the Dodgers were the ones bringing in one of their aces, Walker Buehler, to get the last three outs.
The last on a swinging strike on a low pitch against Alex Verdugo.
One more thing on the fifth inning of Game 5:
It was as much Anthony Rizzo’s fault as it was Gerrit Cole’s.
What, you don’t think Bronny James has paid his dues?
LeBron is being a dad here, and as the father of three sons, I believe his heart is in the right place.
But, come on.
I’d love to see Rex Ryan back in the game, but the past few weeks he’s done everything on TV except hold up a sign that reads:
“Please take me back, Woody.”
In the interest of full disclosure, a friend of mine who’s a lifelong Mets fan now refers to the Yankees as the Other Team in town.
Too soon?
