CLEVELAND – Luke Weaver, the New York Yankees’ smart, astute and everyday closer, got a useful reminder Thursday night when he was asked how he would recover from a three-games-to-nil lead in the American League Championship Series. .

“One pitch away, honestly,” Weaver said, explaining that he got a double play in the bottom of the ninth and pumped two quick hits to the next batter. ‘I just have to execute. I really feel like I let the team down there.”

Weaver strayed far from the zone with his next three pitches before Lane Thomas doubled off the left field wall. Jhonkensy Noel followed with his seismic home run, the one that lost the Yankees’ lead, the one that pushed them from the brink of a pennant into a real, competitive ALCS with the Cleveland Guardians.

If the Guardians’ 7-5 win propels them to a pennant, David Fry’s two-run win over Clay Holmes in the 10th inning will remain one of the greatest moments in franchise history. But it shouldn’t upset the Yankees. If so, they wouldn’t earn the spot in the World Series that has eluded them for 15 years.

What happened Thursday was baseball at its finest, superstars and bench players taking turns playing heroes. Baseball people know when they are part of something special. There’s a difference between ruining a match and simply being defeated.

“Two good teams going after it,” said Aaron Judge, whose laser beam homer off Emmanuel Clase tied the score in the eighth, giving Giancarlo Stanton the lead. “Just great at bat after great at bat.”

Yankees manager Aaron Boone, a third-generation baseball man with a keen sense of history, called it a classic.

“Great game to watch,” Boone said. “That was playoff baseball. Both sides kept coming with haymakers and big at-bats, big moments with two really good bullpens. They survived us tonight. They had one more good swing than we did.”

Fry’s final swing robbed the Yankees of an easy path to the World Series. But they were never entitled to that anyway. Of course, they spend $200 million more on their payroll than Cleveland. It gave them two more victories in the regular season.

“You don’t really come in thinking you’re going to beat a team,” Weaver said. “I mean, 4 and 0, that’s very, very hard to do. We see it all the time how these games go back and forth. I don’t want to say it’s a surprise, because they won’t let us win and we definitely want to get that.”

He added: “That was a huge win for them but it shouldn’t shock us in any way. It should just be like this: you tap your limit and you just keep going and you give credit where it’s due.

Precisely. The Guardians could – and perhaps should – have won Game 2 when so much was going right for them, but they still couldn’t even close the series. Now they’ve pulled themselves back from the brink. At least one of the Yankees has seen it here before.

“I stood on that field right there, I think in the eighth inning, when they tied the game with a big home run,” said first baseman Anthony Rizzo, the former Cub, who watched helplessly as Rajai Davis joyfully raced around the field . is based on the 2016 World Series finale.

“Luckily it wasn’t Game 7. So this is a series. They are a very good team and we know that. Tomorrow we will bounce back and be ready to win.”

The Cubs had one inning – and a miraculous rain delay – to regroup from Davis’ tying body hit and take the title from Cleveland. The Yankees still hold the lead in the series, with two games left here and two more, if necessary, in the Bronx.

And history is filled with examples of teams winning the first two games of a best-of-seven at home, losing Game 3 on a walk-off hit, and then coming back to win. In the final decades of the World Series it was a fairly regular phenomenon:

1980 Phillies: Walked out by Kansas City’s Willie Aikens in Game 3, won the World Series in six.

1988 Dodgers: Walked out by Oakland’s Mark McGwire in Game 3, won the World Series in five.

Twins from 1991: Walked out by Atlanta’s Mark Lemke in Game 3, won the World Series in seven.

Braves from 1995: Walked out by Cleveland’s Eddie Murray in Game 3, won the World Series in six.

Red Sox 2018: Walked out by the Dodgers’ Max Muncy in Game 3, won the World Series in five.

The reason for this – if there is a reason besides the wonderful randomness of baseball – seems partly physical, partly psychological. The team with a 2-0 lead is usually better. But the team that returns home with an 0-2 hole gets a lift from the home fans and the charged circumstances. When the better team finally gains the upper hand, Game 3 becomes just a dead cat bounce.

On the other hand, there’s so much postseason history that fans of both teams can almost always find something to help them sleep better. For Cleveland, beating the Yankees with a postseason homer could be a very good omen. Consider this from James Smyth, researcher extraordinaire for the YES Network:

Postseason Walk-Off HR vs. Yankees
1957 WS Gm 4 at MLN Eddie Mathews
1960 WS Gm 7 at PIT Bill Mazeroski
2003 WS Gm 4 at FLA Alex Gonzalez
2004 ALCS Gm 4 at BOS David Ortiz
2019 ALCS Gm 2 at HOU Carlos Correa
2019 ALCS Gm 6 at HOU Jose Altuve
2024 ALCS Gm 3 at CLE David Fry

— James Smyth (@JamesSmyth621) October 18, 2024

As any Yankees fan knows, all of these series ended in defeat. To continue that streak, the Guardians will have to stick to their formula, which finally surfaced on Thursday.

Eight pitchers combined for mostly excellent work. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and first baseman Josh Naylor connected on a double highlight for a crucial out in the 10th. The Guardians stole three bases and all four bench players ended up getting hits: Fry, Noel, Will Brennan and Bo Naylor.

“Bunts, bombs and mayhem,” Fry said. “We talked about that. It felt like we got back to that tonight.

The Yankees still have the edge, not just in games, but in depth. The Guardians, already struggling to make a rotation, will turn to Gavin Williams (3-10, 4.86) in Game 4 and perhaps Ben Lively, who had been left off the roster until Alex Cobb’s back injury. in Game 5. bullpen looked mortal, with a 3.80 ERA this postseason.

But they made it a series, and an unforgettable one if Thursday’s chaos puts them on the road to the World Series. The Yankees should know better than to dwell on it.

“A loss is a loss, whether it’s a clean loss and we lost 3-1 or whatever,” Stanton said. “This one obviously stings a bit more, but at the end of the day an L is an L – with 1, 2, 8, whatever. Tomorrow is a new day. We have to get it done.”

It must be hard to make it happen. It seemed so easy for the Yankees for a while. Not now. Welcome to October.

(Photo by Jhonkensy Noel: Nick Cammett/Getty Images)