Guardians have a new energy after all-time thriller

They have been the home office for October for just about as long as there has been baseball in October.They have had so many moments, so many snapshots, just like these, pressed between the pages of the classiest scrapbook in sports. Now, it had happened, again, in real time.

The Yankees were reeling.They were down, 3-1, top of the eighth, and Cleveland had its closer, Emmanuel Clase, throwing 99-mph darts on the black.

Progressive Field was loud, the roar spilling out into the Cuyahoga River.He got two quick strikes on Aaron Judge.

Judge took one just off the corner. And then … “Oh, man,” said Stephen Vogt, the Guardians manager. Oh, man, indeed.Judge’s tracer never got more than 20 feet off the ground.

It didn’t need to.It landed just over the right field fence.

The stadium hushed.The Yankees dugout exploded.

And here’s the crazy thing: that was just the warm-up.Because a few minutes later Clase, for some inexplicable reason, abandoned his cutter with Giancarlo Stanton at the plate.

He threw a slider.Hung it. “And Big G,” Aaron Boone would say, “got it.” Now they were opting for something stronger than “oh, man” all around Progressive Field.

It was 4-3, Yankees.By the bottom of the ninth, it was 5-3.

The Mets built a cottage industry on precisely these kinds of dramas all month.But the Yankees have been doing this kind of thing since Calvin Coolidge was president. Now they’d done it again. The Guardians were deflated.

They were dead.Their dugout was a morgue, their ballpark a library.

Luke Weaver — the Yankees’ version of Clase — had two outs, none on, bottom of the ninth.Lane Thomas hit one off the wall in left, and it felt like the worst kind of tease for the locals. Then Jhonkensy Noel stepped to the plate.

His nickname is Big Christmas.And there won’t be a more welcome present under any tree in northeast Ohio than the one he delivered in the bleak darkness of this Cleveland night. And if you listened cl...