We are pinch-hitting for today’s Starting Five — we haven’t pinch-hit for the SF since high school — with a special itemized report of minutiae from last night’s Game 3 win by the New York Yankees:

1. Before last night the Baltimore Orioles were 76-0 in games that they led after the seventh innning this season.

2. The Orioles had won 16 consecutive extra inning games. In fact, they are 16-0 in extra inning games this season against everyone else, but 0-3 versus the Bronx Bombers.

3. Alex Rodriguez has struck out seven times in nine at-bats versus righties in this series. Oriole closer  Jim Johnson is a righty.

4. Raul Ibanez hit two home runs on three pitches. He has more home runs this series than the rest of his team combined.

5. Ibanez is 40 years old, or three years older than A-Rod. So, yes, one of the five or ten greatest hitters of all time was pinch-hit for by a 40 year-old.

6. Ibanez was chosen by the Seattle Mariners with the 1,006th overall pick in the 1992 draft. A-Rod was chosen by the Mariners with the first overall pick in the 1993 draft. The pair were teammates on Seattle’s Single-A Midwest league team in Appleton, Wis.

7. Ibanez is both the oldest player ever to hit a walk-off homer in the postseason and the first to ever hit a home run in both the ninth inning and in extra innings of the same playoff game.

8. Ibanez has now hit three game-tying homers in the 9th inning in the past three weeks. All three came at Yankee Stadium (previously versus Oakland and Boston in games that the Yankees also won).

9. The New York Post called Joe Girardi’s decision to pinch-hit for the No. 6 all-time RBI man and No. 4 all-time home-run hitter “the boldest managerial move in Yankee history.” We’ll leave that for you to decide, but there’s no doubt it was the right call. You didn’t even need hindsight to see that.

10. Genius or serendipity?  If Joe Girardi  puts Pay-Rod at 3rd bas instead of at DH, is Ibanez still in the game in extra innings?  Almost certainly not unless Eric Chavez had been the DH, allowing a double switch.

11. Adam Jones, Baltimore Orioles: “It kind of caught me off-guard, hitting for a guy who’s half a billionaire.” (actually, it’s closer to one-third of a billionaire, but the point is well-made).

The Pinch-Hitters

 

What happens now? A-Rod appeared genuinely gracious and excited for Ibanez  in the postgame press scrum. Let’s give him that. Still, A-Rod has rarely been clutch in the postseason for the Bombers — his effete attempt at swatting away a tag after a harmless roller for the final out of Game 6 in the 2004 ALCS versus Boston is forged in infamy here — and now he’s just not that fierce of a hitter anyway.

Yes, A-Rod suffered a wrist injury in August, and that may help explain his having just six extra-base hits in September and October. However, here’s a vet of 17 full seasons with a career slugging percentage of .560 whose average the past two seasons, respectively, has been .461 and .430.

It’s funny: For all the talk of when Derek Jeter’s skills will begun to atrophy — or that they already had –maybe the dude whose pinstripes were fading faster is his infield neighbor. Jeter, 38, led all American League players in hits this season with 216.

Meanwhile A-Rod, who has missed more than one-third of the past two seasons, has just 13 more hits in those two years combined than Jeter had this year.  The man who never hit fewer than 30 home runs in a season between 1998-2010 has a total of 34 over the past two seasons.

Injuries? Age? PEDs? We don’t know the exact answer. However, yesterday Pete Rose opined that Jeter would never catch him as baseball’s all-time hits leader (Rose, 4,256; Jeter, 3,304, and in 10th place) becaue he’d never want to leave New York and because the Yankees cannot afford to keep him at shortstop, defensively, over the next three to four years.

A few solutions: First, why can’t they? If Jeter can lead the league in hits while making all the smart plays he does defensively and elsewhere — sure, he pushed Nate McLouth off second base during his first-inning steal in Game 3 but he’s Derek Jeter; he can — why is he SUCH a liability at SS?

Second, maybe the Yanks just push Jeter to third and find a way to unload A-Rod (after all, A-Rod went from SS to 3B to join Yanks). Maybe they’re already thinking about that. But who is going to want Pay-Rod, whom the Yanks must compensate with $28, $25, $21, $20 and $20 million per season between 2013-2017?

Here is where the Yanks will eat at least some of his salary — at least half — and be done with him. You may look at it as having to pay $14 million per season to a guy who is not even in uniform, but you can also see it as saving $14 million. And, the player you add to the roster is almost certainly going to sign for less tahn $14 million while adding just as much value as Pay-Rod currently does and likely will in the future.

In short, not only was Girardi’s move bold and likely the defining moment of his career; it was also the first step toward the Yankees unburdening themselves of Pay-Rod’s salary and all the drama that accompanies it… as soon as they find a taker.

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Lost in all of this: The Oakland A’s walk-off was even more dramatic. First of all, the A-Men were down to their final three outs of the season. Second, they trailed by two runs, not one. If you stayed up last night to watch it, the A’s earned this one. All four hits were legit ropes versus the Tiger closer, Jose Valverde. Now if only they could tear the tarp off the stadium’s upper deck so that it didn’t feel, when the panaroma shots are taken, as if we were watching the filming of a baseball movie instead of an actual MLB postseason game.

For a dude who spent most of the season at the very bottom of the N.L. ERA list, Tim Lincecum/Mitch Kramer was masterful in Game 4 at Cincinnati. In middle relief. A two-time Cy Young Award.  He’s the N.L. A-Rod.

Our most excellent friend, Tim Crothers, a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, has just had his third book published. Titled “The Queen of Katwe“, it is the true story of a Phiona Mutesi, a girl who lives in the slums of Kambala, Uganda, and who also happens to be one of the world’s top chess prodigies. To originally report the piece for ESPN the Magazine (it was later nominated for a National Magazine Award in feature writing: SI had turned down Tim’s pitch originally), Tim flew from Raleigh-Durham to Atlanta to Kambala and  then to Siberia, where the Wold Chess Championships were being staged (and where his luggage was lost).

Many, many stories about Tim, but here is a favorite. In the early 1990’s there were budget cutbacks at SI and we reporters were told we could only write our own stories if 1) they were approved and 2) the travel was no more than the cost of a subway ride. Tim, without informing any editors, persuaded Washington Generals coach Red Klotz to allow him to ride on their bus for a game or two and then turned in this brilliant profile of the Harlem Globetrotters’ whipping boy (this is how you write a lede to a takeout feature, by the way).

Tim knew that if he pitched the idea alone that it would be poached by a senior writer. So he took a huge gamble and turned in the finished product first. It was, as far as I know, the first “bonus” piece to appear in SI that was penned by a fact-checker.

One more thing about Tim: almost everyone he has ever profiled (Tim Floyd being a notable exception) loves him. Anson Dorrance has actually asked him to become an assistant coach with the Tar Heels, but Tim turned him down. Much success to Tim with the release of this book; no one I know is more deserving.

Finally, one of my favorite efforts in SI was the “Pub Memo” I wrote about Tim (we were never credited for these; the managing editor signed his name to it).

And, finally… John Cusack attends a Peter Gabriel concert 25 years after “Say Anything” is released. Gabriel plays “In Your Eyes.”

Cusack walks ontsage holding a boombox. And now there is a new superlative degree of meta.