Yankees Sail Into Series

MVP Pettitte Stops Mariners, Team Wins 4th Pennant in Row: Yankees 12, Mariners 3

New York's Derek Jeter hits a sacrifice fly to score Scott Brosius in the third inning of the Yankees' 12-3 victory Monday night. (AFP)

NEW YORK, Oct. 22 -- The years pass. Players come and go and shift to other positions. New challengers arise, some of them sporting lofty credentials. A horrific national tragedy takes place in the city and turns Yankee Stadium into a canvas of red, white and blue and the seventh-inning stretch into a patriotic timeout. And the New York Yankees absorb it all, grow stronger and keep winning.

Tonight, the Yankees dynasty steamed into a fourth consecutive World Series, completing a thorough destruction of the Seattle Mariners with a 12-3 victory in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Left-hander Andy Pettitte earned the victory with 6 1/3 solid innings, improving to 10-5 in his postseason career. Afterward, he was named most valuable player of the series.

In winning the series four games to one, the Yankees vanquished another challenger who brazenly believed it had the might to end the dynasty. And not just any challenger. The Mariners constructed the greatest regular season in 95 years of baseball history but came away from Yankee Stadium, like all the others, empty.

Saturday night in Phoenix, the Yankees will meet Arizona in Game 1 of the World Series. The Diamondbacks are their fourth opponent in the last four fall classics. The Yankees dispatched the other three -- the San Diego Padres (1998), Atlanta Braves (1999) and New York Mets (2000) -- in four, four and five games, respectively.

"It's been a great ride," Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez said. "This never becomes old hat. We'd love to get four more [wins] and bring another title back to this city."

As a crowd of 56,370 -- looking down upon the Mariners like hunters over prey -- screamed for more, more, more, the Yankees danced in their dugout, answered every curtain call and poured on the runs. Four in the third inning, capped by a two-run homer by Bernie Williams. Four more in the sixth against the Mariners' league-leading bullpen.

Four nights earlier, after the Mariners lost the first two games of the series, Manager Lou Piniella vowed the series would return to Seattle for Game 6 on Wednesday. But by falling in five games, the Mariners were left to ponder how the best regular season in American League history -- 116 victories -- had gotten them such a paltry payoff in October.

The Mariners will be tormented by the thought that perhaps their critics were right, that somehow, despite never losing a road series this year and only once losing three straight games, they were not built for the postseason.

"The amazing thing about baseball," Piniella said, "is that no matter how many games you win, unless you win the World Series you're going to feel disappointment. . . . You're playing the best teams in baseball [in the playoffs], and the further you go the better the teams get. Sooner or later, teams are eliminated. And we were the one, unfortunately, that was eliminated."

Neither the Mariners' starting pitching nor their bullpen -- two of the hallmarks of their march through the regular season -- could match the Yankees.

The Mariners' 116 wins "mean nothing, period," tonight's starting pitcher Aaron Sele said. "It doesn't matter if you win 85 or 185. It's how you finish."

"The regular season is the regular season, and the playoffs are the playoffs," Yankees third baseman Scott Brosius said. "This had nothing to do with what happened between April and September."

Despite finishing 21 games behind the Mariners in the standings, clearly the Yankees are a different creature in October. As they celebrated in a subdued clubhouse -- adhering to baseball's mandate to do away with champagne spraying in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy -- the Yankees delighted in their latest victory and marveled at the long path they took to get there.

"To be honest," said owner George Steinbrenner, recalling the deficit the Yankees faced after losing the first two games of the division series at home to Oakland, "I didn't know if we had a chance, just because of all the stress we've gone through."

Meantime, Sele, an easygoing right-hander who goes from elite pitcher to also-ran as soon as the calendar turns to October, endured another trip through his personal hell. With his loss tonight, Sele fell to 0-6 with a 4.46 earned run average in his postseason career; he is 0-5 with a 5.00 ERA against the Yankees.

In sharp contrast to his brash guarantee of a return to Seattle, Piniella's words after Sunday night's crushing loss in Game 4 -- which the Yankees won, 3-1, on Alfonso Soriano's ninth-inning homer after the Mariners took a 1-0 lead in the eighth -- sounded like those of a man admitting defeat.

His bravado was gone, and perhaps so was his will. Piniella sat mostly motionless in his dugout as tonight's game unraveled, smacking his gum and muttering an occasional obscenity. As he walked from the mound to the dugout following a pitching change during the sixth inning, the crowd chanted, "No Game 6!" at him.

"I just wanted to show confidence in my team. That's my job as manager," Piniella said of the ill-fated guarantee. "I'll tell you this: I won't do it again."

As the final outs were gathered in the Yankees' 12th straight postseason series win, the crowd chanted "O-ver-rat-ed! O-ver-rat-ed!" at the Mariners, the final indignity for a season that achieved everything, and nothing.