D4 Rays vs.Rangers
GAME 1 Wednesday
Rangers 5 Lee (W, 1-0)
Rays 1 Price (L, 0-1)
GAME 2 Yesterday
Rangers 6 Wilson (W, 1-0)
Rays 0 Shields (L, 0-1)
*if necessary (all games on TBS)
Rangers one win from sweep as struggling Rays fall again
BY FRED GOODALL
st. petersburg, fla. — Two dominating pitching perfor- mances and a long home run by playoff neophyteMichael Young have the Texas Rangers on the verge of winning a postseason series for the first time. Young hit a three-run homer
one pitch after keeping his at- bat alive with a disputed check- swing, helping C.J. Wilson and the ALWest champions beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 6-0, Thursday for a 2-0 lead in their AL Division Series. Texas is the only current ma-
jor league franchise that has neverwon a playoff series. After winning consecutive games on the road, that can change with one victory when the best-of- five matchup shifts to Rangers Ballpark this weekend. Game 3 is Saturday,withMatt
PAUL BATTAGLIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS Yankees starter Andy Pettitte fields a ball hit by the Twins' OrlandoHudson, rear, to start a double play. Pettitte in posteason form
Yankees continue dominance of Twins with 5-2 victory
BY DAVE CAMPBELL
minneapolis — Andy Pettitte and the defending World Series champions stumbled through September and landed in the AL wild-cardspot. As the Minnesota Twins can
attest, the New York Yankees are hardly anunderdog inOctober. Pushing the home-field advan-
tage back inMinnesota’s face, Pet- titte turned in a vintage postsea- son performance with seven smooth innings and Lance Berk- man had two big hits in a 5-2 victory over the Twins on Thurs- day that gaveNew York a 2-0 lead inthe best-of-fivedivisionseries. “Andy,whenhegets inbigsitua-
tions, he knows howto handle it,” YankeesManagerJoeGirardi said. “He’s not going to try tomake the perfect pitch. He’s going to stay aggressive and just try to dowhat he does.And I think a lot of that is just fromexperience.” Berkman hit a go-ahead home
run in the fifth and a tiebreaking double in the seventh againstCarl
Pavano, sending theTwins totheir 11th straight postseason loss. Eight of those have come against theYankees,whotrailedineachof those games. Mariano Rivera got three outs
for his second save of the series, extending his postseason record to 41. The Twins haven’t won a post-
season game since 2004, match- ingthePhiladelphiaPhillies (1915- 1976) for the second-longest streak in history behind the Bos- ton Red Sox (1986-1995) and their 13 ina row. Berkman,yetanotherbig-name
veteran finding a place on a Yan- kees postseason roster, even on thedownsideofhis career,madeit 2-1with his drive into the left-cen- ter bullpen in the fifth.His double in the seventh—one pitch after it appeared Pavano sneaked strike three past him — drove in Jorge Posada and gave New York a 3-2 lead. “That’s why I wanted to come
over here, just to get a chance to play in these games,” Berkman said. The disputed call by plate um-
pire Hunter Wendelstedt led to the ejection of Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire following Berk- man’sdouble. Pavano allowed10hits andfour
runs in six innings. Many fans proudly wore their pregame give-
aways—fuzzyblackstick-onrepli- ca mustaches in honor of his ap- pearance. He started strong, but the Yan-
keeswere on the ball in the fourth — and really got to him in the seventh. Derek Jeter chased his old
teammate off the mound with a half-swing RBI single to make it 4-2. The Yankees added a run in the ninth and headed back home forGame3onSaturdaynightwith a commanding lead over the team they owninOctober. “We’vegotabighill toclimb. It’s
not going to be easy, but it can be done,” Gardenhire said. “We’ve seenitdonebefore,andthisclubis never going to quit.” Pettitte retired 12 in a rowuntil
OrlandoHudson’s homer tied it at 2 in the sixth, but after Delmon Young’s two-out triple he escaped with a weak groundout by Jim Thome. Pettitte needed only 88 pitches to finish seven innings, with five hits and two runs al- lowed. He walked one and struck out four. This was Pettitte’s 41st career
postseason start and 19th win — bothmajor league records. “I just thinkthebiggestpartof it
is being able to control your emo- tions,” Pettitte said. “Nothing’s go- ing to faze you.Nothing’s going to make younervous.” —AssociatedPress
Garza pitching for Tampa Bay against Colby Lewis. Ian Kinsler also homered for
the Rangers, who are in the playoffs for the first time since 1999 and hadn’t won a postsea- son game in 14 years before Cliff Lee shut down the sputtering Rays in their home park on Wednesday. Wilson was equally impres-
sive, allowing two hits in 62/3 innings. He gave up a single to leadoff man Jason Bartlett to start the game, then limited the Rays to three base runners on an error, a walk and a hit batter over the next five innings. Willy Aybar doubled in the
seventh for the second hit off the Texas starter, who departed with runners at second and third. Darren O’Day struck out pinch hitter Matt Joyce, and Darren Oliver got the last seven outs to finish the two-hitter before a sellout crowd of 35,535. Long known for fielding pow-
erful lineups, the Rangers final- ly look as though they have the arms tomatch. “The story today was our
pitching,” Young said. The Rays, whose .247 batting
average during the regular sea- son was the lowest for an AL club to make the postseason since the 1981 Oakland Athlet- ics, were held to eight hits in two games at Tropicana Field, where they had one of the best home records in the league this season. Texas pitchers struck out 23
batters in two days,which is not surprising. Tampa Bay’s 1,292 strikeouts this season were the most by a major league team that has reached the playoffs.
TENNIS
A pair of legends bring out the stars for annual HIV/AIDS charity event
star-studded lineup toWashington
BY LIZ CLARKE They made an unlikely pair: a
bespectacled tennis player and pudgy English singer who both struggled with poor vision and weight. She loved his music; he loved the way she competed. (His childhood wish, in fact, was to win Wimbledon.) Billie Jean King and Sir Elton
John were so in awe of each other’s talent that they were too shy to introduce themselves, but had to be nudged together, at a 1973 party in Los Angeles. After both of their lives were
touched by HIV/AIDS, the fast friends found a way to merge sports and music to benefit re- search for the disease that claimed many of their dear friends — in King’s case, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who died of AIDS-related illness in Febru- ary 1993; in John’s case, Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who
King, John lure
wasforced to leave hishometown because of the persecution he endured. Like Ashe, White spent his remaining years advocating for better understanding and treatment of the disease. The idea that resulted is an
annualcharity event,WTTSmash Hits, featuring some of the sport’s more enduring champions squar- ing off in a World TeamTennis match, with King and John serv- ing as respective team captains. Now in its 18th year, WTT
SmashHits comes toWashington for the first time on Nov. 15, featuring a star-studded lineup that includes Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova, who boast 92 Grand Slam titles and two Olympic gold medals among them. Other players on the bill include James Blake and Anna Kournikova. They’ll form two teams and play five sets of World TeamTennis. John will also take part in a celebrity doubles match to open the event, which willbeheldatAmericanUniversi- ty’s Bender Arena. Washington has the nation’s
highest rate of new HIV/AIDS cases, which is the chief reason for bringing WTT Smash Hits to
the city. The event has raised more than $9.6 million for the Elton John AIDS Foundation and local AIDS charities since 1993. This year’s beneficiaries are the EJAF and the Washington AIDS Partnership. “We’ve been talking about
coming here for a long time,” said King, who won 39 Grand Slam titles and founded World TeamTennis, the summertime league in which men and women compete in the team format she believes is the key to getting youngsters involved in the sport. “It’s an international city, which we like.We have theWTTWash- ington Kastles here.AndMichelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ initiative ties into health,andIwantto help that locally.” At age 66 and despite knee
surgery earlier this year, King remains as kinetic off court as she was on it, lunging from one topic to another with impassioned zeal. She spoke with pride about the
way tennis, over the years, has responded to the AIDS crisis, which she attributed to the pro- found admiration and respect for Ashe, who contracted the illness while undergoing heart bypass
surgery in 1983 before blood sup- plies were stringently screened. “When it’s personal, it’s amaz-
ing how much you want to know about things and how much you care,” King said. “So that’swhywe jumped in pretty fast.” She spoke about her 37-year friendship with John, who
cheered her on from the players’ bench during her World TeamTennismatches for the Phil- adelphia Freedom in the early 1970s and wrote a song in her honor, by that title, that reached No. 1 in 1975. Dressed in an Adidas track suit for her train trip home, King
GAME 3 Tomorrow, 5:07
Rays Garza (15-10, 3.91)
at Rangers Lewis (12-13, 3.72)
GAME 4* Sunday, 1:07
Rays Davis (12-10, 4.07)
at Rangers Hunter (13-4, 3.73)
GAME 5* Tuesday, 5:07
Rangers Lee (1-0)
at Rays Price (0-1)
GAME 1 Wednesday
Yankees 6 Sabathia (W, 1-0)
at Twins 4 Crain (L, 0-1)
EZ SU
KLMNO BASEBALL
Twins vs.Yankees
GAME 2 Yesterday
Yankees 5 Pettitte (W, 1-0)
at Twins 2 Pavano (L, 0-1)
GAME 3 Tomorrow, 8:37
Twins Duensing (10-3, 2.62)
at Yankees Hughes
(18-8, 4.19) GAME 4* Sunday, 8:07
Twins Blackburn (10-12, 5.42)
at Yankees Sabathia (1-0)
GAME 5* Tuesday, 8:37
Yankees Pettitte (1-0)
at Twins Liriano (0-0)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2010
J. MERIC/GETTY IMAGES
Michael Young, left, is congratulated by teammate Esteban German after his three-run homer in the fifth.
Young, in the playoffs for the
first time after 10-plus seasons with Texas, broke the game open in the fifth inning with a 431-foot shot to center field off Chad Qualls, who thought he had struck out the six-time all- star on a 2-2 pitch. Plate umpire JimWolf appealed to first base umpire Jerry Meals, who ruled that Young held up in time. Rays players were incensed
on the bench, and replays showed that Young probably went too far. After the home run on the
next pitch for a 5-0 Rangers lead, Tampa Bay Manager Joe Maddon left the dugout to talk with Qualls. Maddon yelled at Meals from the mound and was ejected by Wolf when the plate umpire arrived at the huddle. “Once he said, ‘Safe,’ I’ve got
to turn the page and focus on the next pitch,” Young said. “It’s really not my job to make deci- sions there.” Maddon also disputed a cru-
cial call early inWednesday’s 5-1 loss to Lee. Plate umpire Tim Welke said a pitch hit Carlos Pena’s batwith the bases loaded in the first inning, ruling it a foul tip.Maddon unsuccessfully argued that Pena was hit by the pitch.
Tampa Bay then failed to
score when Pena and Rocco Baldelli struck out. Kinsler homered in the
fourth Thursday off losing pitcher James Shields, who got theGame 2 assignment for Tam- pa Bay even though he lost 15 games during the regular sea- son and hadn’t won since Aug. 29. The right-hander allowed four runs and four hits over 41/3 innings. Kinsler alsohad anRBI single
off Qualls in the fifth. With the Rays facing a lefty
starter for the second straight day,Maddon held the struggling Pena out of the lineup. Wilson has been extremely tough on left-handed batters this season, and Pena — whose .196 batting average was the lowest among all major league qualifiers — went 0 for 3 with three strike- outs against Lee onWednesday. The Rangers manufactured a
run in the third. Matt Treanor was hit by a pitch, moved from second to third on an infield single and scored when Shields made an errant pickoff throw. The right-hander tried to pick offElvisAndrus at first base, but the throw hit Andrus and skipped into foul territory. —Associated Press
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST Billie Jean King and Sir Elton John, friends since the early 1970s, createdWTT SmashHits 18 years ago.
joked, “Don’t I look like Sue Syl- vester?” referring to the evil cheerleading coach from “Glee,” among her favorite TV shows. Ever the achiever, King noted that she was president of her high school glee club despite having the worst voice.
clarkel@washpost.com
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