http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/sports/baseball/09yankees.html?_r=1& hp&oref=slogin Season Over: Yankees Out, and Torre ... Everything changes. Things fall apart. Summer does not last forever, though it seemed that way at Yankee Stadium last night. It was 87 degrees at game time, one last day of warmth, perhaps, for Joe Torre. For 12 seasons, there was sunshine on his shoulders. But now there is darkness, and the condemned old ballpark is shuttered again for the winter. The Yankees are a first-round playoff casualty for the third October in a row, and Torre will almost certainly lose his job as manager. The Cleveland Indians eliminated the Yankees, 6-4, in Game 4 of their American League division series. George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ owner, was said to be fuming in his office. The Indians will now play the Boston Red Sox in the A.L. Championship Series starting Friday at Fenway Park. Steinbrenner had already tied Torre’s future to the outcome of this series. Torre became an icon — and a very wealthy man — while guiding Steinbrenner’ s players to four World Series titles. But the last was seven years ago, a drought too long for a famously impatient owner. Four of the unfulfilled seasons have come with the game’s best player, Alex Rodriguez, anchoring the lineup. Rodriguez was 2 for 12 in the series until adding a single and a homer after the Yankees had fallen far behind. He can now opt out of his $25.2-million-a-year contract and is expected to seek untold riches in a new contract. If he leaves, his last at-bat in pinstripes will be remembered as a harmless fly ball to right field for the second out in the ninth with the potential tying run on deck. Two mainstays from the championship years, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada, can also become free agents. Keeping both, and Rodriguez, will be expensive but affordable for the Yankees, whose business model thrives despite repeated playoff failures. In his first two at-bats, Rodriguez struck out twice on six pitches against the soft-tossing Paul Byrd, who fanned no others in five innings. But other batters were worse in the series — notably Derek Jeter, who hit .176 and made the first out in the ninth. Most damning for the Yankees, though, was the performance of their ace, Chien-Ming Wang. The major league leader in victories over the past two seasons, Wang was 0-2 with a 19.06 earned run average against Cleveland. In Game 1, Wang matched his career high by allowing eight runs. In Game 4, he set a career low for innings pitched, with one. Wang gave up two runs in the first and was charged with two more in the second after leaving with no outs and the bases loaded. Mike Mussina, who replaced him, allowed two runs in four and two-thirds innings. The decision to start Wang on three days’ rest, for just the second time in his career, could haunt Torre. He had resisted the urge to do it last fall, and Jaret Wright lost the elimination game. With Wang another year removed from his rookie shoulder problems, Torre trusted him. He also hoped that, with short rest, Wang might be just tired enough for his sinkers to fade properly. In Game 1, Wang had been too strong and the pitch did not sink, causing him to abandon his game plan and throw more sliders and changeups. But the short layoff, and the comfort of pitching at home, did not change much for Wang. Again, his sinkers were not sinking. Grady Sizemore led off the game with a home run into the bleachers in right-center field. Travis Hafner took a sinker to the opposite field for a one-out single, and he scored when Wang missed with a pitch up in the strike zone to Jhonny Peralta, who singled to center. The Yankees wasted a scoring chance in their half of the first, when they put two runners on with one out for Rodriguez, who whiffed on an 86-mile-an-hour fastball. Posada then flied out to left fielder Kenny Lofton, who made a sliding grab. Lofton was dynamic in the series, and his bunt attempt in Game 3 caused a lurching Roger Clemens to aggravate his strained hamstring. Lofton’s success seemed to almost mock Torre, who never wanted Lofton in 2004 and did not get along with him. The Yankees signed Lofton that season because Steinbrenner was envious of Juan Pierre, a speedy leadoff hitter who tormented the Yankees for Florida in the 2003 World Series. Steinbrenner no longer exerts such direct influence over player moves, leaving General Manager Brian Cashman to make those calls. But his public threat to fire Torre if he lost this series, which was reported Sunday, showed that it was still Steinbrenner’s decision on the manager. Cashman talked him out of firing Torre after last year’s first-round loss, but with Torre unsigned for 2008, it is easy now for Steinbrenner to make a clean break. “I do respect the fact that he is the boss,” Torre said before Game 4. “It ’s not about how much money he pays me. It’s that he trusted me with his team, and I take that as a very serious and personal responsibility. And I hope that I do well enough for him to be proud of what we do.” The Yankees failed to win the A.L. East this year for the first time in a decade, but their effort to capture the wild card was a source of pride for Torre. The Yankees won 73 of their final 112 games to overcome a horrid start that had put Torre’s job in jeopardy in late April. It is trendy now to call the postseason a crapshoot, where the unforeseen — like a swarm of midges from Lake Erie disrupting Game 2 — can obscure which team is really best. But Steinbrenner has never believed that, and when Torre won four titles so quickly, he set an almost impossibly high standard for himself. The Yankees’ last pennant was in 2003, when Aaron Boone smashed an extra-inning homer to cap a stirring comeback against the Red Sox in Game 7 of the A.L. Championship Series. The scoreboard played those highlights before the bottom of the sixth last night and, as if on cue, Robinson Cano led off with a homer to chase Byrd. It cut Cleveland’s lead to 6-2, and during a pitching change, the scoreboard showed Tino Martinez, sitting by the home dugout, just behind the former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Soon, the crowd was standing and roaring. But with runners at the corners and one out against Rafael Perez, Jeter grounded into a double play, ending the inning. The crowd grew silent, then booed when Kyle Farnsworth came into the game in the seventh. -- ◥◣ ◢◤ █ ███ ███ ███ ███ ◥◣◢◤ █ █ █ █ █ █◢◤ ◥◤ █ ███ █ ███ █◥█ --

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