It’s All Blunder and Frightening for Hung-Over Yankees

Aaron Boone was dumb. Alfonso Soriano was reckless. Nick Johnson was Charlie Brown.

Their rowdy fans were quiet until they began heckling Boston, which would have been fine, except they weren’t playing Boston.

Their astute manager was cool until he ordered the infield into a drawn-in, late-game position, a great idea, except it was only the fifth inning.

Less than 48 hours after wearing the lampshades of greatness while dancing on the tables of history, the New York Yankees staggered into the World Series opener Saturday rubbing their foreheads and looking for a couch.

Call it The Hangover of the Bambino.

While the Florida Marlins brought their “A” game, the Yankees brought their spring training “B” game, losing a 3-2 decision that also served as a decorative calendar.

Um, Bombers?

It’s still October. You did not win the world championship with Thursday’s dramatic seventh-game victory over the rival Boston Red Sox.

That bleating calliope and crowd of people arrived in the Bronx on Saturday not for a parade but a baseball game.

In fact, you’ve got as many as six more baseball games, or considerably fewer, depending on how many times your baserunners are picked off by five feet and your leadoff hitter fails to get the ball out of the infield.

“Hey, it’s the World Series,” scolded Derek Jeter afterward, the Yankee captain working overtime. “If you can’t get up for the World Series, then something’s wrong with you.”

Exactly.

Something was wrong with these Yankees, something both understandable and devastating, something that could perhaps be classified as post-rivalry syndrome.

“This is ... different,” Soriano said after a game that contained about one New York minute of Yankee emotion. “The Red Sox and Yankees, we hate each other. But the Marlins, this is a different team.”

And what a different night it was, beginning with Boone, Thursday’s home-run hero, an instant Yankee legend whose fame lasted until we all got a good look at his feet.

Yep. Clay. It happened after a fifth-inning single to shallow left field by Juan Pierre. Runners were chugging from second and third base. One scored, Hideki Matsui picked up the ball and threw it home and was going to nail Juan Encarnacion at the plate before he could score the second run.

But Boone cut off the ball, allowing Encarnacion to score easily.

Now the cheer interpreters really can’t distinguish between “Boooone” and “Booooooo.”

“In hindsight, I should have let the ball go,” Boone said.

Not just in hindsight, but in catcher Jorge Posada’s sight.

“I thought we had a very good chance to get him,” Posada said.

Also, in Pierre’s sight.

“I was a little bit surprised ... for the fact that I knew how close Matsui probably was and how hard I hit the ball,” he said.

By the time the postgame interview session ended, regret had been expressed from so many angles, Boone’s fuse became as short as his Thursday night swing was long.

So, somebody else asked, you should have let that ball go, Aaron?

“I just said that 150 times,” he barked.

He wasn’t the only worn-out refugee from Game 7.

Even the great Joe Torre wasn’t immune. It was his decision to play the infield in when Pierre was batting that led to that two-run hit in the first place. If the infield had been playing at normal depth, Jeter would have had a play and perhaps prevented at least one run.

Usually, that sort of move is only made late in a close game. But Torre said he was afraid of Pierre’s speed. You mean arguably the best manager in baseball postseason history chose to let a postseason rookie write his playbook?

“We played the infield in because of Pierre,” Torre said. “He hits a normal ground ball and, you know, you have to scuffle to get him.”

On this night, many Yankees would know something about scuffling. With runners on base, their hitters went two for 18, which would be a tribute to the Marlin pitchers, except many times impatient Yankee hitters hammered their own thumbs.

Take the fifth inning, after the Marlins had taken that 3-1 lead. The Yankees answered with a leadoff single by Karim Garcia before requiring the Marlins’ Brad Penny to throw only five more pitches to complete the inning.

The leading culprit here was Soriano, booed here for the first time in recent memory after he followed Garcia with a first-pitch, double-play grounder. While Pierre was driving the Marlins’ offense from the top spot by reaching base four times, driving in two runs and scoring the other, Soriano couldn’t get the ball out of the infield in five tries.

And when this swing-at-anything guy faced Ugueth Urbina in the ninth inning with the tying and winning runs on base? He doesn’t swing! He struck out looking on a changeup, then later shrugged.

“It looked inside,” he said.

In the end, though, none of them looked quite as silly as Johnson, who was standing on third base with two out in the third inning, score tied, RBI nut Matsui at the plate, Penny struggling.

And he gets picked off. By catcher Ivan Rodriguez. And it isn’t close. He turns to retreat to third and falls on his face, far short of the base, and is easily tagged.

Look familiar, comic fans? The only thing missing was a wailing third-base coach named Snoopy.

“I slipped,” Johnson said. “It happens.”

But perhaps never before to a soundtrack like Saturday’s, a chant emanating from the right-field bleachers, both hilarious and strange: “Red Sox bleep, Red Sox bleep....”

Hopefully by Game 2 tonight, the Yankees and their fans will realize that they are playing the Marlins, before those Marlins send them into the sort of winter that would make even Grady Little shiver.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.