Those Darn Yankees Show What It Takes

Scenes from a Silent Saturday.

Brad Halsey steps to the plate for the New York Yankees. He is a pitcher making his major league debut. This is the first time he has officially batted since he was a sophomore in high school.

The Dodgers’ Hideo Nomo throws one of his, um, fastballs.

“I see it and I’m like, ‘You know, I think can hit one of those,’ ” Halsey says.

The next pitch, he does.

Scenes from a Suffocating Saturday.

The Dodgers put the tying runs on base with two out in the seventh. Milton Bradley hits a slow grounder toward the hole between first and second.

If the ball gets through to the second baseman, he beats the throw, and ... wait ... where did Derek Jeter come from?

Jeter charges over from shortstop, grabs the ball behind the pitcher, throws Bradley out, and the Dodgers never again challenge.

“A heady play, an instinctive play,” Yankee coach Willie Randolph says. “It’s what he does.”

It’s what most of these Yankees have done for most of the last nine years.

It’s what most of these Dodgers are still learning to do.

The Yankees handed them a rare opportunity Saturday, stuck it right between the numbers. The Dodgers fumbled it.

Nomo couldn’t beat Halsey. Shawn Green couldn’t get the ball out of the infield. Dave Roberts couldn’t get off the bench. The sellout crowd couldn’t get into any of it.

The Dodgers lost, 6-2, in a game that illustrated how all first-place teams are not created equal.

“We really had a chance to build on some electricity today,” Roberts said, shaking his head.

He was speaking of Friday night, which ended with Yankee mouths agape and bats wilted, the biggest regular-season crowd in Dodger Stadium roaring as Eric Gagne froze Bernie Williams for a win that could have frozen a weekend.

The Yankees showed up Saturday, some of them only an hour before the noon game, with a curveball hangover and pavilion fever and 23-year-old Halsey making his major league debut on the mound.

But Nomo went first.

Fifteen minutes later, the Dodgers were sitting under a four-run deficit and fans were sitting on their hands.

Three hours later, nothing much had changed, which makes one wonder if anything much will change this October unless the Dodgers change first.

Can they really break their 16-year playoff losing streak with Nomo as one of their top starters, and with Green batting cleanup?

(We mention both men in the same sentence because, after Saturday, they have the same number of home runs since May 8 -- one).

The Dodgers need a starting pitcher, and a hitter to bat behind Green and perhaps allow him to return to a more familiar right field.

Even with a first-place team, Paul DePodesta has some hard decisions to make, because Brian Sabean will be making those same decisions in San Francisco, and we know what he’ll do.

Saturday hopefully provided our favorite webmaster with a little more content.

Start with Nomo. They say it was his best start of the season. This emphasizes the dreadful nature of his season.

Maybe his last six innings were great, but how about his first six hitters, five of whom reached base?

Just before Hideki Matsui golfed a good pitch into the right-field corner for a three-run homer, Nomo’s outing was typified by a 13-pitch duel with Jason Giambi in which Giambi fouled off seven pitches after two strikes ... and then walked.

Nomo is throwing with the velocity of a guy who hasn’t been the same since off-season shoulder surgery. With a 7.26 earned-run average, he is throwing like a guy with the second-worst ERA among National League starters.

“That first inning settled everything down,” said Paul Quantrill, a former Dodger now in the Yankee bullpen. “We got the game to where we could just chug away at it.”

Which brings up the Dodger hitters, who have slowly stopped chugging and started flailing, ranking 13th among 16 league teams in runs scored, nearly the same spot as last year, only more frustrating.

The Dodgers were 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position against a kid who had never pitched against anybody tougher than Mud Hen, and the only time the fans seemed to rally after that first inning was in the ninth.

Rock music blaring. The remaining fans standing and cheering. A reliever jogging in from the bullpen.

Guy named Mariano Rivera.

Saturday Over.

Even before it started.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. For more Plaschke columns, go to latimes.com/plaschke.