Rocket’s Red Glare, No Bombs Bursting in Air

NEW YORK —  The wounded flag flapped in ash-stained strips above the Yankee Stadium outfield facade, colors faded, stars missing.

Hundreds of cops and special agents scurried throughout the corridors, dogs sniffing, walkie-talkies cackling.

Thousands of fans wedged together outside the front gates, waiting to pass through the metal detectors, chaotic, claustrophobic.

For a few eerie hours Tuesday before Game 3 of the World Series, this country’s most famous sports facility was not about sports.

It was about war.

It was about blockades and wand searches and bomb sweeps and more pistols than popcorn boxes.

In front of one gate, New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner stood 15th in line to be frisked.

Through another gate, Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens awkwardly stumbled, holding keys and cell phone and other items that he had emptied from his pockets.

President Bush was here. Terrorist warnings were in the headlines. Ground Zero was right down the street.

The sky held full moon. A giant lightbulb revealing our position to the enemy.

“Look around, we are at war,” said Antonios Manatakis, local restaurant owner, watching this scene from another country, another planet. “Whether anybody wants to believe it or not, we are at war.”

But then, slowly, as attention focused on the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks, we weren’t.

Slowly, almost unexpectedly, we were at a baseball game.

In the second inning, Jorge Posada hit a homer to give the Yankees a 1-0 lead, and all that colored stuff falling from the sky was not a deadly chemical, but confetti.

In the sixth inning, Scott Brosius blooped a single to left field to drive in the go-ahead run, and that rumble was only the fans in the right-field bleachers.

In the seventh, the 55,820 fans began swaying in unison, only none of them were sick. They were singing along with a New York City cop belting out “God Bless America.”

Finally, about midnight, fear was replaced by Frank.

The amazing Mariano Rivera completed a 2-1 victory for the workmanlike Yankees, and instantly the loudspeakers blared the customary Sinatra victory theme, “New York, New York.”

Only this time, contrary to custom, the fans didn’t stop singing it when they left their seats.

They sang it into the corridors, into the bathrooms, down the ramps, painfully and shakily and wonderfully, the tune filling the old stadium and seeping into the streets below.

I’ll make a brand new start of it, in old New York. They sang it as if they meant it. The Yankees still hold that power over them.

Sports, as it was proved again Tuesday, can still hold that power over us.

A night of war, and baseball, and peace.

“There’s a lot of things that went on again this evening that I’ll remember for a long time,” said Clemens, who pitched seven splendid innings to carry the Yankees back into the series with their first win.

He even admitted he was inspired by another Texas right-hander.

Yeah, President Bush, whose first pitch to Todd Greene set the climate for the night.

And not just because it was a rare Chief Executive strike.

When Bush walked to the mound to throw the first pitch, Clemens even stopped warming up, which is something veteran major league pitchers won’t even do for the national anthem.

“It’s something that I will take with for me for a long time,” Clemens said.

Brosius, who later poked only his second hit of the series, agreed.

“That was pretty cool,” he said. “You know what he’s going through, and to take the time to be here ... that really added to the occasion.”

Actually, it did more than that.

Some might say the president’s appearance muddled the occasion, as Bush was the reason every fan underwent special searches beforehand, keeping some people trapped in an inching-along crowd for more than an hour.

Yet even though some of those fans emerged from the mob in tears, they did not complain.

“It was horrible in there,” said Rich Boyer, an account manager from New Jersey. “But it’s necessary.”

And with that, he rushed off to his seat, which he probably reached just in time to see, well, yeah, his president.

“I think the president being here, you know, put his money where his mouth is,” said Yankee Manager Joe Torre. “He wanted us right from the get-go to do what we need to do, to live as normal a life as we can.”

That’s not happening, of course.

This was possibly the most abnormal World Series game since the Black Sox scandal.

There were armed men on the stadium roof. Stadium elevators were closed for most of the game. Vans with tinted windows lined the parking lot. There were so many people in suits and holsters, it looked like an “NYPD Blue” casting call.

Before the game, the Diamondbacks’ Mark Grace said he wasn’t scared.

“I’m not going to go out there with fear at all because ... Yankee Stadium is perfect and I’m not going to fear perfection,” he said,

But this team of World Series rookies played like it. They played rattled. They played as if they were looking more at the armory in the stands than at the baseball in front of their faces.

The three errors. The three wild pitches. The fact that left-fielder Luis Gonzalez didn’t even attempt a dive at Brosius’ huge bloop.

And the Yankees? Shane Spencer attempted the dive on Matt Williams’ line drive with two men on base in the sixth inning, and made the catch to save a run.

Just as, one batter earlier, Alfonso Soriano dived on Erubiel Durazo’s grounder to save a run.

The Yankees’ game. A baseball night.

“This was more like us,” Torre said.

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