Once upon a time, nearly half of the baseball games I watched were played on synthetic turf. Houston, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Toronto, Montreal all played on the stuff and won plenty, those teams taking turns winning 15 pennants, 10 World Championships and oodles of division titles from 1975-1993. The high bounces, fast grounders and ugly backdrops were simply part of baseball.

But while the stadium-building movement and the replacement of turf with grass in older ballparks have improved aesthetics considerably, they’ve homogenized the game at the expense of speed-and-defense teams like Whitey Herzog’s Cardinals. The Minnesota Twins are an anachronism, their success over the past few years perhaps the dying gasp of the turf team. They’re built for speed in a way most teams simply aren’t, and when they play in the Metrodome they would seem to have an advantage.

The problem, of course, is that they keep running into those infernal Yankees in the postseason. Capable of winning anywhere, the Yanks beat them twice at the Dome in last year’s Divisional Series, eliminating them. Friday night, to the Twins’ chagrin, turned into more of the same.

With the series knotted at one game apiece, taking the hill for the Yankees was Kevin Brown, he of the rage-induced broken hand and a man hardly suited to pitching on turf. Brown’s anger appears to be directed at his own limitations, as the ravages of age and injury prevent him from blowing his mid-90s fastball by hitters like he did in the late-’90s. From 1997-2003, Brown struck out 8.2 hitters per nine innings, but he’s only whiffed 5.7 this season. Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre has tried to convince him to put the ball in play, not the easiest sell given the team’s reputation for less than stellar infield defense. And not an especially good idea on a surface where infield grounders quickly become base hits.

Brown got off to a rocky start on Friday night, serving up a home run to Jacque Jones on his 11th pitch of the evening. It was the second homer of the series for Jones, who’s spent the last two days living down the distinction of being (according to Joe Sheehan) “the first player in history to be criticized for hitting the cutoff man.”

But the Yankees quicky bailed out Browns against Twins starter Carlos Silva. Silva is a sinkerballer who gets a lot of ground balls himself while striking out very few hitters — 3.4 per nine innings this year. He was nearly ground-balled to death in the second inning. After he got two quick outs, Jorge Posada laced a single to centerfield. On the next pitch, John Olerud hit a grounder that skipped past Cristian Guzman at short. Two pitches later, Miguel Cairo poked a single down the rightfield line, scoring Posada to tie the game and sending Olerud to third. The flurry of singles continued as Kenny Lofton blooped Silva’s first pitch into left for another run. Silva got Jeter to two strikes before he too singled to through the left side for the fifth straight Yankee hit. Finally, Alex Rodriguez popped out to end the madness, but the damage had been done, 3-1 Yanks.

The turf continued to be a factor. Brown got into trouble with two infield singles in the second by Lew Ford (compounded by a Jeter throwing error) and Guzman. With runners on first and third and one out, Brown dispatched Michael Cuddyer on three pitches, and then came up lucky when A-Rod speared Henry Blanco’s sharp liner to end the inning. He continued to dodge trouble. In the fourth, with two outs and a man on second, he gave up an infield single to Guzman, the fourth time that the Twins beat one out. Again, Cuddyer was the safety valve, Brown retiring him on a grounder to Jeter.

Silva pitched reasonably well through five innings, allowing only the three runs despite seven hits. But the Yanks broke the game open in the sixth. Following a leadoff single by Hideki Matsui, Silva left one out over the plate for Bernie Williams, and the all-time leader in postseason home runs (yeah, three tiers of playoffs, blah blah blah) hit his 20th on a liner to right to widen the gap to 5-1. Another Posada single chased Silva, and the Yanks simply piled on reliever J.C. Romero, who had given up the game-winning sac fly on Wendesday night. Opening against Olerud with a head-scratching pitchout — on catcher/track star Jorge “Thunderthighs” Posada? — Romero went to 3-0 on John Olerud. The Yankee first baseman took two pitches for strikes and then worked a walk. Cairo bunted the runners to second and third. Romero recovered to strike out Kenny Lofton, then gave way to 23-year-old rookie Jesse Crain. Jeter bounced Crain’s second pitch through the box — welcome to the postseason, kid — for a two-run single that put the game seemingly out of reach.

Down 7-1, the Twins became desperate and foolish. Leading off the bottom of the sixth, still facing Brown, Torii Hunter chopped a ball over A-Rod at third base. Matsui, looking to cut the ball off, tried to barehand and ended up kicking the ball into left-center with his right heel. Hunter dug hard around second, looking to stretch the miscue into a three-bagger, but Matsui recovered and made a perfect peg to Rodriguez to nail the speedy Twin. Two batters later, Corey Koskie laced a gapper to left-center — one that easily would have scored Hunter, had he settled for two bases — and tested Bernie Williams’ subpar throwing arm. Williams aced the test, firing an accurate peg to Cairo. The headfirst-sliding Koskie got a mouthful of dirt for his trouble in addition to being tagged out.

That ended Brown’s evening. He’d given up eight hits over six innings, walked none and only struck out one. But of the eight hits, four were infield singles, two were outfield hits erased by baserunning mistakes, one was Jones’ homer, and the other a Koskie single of no great consequence. As I’ve said before, timing is everything. Though not dominant, Brown’s outing was an impressive one for a pitcher who many — myself included — didn’t expect to be wildly successful. I’m not exactly in his corner yet, but he took a big step toward atoning for his fist-pounding foolishness.

Meanwhile, the bad breaks continued for the Twins, particularly Hunter. In the seventh, he made a spectacular catch off of a long Matsui fly, but when he crashed into the left-centerfield wall, the ball popped out and dribbled over the fence. Hunter crashed to the ground in agony as the Metrodome crowd gasped. A confused Matsui, who thought the centerfielder had held the ball, stopped circling the bases before Williams, beating the umpire, signaled “home run.” When Hunter finally got to his feet, the Dome crowd, more concerned for their star player than for the increasingly out-of-reach ballgame, gave him a hearty heartland ovation.

Paul Quantrill and Felix Heredia carried the Yanks to the ninth, still leading 8-1. But on consecutive pitches, Heredia drilled Twins hitters, first Koskie and then Ford. A dyspeptic-looking Joe Torre brought in his new favorite toy, Tanyon Sturtze. Guzman chopped a ball which Cairo cut off in short right but had no play on, loading the bases. Cuddyer poked Sturtze’s next pitch into centerfield for an RBI single, at which point Torre brought the hammer down in the form of Mariano Rivera. It wasn’t a save situation, but with a six-run lead, Torre was taking no chances. Mo and the Yanks willingly traded outs for runs. One scored on a groundout, another on a sac fly, and then with two outs, A-Rod made a nifty play on a Jones grounder, fired to Olerud to clinch the ballgame and gave the Yanks a 2-1 edge in the series.

But it most definitely ain’t over. Johan Santana, the best pitcher in the American League, stands in the way of a rematch between the Yankees and the Red Sox, who after blowing a five-run lead thanks to a Vladimir Guerrero grand slam, recovered to eliminate the Anaheim Angels yesterday. With Orlando Hernandez still not 100 percent, Torre has tapped Javier Vazquez to start. You couldn’t get a pair of pitchers whose post-All Star Break fortunes contrast more:

          W-L  ERA    K/9

Santana  14-0  1.13  10.83

Vazquez   4-5  6.92   6.24

I had Vazquez as my preseason AL Cy Young Award winner, but he’s been a basket case with bad mechanics over the last three months. Santana, on the other hand, has gone out and earned the damn hardware. The Yanks have to be heartened that they scraped nine hits off of him and that he’s coming back on three days’ rest, uncharted territory for the 25-year-old ace. If they want to become the best, they’ll have to beat the best.

Throwing the shaky, homer-prone Vazquez at the Twins in the Hefty Bag would seem to be a bad idea, but the Hubert H. Humphrey ain’t the Homerdome of yesteryear. The Twins and their opponents hit 172 dingers there, while clouting 186 in opposing ballparks, an eight percent edge. Still, it’s hardly an ideal environment for Javy, who got bombed there for six runs, including two dingers, on August 17.

Andra and I are trekking up to Riverdale to enjoy the game and break bread with Alex Belth and his gal Emily. Alex Ciepley will join us but doubtless remain true to his midwestern roots by cheering for the Twins while the rest of us squirm. Should be a barrelful of monkeys.

Speaking of Belth and this series, if you haven’t caught his back-and-forth exchanges with Twins blogger extraordinaire Batgirl (she of the hysterical Lego re-enactments), check them out on All-Baseball.com.