Even Yankees can appreciate ALCS Game 3 — and so can former Cleveland hero Rajai Davis

CLEVELAND — Yankees players, disappointed as they were, could at some level  appreciate what they had been a part of.

“Two good teams going after it,” Aaron Judge said late Thursday night after the Yankees’ 7-5 loss in 10 innings to the Guardians in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, a game featuring four home runs — two by each team — from the eighth inning on, the last one David Fry’s walk-off two-run homer off Clay Holmes. “Just great at-bat after great at-bat. They were able to come away with the last big swing there.”

Anthony Rizzo had the most unusual perspective of anyone when it came to that kind of late-inning craziness.

As he put it with a weary smile: “I’ve been standing directly on that field, I think in the eighth inning, when they tied a game on a big home run. Thankfully, it wasn’t Game 7.”

Indeed, Rizzo was the Cubs' first baseman in 2016 when they won a classic Game 7 of the World Series at Progressive Field, beating Cleveland, 8-7, in 10 innings.

The Cubs, playing in the World Series for the first time since 1945 and trying to win their first championship since 1908, built a 5-1 lead in the fifth inning that unseasonably warm night in Cleveland and held a 6-3 lead with four outs to go before all heck broke loose in the eighth.

With a runner on, two outs and the Cubs leading 6-4, Rajai Davis, choking up on the bat, lined a 2-and-2, 97-mph fastball from Aroldis Chapman  just over the railing atop the 19-foot wall in leftfield to tie the score at 6 and shake the stadium.

Just as Progressive Field shook in the ninth inning Thursday night when pinch hitter Jhonkensy Noel slammed a two-out, two-run homer off the previously unhittable Luke Weaver to tie the score at 5-5. That came-out-of-nowhere blast was preceded in the top of the eighth  by Judge’s ballpark-silencing two-run homer off Emmanuel Clase that tied it at 3-3, which immediately was followed by  a home run by Giancarlo Stanton that gave the Yankees a 4-3 lead. Clase, who posted a 0.61 ERA this season and who features a cutter that often comes in at 98 to 101 mph, had allowed exactly two home runs in the regular season.

In one of those great coincidences that frequently dot this sport, Davis, who retired after playing the 2019 season with the Mets and who now is Major League Baseball’s senior director of on-field operations, was in attendance Thursday night.

“That’s way up there. That’s one of my all-time favorites,”  Davis, who played 14 seasons in the majors, said Friday of where Thursday night’s game ranked for him of games he’s either played in or witnessed. (Naturally, and appropriately, Game 7 from 2016 isn’t likely to ever get dislodged from the top spot.)

Davis said he felt “chills” running the bases after his Game 7 homer and felt something similar Thursday, more so after Noel’s home run because it ranked higher on the shock scale than Fry’s.

“I definitely felt it. I felt some chills,” Davis said. “I felt the immensity of the situation, like this is a big moment. I sensed that and I felt that — this is a magnitude home run.”

No one with the Yankees would dispute that. And while no one wearing the road grays certainly felt chills upon watching either Noel’s home run or Fry’s, they knew they had played a game that would be talked about for some time.

“Look, amazing game to witness,” said Aaron Boone, whose 11th-inning homer off Tim Wakefield at old Yankee Stadium ended a classic Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. “That was playoff baseball. Both sides just kept coming with haymakers and big at-bats, big moments off of two really good bullpens. They outlasted us. They had one more good swing than us.”

Said Rizzo: “That’s a great baseball game if you’re a fan watching, on both sides, and just a fan of the game. It’s tough to be on this end of it.”

Notes & quotes:  Ian Hamilton was taken off the Yankees’ ALCS roster Friday afternoon because of  the right calf injury he suffered during Game 3 and was replaced by fellow reliever Mark Leiter Jr. In accordance with MLB’s rules when it comes to injuries during the postseason, Hamilton will not be eligible for the World Series if the Yankees get there. Before Friday’s game, Boone said Hamilton suffered a Grade 1 calf strain . . .  Austin Wells, 2-for-26 with 12 strikeouts this postseason entering Friday — including 0-for-10 in the ALCS — was dropped from cleanup to eighth Friday. He was replaced at cleanup by Jazz Chisholm Jr., who was 4-for-27 in the first seven games of the postseason.