NEW YORK — Some playoff games are too unwieldy for one day. They sort of multiply and replicate, like amoeba, and spill over to the other side of midnight. They also take logic and reason with them, and mock the very athletes they purport to showcase.

And then there was Game 2 of the American League Championship Series.
The short version is that Maicer Izturis, the Angels’ second baseman, took Melky Cabrera’s one-out grounder in the 13th and, instead of routinely flipping it to first, turned and threw wildly to second in a try for the force play. You can credit the boldness but you can doubt the judgment, and as the ball got past Erick Aybar, Jerry Hairston joyously ran home for the 4-3 Yankees’ victory, putting the Angels down 0-2.
Chone Figgins stood there and just watched, deadpan, to see the tug of war end in yet another Angel misplay, in a weekend plagued with them.
“We’ve got to check ourselves,” Torii Hunter said later. “We battled these guys to a T, but we made a miscue and they took advantage. The way we’ve played here, that isn’t our baseball.”
There was little else to say. John Lackey walked over to Ervin Santana, the losing pitcher, and shook his hand and slapped him on the shoulder. Otherwise, bags were getting hauled out and equipment was getting packed, and a beaten army was gathering itself again.
“We’ve got a six-hour flight,” Brian Fuentes said. “And an off-day tomorrow. We’ll have time to regroup.”
The Angels responded to bad weather with bad baseball all weekend. Their minds and hands kept failing them. They hit .154 in the two losses. Here they left 16 men in base.
A long-rumored storm, having soaked all points south, strangely dawdled on the outskirts of New York to see just how this one would come out, whether the Angels could do something constructive with the bases loaded, whether Mariano Rivera would be asked to pitch 21/3 innings, whether Derek Jeter would survive an error off the heel of his glove, whether Erick Aybar would survive his abject failure to touch second base in the midst of a 10th inning double play.
None of those events resolved this game, so the clouds impatiently attacked the Bronx and began pelting Yankee Stadium in the ninth.
Which is when the Angels managed to conjure up a strange daily double to take a 3-2 lead. They parlayed a walk by Gary Matthews Jr., a sacrifice by Aybar and a flaring base hit to left by Chone Figgins, who hadn’t had a hit in the previous 46 postseason innings this year.
But Hunter hit into a double play, an ominous sign for those who know how reluctantly these types of games end.
That brought up Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the 11th. The Angels, naturally, brought in Fuentes.
He saved 48 games during the season and was emphatic in Game 3 in Boston last Sunday. But he’s still a left-handed closer.
He threw a high strike, a high inside strike, and then left a fastball just too close to the outside corner for his own sake. Rodriguez dutifully whacked it about 1 foot over Bobby Abreu’s glove and barely over the right-field wall he hesitated when he got to second, because he thought it might be a ground-rule double, but then trotted around, the way you know how to do when you’ve hit 67 more homers over the past 10 years than anyone else in the major leagues.
“I tried to elevate it,” Fuentes said. “I got ahead like I wanted to. I haven’t seen the replay. But I don’t guess I elevated it enough.”
Santana, who shut out Texas in the Angels’ division-clinching game, walked in to pitch the 12th and found himself confronting A-Rod with two out and bases loaded. But this time Rodriguez skied an 0-1 pitch to Hunter in center, and the rain, probably bored with it all, receded. And the show went on.
By then, large gaps of empty blue seats — real expensive ones, of course — began surfacing. The rain kept coming, and between innings, groundskeepers came to the mound and the batter’s boxes and poured out and tamped down the absorbent sand that was supposed to make this look like baseball somehow.
Every postseason we see this now. Chicago in ’05, St. Louis in ’06, Boston in ’07, Philadelphia last year, when the misery finally got so pronounced that Game 5 was suspended, and finalized two days later. No other sport stages its championships in such uncomfortable conditions, and yet Commissioner Bud Selig and the networks seem to have no problem with it. And if the postseason goes the limit, it won’t end for 18 more days.
The Angels just hope to get to another weekend.