Leading Off: Coast to Coast, Comeback Fever For a night, it seemed, two baseball playoff games were trying to outdo each other for sheer audaciousness. On one coast you had the Yankees, down a run in the bottom of the ninth and the hapless Alex Rodriguez due up, only to have Manager Joe Girardi snap to his senses and create a hero out of whole cloth named Raul Ibanez, who not only tied the game with a home run, but later won it with another. On the other coast, you had the Oakland A's topping that pandemonium from two runs down in the bottom of the ninth, the final heroics delivered by someone named Coco Crisp. Sure, the Yankees' victory featured the pivotal benching of a future Hall-of-Famer, but the A's raised them by doing it with a payroll straight out of the local In-N-Out Burger. But does that really top two home runs? From Raul Ibanez? Oh my! There were offshoot stories too, the A's victory making one big happy mess of the Bay Area, as Scott Ostler writes in The San Francisco Chronicle, with the Giants having forced a Game 5 after having been all but counted out against the Reds. This while the Orioles' woes were the second bunch to the Beltway, which already had the Nationals being trounced by the Cardinals in Washington's first home playoff game since 1933. But for sheer drama, it was hard to beat the Yankees. Or the A's. Oakland's comeback certainly required climbing a bigger hill. The Tigers, after all, are a big-budget power team that had the supercloser Jose Valverde on the mound. But, as Tim Brown writes on Yahoo.com, the A's hung around long enough to keep believing. Their ninth-inning comeback was built on an innocent single by Josh Reddick, followed by a slightly more ominous double by Josh Donaldson and then a holy-cow double by Seth Smith that scored both of them. Two outs later, it was Crisp's single that sent the A's into pandemonium, Jim Caple writes on ESPN.com, and everyone was digging into his or her hyperbole bag for a proper way to describe the night, as Scott Miller does on CBSSports.com. That's because a few hours earlier the Yankees had pulled off the improbable. It's hard to call it the impossible because their opponent is a scrappy band of anonymous Orioles, many of whom still need ID to get past stadium security. But the big, bad Yanks were two outs from being pushed to the brink, and things do become a little momentous when the occasion calls for benching Rodriguez. Sure, nearly every Yankees fan on earth was screaming for the move for the last few days, but the call is much harder to make in reality, argues Mike Vaccaro in The New York Post. Ian O'Connor of ESPN.com called it the gutsiest move, but could Girardi really let another game die on Rodriguez's suddenly useless bat? The decision had immediate repercussions that changed everything, writes Jeff Passan on Yahoo.com. Ibanez now joins Yankees lore as an unforgettable hero, Ted Keith writes on SI.com, and the moment is etched into baseball history for sheer audacity, writes Jon Paul Morosi on Foxsports.com. The two games each left a clubhouse stunned, but while Detroit gains some confidence from sending all-world Justin Verlander to the mound in Game 5, as Phil Taylor writes on SI.com, the Orioles are left to scrape together a bigger dose of the underdog tonic they've been living on all year, Peter Schmuck writes in The Baltimore Sun. The Orioles' funk may be more than matched by that of the Nationals, whose little playoff party was set to be such a joyous occasion: a beautiful fall afternoon, another Teddy Roosevelt victory in the Presidents Race (this time after dancing to "Gangnam Style") and all requisite giddiness about their new budding powerhouse. The Cardinals decided to spoil all of this with Chris Carpenter's masterly performance, Bernie Miklasz writes in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Reds might be reeling even worse than the Nationals (who still have two potential games at home), with the Giants suddenly playing lights-out, Bruce Jenkins writes in The San Francisco Chronicle, and getting a big lift from the formerly downtrodden Tim Lincecum, writes Wayne Drehs on ESPN.com. But the day was officially later stolen by the Yankees and the A's. You can keep debating which one was more amazing.