From the top of the Yankee Stadium mound, the top of a journeyman's world, Brian Gordon surveyed the sweeping majesty of the place. No, he wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Or Corpus Christi or Round Rock or any of the minor league stops that defined a ballplayer's dream, and one that appeared certain to die in some backwater corner of America's game.
"I tried to pull my hat down low and not get caught up in it," Gordon said. "I figured if I pulled my hat down low and looked at the catcher, hey, I was doing that a week ago in Triple-A."
He'd been playing baseball in the minors ever since he was drafted as a 17-year-old by Arizona in 1997. The Diamondbacks took him in the seventh round as a hitter, an outfielder, even though he was just another kid out of Texas who burned to be the next Nolan Ryan.
"All Brian ever wanted to be was a pitcher," said his father, Ernie, a former Army sergeant out of West Point. "We were shocked when Arizona drafted him as a hitter, but we thought maybe the Diamondbacks saw something we didn't see."
It turns out they didn't. Gordon put in 10 years as a position player, constantly hitting the wall in Triple-A before finally deciding he would retire or pitch, one or the other. He was playing with Round Rock in the Astros chain when he knocked on the door of his manager, Jackie Moore, and told him he wanted a shot on the mound.
Over the years, Gordon would hit .275 with 119 homers in the minors, and he never once didn't feel a void in his competitive soul.
"Coaches had kept telling Brian to get pitching out of his head," said his mother, Wendy. "He'd been waiting all this time for one coach to tell him what Jackie told him: 'Show me what you got.'"
So Thursday in the Bronx, with Jackie Moore serving as bench coach for the visiting Texas Rangers, Brian Gordon did what his old minor-league manager asked him to do.
He threw five and a third innings of smart, efficient baseball at the Rangers, holding them to two runs in a tense game the New York Yankees would win 3-2 in the 12th.
"I'm very proud of him," Gordon's hero, Nolan Ryan, said from his Texas office after Joe Girardi lifted his man and sent him toward a standing ovation.
"Brian's performance was very representative of the type of pitcher he is, and it speaks volumes as to how much heart he has. To spend 10 years as a hitter in the minor leagues and end up pitching in Yankee Stadium, that's a true success story."
Ryan had a Hall of Fame hand in that story. Wendy Gordon worked as an office manager for the Round Rock team that Ryan owned, and when the strikeout king heard Brian wanted to pitch he gave the kid a call.
They worked out together, Ryan and the converted bush-league outfielder who used to rush home from school to watch videos of the one and only pitch.
"I worked on Brian's delivery some," Ryan said, "and I told him he had to command his fastball to move up to the big leagues. I encouraged him to stay with it. Even though he wasn't blessed with an overpowering fastball, he had command of the breaking ball and he was very dedicated to becoming the best pitcher he could possibly be."
In 2008, Gordon pitched four innings in relief for Ryan's Rangers before being ticketed for another minor league bus. This season he was 5-0 with a 1.14 ERA for Philadelphia's Triple-A team, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, when he exercised an out in his contract to sign with the Yanks.
Tuesday night, on the drive to New York, Gordon dialed his mother on one cell phone and his father on the other. "Brian didn't want one of us to hear the big news one second before the other," Wendy Gordon said.
Thursday, in the hours before his very first big-league start, Brian Gordon sat at his locker with his back to the vast oval clubhouse. A Yankees gym bag rested on the carpeted floor to the right of his chair, and three boxes of Nike shoes rested on the carpeted floor to the left.
One pitcher lockered next to Gordon, Aumari Sanit, had just been fired to make room for him on the 40-man roster, and yet Sanit had something his replacement did not -- a nameplate above his stall. Gordon? He was identified by a blank white card, a sure sign his was also scheduled to be a temporary stay.
"If I have to say goodbye," Brian Cashman had said, "it's a lot easier saying goodbye to him than somebody I drafted and developed."
Gordon reached for one of the Yankees warmup shirts and inspected the jersey as if it were some sacred shroud. He spent most of his pregame time just sitting and staring into nothingness, the silence occasionally interrupted by the equipment guy, Rob Cucuzza, or the pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, or a teammate, David Robertson, all of them checking in on this or that.
At 12:02 p.m., some 66 minutes before his first pitch, Gordon scanned an over-sized lineup card with the intensity of a linguist trying to decipher a Stone Age alphabet. He had every reason to be nervous. Cashman had described his $200 million team as a "massive underdog" simply because Gordon was on the mound.
"If you're in Vegas," the GM said, "you'd bet against us."
Cashman wasn't done. He was asked if it was odd that a potential World Series opponent such as Philadelphia would give the Yanks a credible and encouraging read on a pitcher who might aid their depleted staff, if only for a start or two.
"They got Cliff Lee, I got Brian Gordon," Cashman said through a smile. "I don't think they've got anything to worry about."
