PHILADELPHIA — The last time the Yankees asked Andy Pettitte to do what they will ask him to do Wednesday night, the World Series ended with a visiting team celebrating on the field at Yankee Stadium.

That wasn’t Pettitte’s fault. He and the Yankees ran into a buzz saw named Josh Beckett that night in 2003, and the way Beckett pitched, the one earned run Pettitte allowed against the Marlins in seven innings might just as well have been 10.
Which brings us back to Pettitte’s previous opportunity to wrap up a World Series for the Yankees, which happened one day shy of eight years ago Tuesday.
That night, the Yankees gave Pettitte the baseball in Game 6, looking to bury a Diamondbacks team already declared dead after losing three straight to fall into a 3-2 hole.
Two innings later, they were grabbing it back. Pettitte got rocked that night, allowing as many runs — six — as he got outs, and the Yankees lost, 15-2. We all know what happened the next night, of course.
Suddenly, a World Series that looked as if it was over on Sunday night is anything but on Tuesday morning.
When asked who his projected starter would be if the Phillies forced the Series back to New York, Joe Girardi said, “We’re not thinking about Game 6 right now.”
You can bet he is thinking about it now.
“Andy is going to do his work today, his light bullpen session,” the manager had said, “and we’ll see how he feels tomorrow if we need to.”
He needs to.
But this is what happens when you hire a genius to manage in a league without a double-switch. He’s got too much time to think and not enough to think about. So he thinks up things like moving his entire rotation up to pitch on short rest. The result is he’s got two games to play, one game to win and not a single starter who is fully rested to pitch in either of them.
So now, once again the pressure is all on Pettitte, and it still may work out fine.
The Yankees’ offense is too tenacious, and the Phillies’ bullpen too incendiary, to expect them somehow to pull out two victories at Yankee Stadium. Even having fallen behind 6-1 and 8-2 Monday night, the Yankees kept the pressure on until the final pitch, when Mark Teixeira, representing the tying run, swung through a Ryan Madson changeup to finally end a sweaty-palms 8-6 Philadelphia victory.
Pettitte might walk out there Wednesday night and shut down the Phillies the way he shut down the Angels — on full rest — in Game 6 of the ALCS. He might even turn back the clock to the day he stifled the Braves on three days’ rest in Game 5 of the 1996 World Series.
When, by the way, he was 24 years old. Pettitte is 37 now, and hasn’t pitched on short rest since 2006, when he was an Astro. His record on three days’ rest is an uninspiring 4-6 with a 4.15 ERA.
And for all the well-deserved respect Pettitte gets for his postseason track record, the World Series has never really been his thing. As a Yankee, his playoff record is 12-4 with a 3.73 ERA. In the World Series, he is a .500 pitcher, 4-4, with a 4.00 ERA.
But now he is the Yankees’ only alternative, and in some ways, their only hope to avoid the uncertainty and randomness of a seventh game.
Once again, the Yankees ask Pettitte to bail them out, to do something he wasn’t able to do the last two times he tried in the World Series.
When asked after Monday night’s game if he can pitch Game 6 on short rest, Pettitte said: “Oh, yeah, whenever they tell me to pitch, I’ll pitch. I’m plenty up to it.”
That should come as welcome news to Girardi, who still wasn’t ready to commit to Pettitte in his postgame interview.
“I just said I’ll check with him (today) at our workout and see how he feels,” Girardi said. “We would have to talk about it internally.”
It wasn’t supposed to come down to this, but in his haste to win Game 3 of the World Series, Girardi may have forgotten that in order to be world champions, you’ve got to get the fourth win, too.