At the plate and on the bases, in the field and on the pitcher’s mound, last night’s ballgame was all about controlled aggression. Baseball is at its best as a contest between opposing philosophies, and the Twins and Yankees played an epic to show why that’s so. With all the lead changes last night, there were no goats on either side, just baseball played beautifully by all.

From the first pitch, this game had style. Last night’s starters, Brad Radke and Jon Lieber, were the two best control pitchers in the American League this season, and each team’s hitters came out swinging, putting the ball to the bat and playing the kind of game we’ve seen less and less since the offensive explosion began in 1993.

The Yankees, though, only did so after some prodding. After Derek Jeter tied the game with a home run on Radke’s third pitch of the night, the team’s hitters maintained their typical, patient approach, with Alex Rodriguez keying them by working a six-pitch at bat that ended with a lineout.

Radke threw 19 pitches after Jeter’s home run, nine of them balls and only two of them called or swinging strikes. Though the Yankees didn’t score again in the inning, the scenario seemed familiar. Had the Yankee hitters been able to keep on working Radke, he would be out of the game by the fifth inning, letting them at the Twins’ soft middle-relief corps. Radke, though, didn’t quite cooperate; in the second inning he threw just seven pitches, all strikes.

The Twins, meanwhile, were running the bases with abandon. In the first, they profited by it when Torii Hunter scored from first on a Justin Morneau double, and died by it as Morneau made the last out of the inning trying to stretch that double into a triple. In the second, their blinding speed struck again: They turned a walk, two bloop singles, a sacrifice fly, and Gary Sheffield’s weak throwing arm into two runs. With the Yankees down 3-1, it was beginning to look as if they’d missed a big chance in the first inning.

And then there was a rapid change. Lieber found his sinker and the Twins, as aggressive at the plate as they are on the bases, began beating the ball into the ground. From the third through the fifth innings, Lieber faced the minimum number of batters, inducing five groundball outs. Hitting the ball on the ground, putting your head down and running isn’t generally a bad plan for a team as fast as the Twins, but against a sinkerballer like Lieber, playing to your strengths can start to look like mere obstinacy.

The Yankees, unlike the Twins, refused to stick with their usual patient approach. In the third, Gary Sheffield tied the game with a two-run line drive into the left-field seats, but the key hit was Rodriguez’s shot down the leftfield line, a single he got by swinging at the first pitch. In the fourth inning, the bottom of the order went down quickly, but only after Ruben Sierra and John Olerud had both connected with the first pitches they saw. In the fifth, Jeter, Rodriguez, Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui all took cuts at their first pitches, an approach that gave them the lead on ARod’s home run.

In other words, in the space of three innings the Yankees adjusted from their typical hitting approach to one that goes against everything Joe Torre’s teams have been built around: patience, wearing pitchers out, and getting into their bullpens.

When baseball insiders talk about the value of veteran leadership and playoff experience, they are often speaking by proxy about the ability to do just this – change a game plan on the fly to take advantage of an opponent’s weaknesses. In Radke’s case, his weakness lay in a strong commitment to strike one.

There have been questions about the Yankees’ ability to do this ever since the roster was turned over following the 2001 World Series. Those concerns have been overstated, but there’s no question that a reliance on unadaptable hitters like Jason Giambi and Alfonso Soriano changed the team, making it very different and in significant ways weaker than the one that won four World Series in five years.

Nonetheless, this team did almost everything right last night. Above all, this was Rodriguez’s coming-out party as a Yankee, not just because he put the team ahead in the fifth inning and provided a badly-needed insurance run with a seventh-inning RBI, but because of the way he did so.

A-Rod showed that he can and will change his approach under pressure, and he proved that his incredible talent can change a game in minute ways the same way it can change a team’s season in more obvious ones. Working the count to ensure his teammates got a look at what Radke had, finding the seam between third base and the foul line to get on base, hitting a home run to put the team ahead, banging a double to tie the game in the bottom of the 12th – no one will ever again question whether Rodriguez is a championship player.

During last night’s telecast ESPN kept cutting away to a shot of Paul O’Neill, watching the game from a luxury box high above the field. I’m certain he liked what he saw.