Faithful

August 1st

Let the juggling begin. Cabrera reports; to make room we send down Andy Dominique. Since we’ll see four lefties over the next five games, David Ortiz drops his appeal and begins serving his suspension for the bat-throwing incident in Anaheim. Millar’s at DH, McCarty at first and Kapler in right—or would be, except Johnny tells Francona during BP that he’s having trouble picking up the ball because of the afternoon sun further lightening the Metrodome’s translucent white roof. So Johnny is the least DH-like DH in Sox history, Kapler’s in center and Millar’s in right.

Cabrera’s batting third, which I think is a mistake, but in the first, in his first at-bat as a Red Sock, he takes Johan Santana deep. Then in the bottom of the inning he can’t handle a chop over Pedro’s head.

It’s a tight game, like last night’s. Kapler guns Corey Koskie at home, but Tek bobbles the throw and Koskie steamrolls him. Torii Hunter goes back to the wall and casually robs McCarty of a home run. The next inning, McCarty makes a diving stab of a Hunter shot down the line. Manny hits a solo blast to give us the lead again, but the Twins use smallball to scratch back even.

To lead off the seventh, Santana hits Tek. To get more pop in their lineup, Matthew LeCroy is catching instead of Blanco, and Tek steals on him. LeCroy wings the ball into center—Tek to third. Millar then hits a high, medium fly to right. Center fielder Torii Hunter races over to take it from Jones, since he’s got the better arm. He’s in position behind him, but somehow they don’t communicate, because Jones never yields. He takes it flatfooted and his throw is up the first-base line, and Tek scores standing up.

Pedro’s brilliant through seven, striking out 11. Santana goes eight, ringing up 12.

Though Pedro’s thrown only 101 pitches, Francona goes by the book, bringing in Timlin to set up. Timlin gives up back-to-back singles and doesn’t record an out. On Embree’s first batter, the young slugger Justin Morneau, the Twins pull a double steal. Morneau then skies one to deep right-center. It’ll tie the game, no doubt. Kapler has to go a long way to make the catch, then fires a no-look throw back toward the infield. It sails over the cutoff man, Bellhorn, and Cabrera runs over from second to corral it. He must look up to check the runner, or maybe he nonchalants it, figuring the play’s over, because the ball knocks off his glove, and he kicks it—literally kicks it—toward first base. On a real field, the grass stops the ball, but since we’re in the Homerdome, it rolls away across the carpet, and by the time Cabrera chases it down and throws home, Lew Ford’s sliding in safely, and we’re down 4–3. Welcome to the Red Sox.

Joe Nathan gives us an opening in the ninth, hitting Bellhorn, but we don’t bother to bunt him over (hey, why change now). Cabrera strikes out, lunging. Manny hits into an easy 6-4-3 turf job, and we lose a carbon copy of last night’s game, wasting another quality start.

On The Simpsons, Comic Book Guy—a true loser—has a Red Sox pennant hanging in his shop. I channel him now: worst weekend ever.

August 2nd

When I entered in this diary on July 2nd, we’d just been swept out of the Bronx and had fallen eight and a half games back in the AL East. Now, a month later, we’re nine and a half behind the Yankees, who continue on cruise control. The Yanks don’t have much in the way of pitching, but it doesn’t seem to matter; they simply whale the tar out of almost every team they go against. The Red Sox are one of the rare exceptions, but they can afford to ignore us, at least for the time being. Who knows, they may not have to worry about us even in October. For the first time this season one team—it’s the Oakland Athletics—seems to have a solid hold on the wild card.[31]

We’ve lost both of the games we’ve played since the big Garciaparra trade, but I actually don’t feel too badly about that, even though both were of the tooth-rattling one-run variety. For one thing, both of our new players contributed to the offensive effort (okay, okay, so Cabrera—who hit a home run in his first Red Sox at-bat—also cost us yesterday’s game with an error in the bottom of the eighth). For another, the Twins are very good this year, and I’d expect them to take two out of three in their house, just as I’d expect us to take two out of three from them in ours.

But now we finish the year’s longest road-trip playing teams that are either sub-.500 or close to .500, and here I agree with the conventional wisdom: this is probably the season’s last decisive turning-point, and I’ll be watching these games very, very closely. For the next two weeks it’s not going to do to just play .500 baseball on the road. I’m hoping we can win eight of the next dozen, and from now until the middle of the month, I suspect this diary will be hearing from me often.

August 3rd

Mark Bellhorn goes on the DL with a thumb fracture after taking that pitch on the hand, joining Pokey, meaning Francona has more platooning to do. The press is on him about the logjam at first. How is he going to keep all of his players happy? I may not have much confidence in Francona, but at least he has the right answer: “That’s not what we’re here to do.”

Last night Wake won on his birthday, a quiet indoor affair with less than 10,000 guests. For tonight’s game with the D-Rays Francona pencils in the most alien infield yet: Youk at third, Cabrera at short, Bill Mueller at second and Mientkiewicz at first. Dave Roberts starts in right for only the fourth time in his life, and leads off, followed by Cabrera and Johnny. The new speed lineup does nothing, but Tek hits a two-run shot and Bill Mueller knocks in three more from the six-spot. Schilling (a new guy himself, not so long ago) goes the distance, but the post-trade face of the Sox is just weird.

August 4th

I didn’t know how brave I was, asking the Red Sox to win eight of their next twelve, until Jayme Parker (looking cool and beautiful this morning in off-the-shoulder black) tells me that the Sox haven’t won back-to-back road games since June. But they managed the trick last night, and now, instead of needing to win eight out of twelve, they only (only!) need to win six out of their next ten. That means playing .600 ball instead of .666, if you’re of a statistical bent.

Although I haven’t kept an exact count (“You could look it up,” I hear Ole Case whispering), I’d guess we’ve got in the neighborhood of fifty-five games left to play. Eleven of them are with the formerly hapless Devil Rays, and this makes me happy, because the D-Rays, after running off a gaudy string of wins (almost entirely against National League teams) before the All-Star break, seem to be subsiding into their former state of haplessness, and fast. Manager Lou Piniella rode his horses hard during the streak (“ran their dung to water,” my wife would say), and now they seem punchless and reeling. Tampa Bay management has done its part to destroy team morale by trading D-Rays’ ace and chief workhorse Victor Zambrano to the contending Mets. All of which makes me sorry for them, but not too sorry to take pleasure in Tim Wakefield’s win two nights ago and Curt Schilling’s complete-game victory last night. Not too sorry to hope that Bronson Arroyo can complete the sweep tonight, either, although I doubt the Rays will let that happen. They ain’t quite that hapless.

August 5th

Still, we almost got the sweep. Leading 4–1 in the seventh—and cruising—Bronson Arroyo gave up a single and a walk. A Kevin Youkilis error loaded the bases for Tampa Bay with no outs. Then catcher Toby Hall, 0 for his last 18, parked one. Make that score 5–4 Rays, and it stood up. In the Boston half of the ninth, newly acquired Sox speed merchant Dave Roberts, running for Kevin Millar and egged on by third-base coach Dale Sveum, tried to tie the score from second on a Doug Mientkiewicz single.[32] The all-or-nothing dash for home is always a thrilling play, but this time it went Tampa Bay’s way. Center fielder Rocco Baldelli threw a bullet to catcher (and home-run hitter) Toby Hall, who made it easy for the umpire, not letting the willowy Roberts anywhere near the dish. Mientkiewicz got as far as third, then died there when Johnny Damon poppedup to end the game. It was another tooth-rattling loss (especially since both the Yankees and the Rangers, our current wild-card competition, won their games), but Tampa Bay hasn’t been swept at home all year, so all you can do is tip your cap to them and move on. In this case to Motown, where the Tigers wait.

We’re 2-1 in the current twelve-game stretch, and I’m still hoping to take six of the next nine. I know that sounds steep, but at some point this team just has to start setting some steep goals. And meeting them.

August 6th

Ted Williams disliked and distrusted the Boston sportswriters. His appellation for them—“The Knights of the Keyboard”—was sarcastic and contemptuous. This doesn’t make the Splendid Splinter an aberration but rather the first in a tradition. In the current era, Carl Everett was sent hence from Boston with his ass on fire and the tag Jurassic Carl hanging from his neck. Manager Butch Hobson (never one of my faves, believe me) became known—sarcastically—as Daddy Butch. Pedro Martinez, a proud and emotional man as well as a wildly talented pitcher, has felt so disrespected by Boston’s Knights of the Keyboard that he has on at least two occasions vowed never to speak to the media again (luckily for fans, his natural gregariousness has overcome these resolutions). Dozens of Red Sox players, past and present, could tell horror stories about how they’ve been treated by Boston’s sportswriters, who now serve just two papers (if you exclude such peripheral rags as the Phoenix and Diehard, that is): the Globe and the Herald. The Globe is the more influential, and by far the more vitriolic. Its most recent acid-bath victim has been Nomar Garciaparra.

The story being disseminated by the writers—Dan Shaughnessy leading the pack—goes something like this: Nomar was never a team player; Nomar was a downer even at the best of times; Nomar had a line in front of his locker to keep the media from getting too close; Nomar told multiple stories about his conversations with Red Sox management before the trade that sent him to the Cubs; Nomar expressed doubts about how much of the regular season he’d be able to play because of the injury to his Achilles tendon. (This last is supposed to help we poor benighted fans understand how Theo Epstein could have traded one of baseball’s five premier infielders for what boils down to a pair of journeymen with good defensive skills.)

And yesterday, more dirt: According to the Globe, Nomar may have lied about how he came by that sore foot in the first place. In spring training we were told—by Nomar—that the injury was the result of a batted ball. Now, according to the Globe, Nomar is supposed to have told somebody or other that the injury cropped up on its own. If so, yesterday’s story went on to speculate, he may have confabulated the whole batted-ball story in order to keep his market value from going down in his walk year. Because you can heal from an injury, right? But if your body starts to give out on you…that’s a different deal altogether. And the source or sources of this story? Do you even have to ask? Not named. Little more than back-fence gossip, in other words, just one more yap of the fox who wants to believe that, oh yeah, those grapes were sour anyway…and by the way, that big-deal shortstop all the kids love? What a hoser! What a busher!

And if Nomar Garciaparra tells his Chicago teammates not to okay a trade to Boston if they can possibly prevent it, no way, under no circumstances, because in Boston the sportswriters eat the local heroes in print and then shit out the bones on cable TV, who could blame them? I’ll bet right now Mr. Garciaparra is feeling especially well-chewed.

And why are the Boston sportswriters this way during baseball season—so angry, so downright cat-dirt mean—when they are, by and large, pretty normal during the other three seasons of the sports year (football, basketball, hockey)? I think it goes back to the basic subtext of this book, that the Red Sox—like the Cubs—are the derelicts of major league baseball, ghost ships adrift and winless in the mythic horse latitudes of sports legend. That may sound sweet to the poets and to writers like John “lyric little bandbox” Updike,[33] but sportswriters want winners, sportswriters want their bylines under headlines like SOX TAKE SERIES IN 6, and this eighty-six-year dry spell just…makes…them…FURIOUS. They won’t admit it, not hardheaded Damon Runyon archetypes such as they, but underneath it all they’re hurt little boys who have been eating loserdust for much of their professional lives and they just…fucking…HATE IT. Can they take it out on management? On Theo Epstein and mild-mannered, bespectacled John Henry? They cannot. Those fellows do not put on uniforms and swing the lumber. Also—and more importantly—those fellows are responsible for who gets press-box credentials, field credentials, and who gets to belly up to the postgame buffet. So, by and large, management gets a pass.[34] Except, of course, for the poor unfortunate middle-management schmucks who fill out the lineup cards, guys like Terry Francona, Grady Little, Jimy (family so poor they could only afford a single ‘m’ in his first name) Williams, “Daddy” Butch Hobson, and “Tollway” Joe Morgan.

And Nomar. Him, too.

That selfish guy.

That downer.

That liar.

That guy who took the money, ran off to Chicago, and left the kids crying.

It’s all bullshit, of course, and in their ink-smudged hearts, the Knights of the Keyboard know it. But Boston sportswriters are for the most part mangy, distempered, sunstruck dogs that can do nothing but bite and bite and bite. In a way you can’t even blame them. They are as much at the mercy of the long losing streak as the fans who buy their tickets at the window or pony up for NESN on cable TV. Sooner or later—maybe even this year, I haven’t given up hope, even yet I am still faithful—the Sox will win it all, and this infected boil will burst. I think all of us will be happier when it does. Certainly we will be more rational.

Later, after a quiet 4–3 loss to the Tigers:

August 7th

I’ve suggested that the team needed to play .750 ball in its twelve-game stretch against losing opponents; Boston is playing the same old so-so wake-me-when-it’s-over road baseball instead. After three matches in Tampa Bay and one in Detroit, the Yankees have sailed over the horizon and even the wild card looks…well, it still looks perfectly possible, but we look less deserving of it, okay? We look about a run short, and I’m not talking about the run we lost by last night, or not just that one. I’m talking about the game we lost to Tampa Bay by a run, and the two we lost to the Twins—each also by a single run. That’s four one-run losses in a row. This team has played an amazing number of games this season that have been decided by one run: twenty-two so far. The only number more amazing is the number of them we’ve lost: fifteen. Let me write that in bold strokes so we can both be sure of it: 15 GAMES LOST BY A SINGLE RUN. At least two of those one-run losses were to the league-leading Yankees.

And we had another one of those bases-loaded-with-two-out night-mares last night. Again and again this year the Red Sox have failed to produce in that situation. Versus the Tigers, Kevin Youkilis did manage to snare a walk (he is, after all, the Greek…aw, never mind), temporarily tying the score for the tragickal Mr. Lowe. That brought up Orlando Cabrera, one-half of Theo Epstein’s replacement for Nomar Garciaparra. Cabrera, who is pressing at the plate and looking more and more like a Stepford Cesar Crespo clone, struck out on three pitches, two of them well out of the strike zone, and that was the end of our one big chance. The Sox went meekly in the top of the ninth, as they have all too often this year, and now taking eight out of twelve means taking six out of eight. It can be done, but I doubt it can be done by this team.

August 9th

It was a good weekend for the Faithful. Pedro Martinez won pretty on Saturday and Tim Wakefield won ugly on Sunday.[35] In their current important twelve-game stretch against underachieving clubs, Boston now stands at 4-2. Only a churl would point out that they could be 6-0. (I am, of course, that churl.) We have moved into a three-way tie for the wild card with two of the AL Western Division clubs (the Angels and the Rangers), and that is a marked improvement over where we were a week ago. I’ll take it.

But any longtime follower of the Red Sox will tell you that when the team’s cheek grows rosy, the almost automatic response is for someone, either in the media or in the organization itself, to slap a leech on it. In this case the leeching has to do with Kevin Millar’s comments about his playing time and the constantly shifting nature of the team’s makeup.

Millar’s pique over not being in the lineup for the August 7th game against the Tigers (“Here I am, riding the old benchola”) is just silly, especially since he ended up being a last-minute add to Francona’s card. But pro athletes aren’t known for their statesmanlike qualities, and in other baseball markets such comments usually go unpublished. If they are published, they’re apt to be—can you believe this?—snickered at. Not inBoston, though; in Boston, Millar’s pregame grousing was treated by postgame commentators Tom Caron and Sam Horn as grave news, indeed; the preachments of Osama Ben Millar.[36]

The part of Millar’s comments which was not addressed—either on the Red Sox–authorized NESN broadcast or in the predictably anti-player Boston Globe—was his perfectly correct and uncomfortably astute assertion that this year’s Red Sox team has no identity, and it’s that lack which has so slowed the team’s quest for a postseason berth, one we all thought would be a slam dunk at the start of the season. (To be ten and a half games behind the Yankees with a team this talented is just flat-out ridiculous.) The 2004 Boston Red Sox has no face. And it’s not Nomar Garciaparra I miss in this context. Oddly enough—or perhaps not so oddly at all—it’s Trot Nixon I miss, Nixon whose intensity can be seen even in the dog-dumb ads he does for Red Sox/NESN license plates. Every time he stares into the camera with those burning eyes and says, “We think of it as a tag-and-release program… so we can keep an eye… on YOU,” I wish to God he wasn’t on the DL.

Never mind Red Ryder; when ya comin’ back, Trotter? We may need you to pull our irons out of the fire yet.

August 10th

The key to every sport—to every endeavor in life, maybe—is consistency, and nowhere is that more apparent than in team defense. Football, soccer, baseball, hockey, basketball—all team defense is based on the premise that each player knows where his or her fellow players are, and can rely on teammates to cover either territory or opposing players he or she can’t. In the major leagues this assumes that each player knows his teammates’ capabilities and habits, a familiarity that can only come from playing side by side game after game until this knowledge becomes second nature and can be acted on with the speed of reflex.

Example: pop fly down the right-field line. First baseman fades straight back, second baseman angles in from the left, right fielder comes on hard. If the ball’s high and deep enough, it’s the right fielder’s, since the play’s in front of him. If it’s low and shallow, the first baseman has to make an over-the-shoulder catch running away from the plate. If it’s medium, in no-man’s-land, usually the second baseman, having the most speed and the best glove (as well as quarterbacking the in-between play), has to flash across and get it.

Ideally, each fielder has played with the other two enough to know both what they’re capable of and what they’ll do. One right fielder may have difficulty getting in on a ball (Millar, the injured Trot) that another (Kapler, Roberts) should catch easily. Likewise, one second baseman may have no problem making a play in foul ground (Pokey) that another has no shot at (Mark Bellhorn, Bill Mueller), while yet another has maybe a 50% chance (Ricky Gutierrez). Some first basemen don’t go back well (Ortiz, Millar) and some do (Mientkiewicz, McCarty); with Andy Dominique, it’s hard to say, since he’s only played a handful of innings at first, the same way Dauber only played a couple games at first or in the outfield, or Cesar Crespo at second and short, or in right, center, or left. And beyond simple ability, there’s the confusing factor of personality. Some fielders are aggressive and dash after every in-between ball whether they can make the play or not (Manny, weirdly), while others hang back till the last second, letting others take charge (Kapler, sadly). Does Doug Mientkiewicz have a good feel for the combination of Bill Mueller and Gabe Kapler as they converge on a dying quail with men on late in a close game? For Ricky Gutierrez and David McCarty? Ricky Gutierrez and Dave Roberts? Bill Mueller and Kevin Millar? Bill Mueller and Dave Roberts?

Impossible, considering how little they’ve played together. Mientkiewicz is still feeling his way into the defense, the same way Bill Mueller’s doing his best to acclimate at second base. At best it’s guesswork.

Multiply that uncertainty by the number of odd and new combinations in the field (McCarty in left, Youkilis at third and Orlando Cabrera at short all vying for a ball down the line in Fenway where the stands jut out; or Cabrera and Bill Mueller going back on a flare with Roberts, Johnny or Kapler racing in from center) and add in the memory of the seldom-used Damian Jackson ranging back farther than last year’s regular second baseman Todd Walker ever could and knocking Johnny out, and you’ve got a patchwork defense that lets balls drop.

Part of the problem is injuries, obviously, and part is the pre- and mid-season missteps by upper management (never getting a serious replacement for Trot, loading up on platoon first basemen and shortstops to no apparent purpose), but Francona has to take all of that into account and at least try to put a defense out on the field that can work towards becoming comfortable with each other. Until he does, we’ll continue to be inconsistent, and to hurt pitchers like Wake and Lowe, who have to rely on competent glovework behind them to win.

August 11th

The Red Sox and the Devil Rays have split in Boston’s first two games back at Fenway, and we’re now 5-3 in the twelve-game stretch I’ve elected to put under the microscope—the twelve games leading up to the stretch drive. Boston hasn’t made it easy on itself, losing the first game of the final road series against Detroit and the first game of the home stand against Tampa Bay, but the Sox have managed to win their last two series, and they won again last night.

Bronson Arroyo looks more and more comfortable in his role as a starter (and thank Christ he finally shaved off that horrible sand-colored thing on his chin). Tampa Bay’s Toby Hall beat Arroyo with an improbable grand slam in his last start, but in last night’s game Arroyo mixed his pitches better and got more ground balls. Also, Terry Francona, who is right every once in a while,[37] lifted him while he was merely toasty instead of completely baked. There is a difference.

Today there’s a three-way tie for the wild card (Texas, Anaheim, Boston), and tonight the tragickal Mr. Lowe will lug his top-heavy 5.50 ERA to the mound against Tampa Bay’s Dewon Brazelton, with a tidy little ERA of 2.56. This may be one of those gut-check games that seem to mean hardly anything at the time and actually mean more when you look for the point where a team either started to kick it into gear…or didn’t.

August 12th

Boston kicked it into gear, all right. Especially Kevin Millar. Millar seems to have decided that if the Red Sox need identity, he’ll supply it. In last night’s game against the Devil Rays, he went 4 for 4, with two singles, a double, and a three-run shot into the Monster seats, setting the pace as Boston pounded out 15 hits and routed Tampa Bay 14–4. The man who gave the 2003 Red Sox their late-season slogan—“Cowboy up”—is battingsomething ridiculous like .470 for the month of August—31 for his last 66. With numbers like that, he can perhaps be excused for bitching about having to ride “the old benchola.”

We have one more game against the tasty Devil Rays—today at one o’clock—before tougher meat comes to town: the Chicago White Sox, currently a game above .500. Boston stands at 6-3 in the current twelve-game stretch, and if we could beat Tampa Bay behind Pedro this afternoon, we’d only have to top the ChiSox once to finish 8-4, as I had hoped we would. Meantime, in the wild-card race…chillun, we have sole possession. For today, at least.

Later: After writing that, I shut down the computer and head for southern New Hampshire to visit old friends (he’s the physician’s assistant who has helped me with medical stuff in a dozen books, most notably The Stand and Pet Sematary, she’s a retired nurse who has reached a hard-won truce in her war with cancer). We have lunch on the patio, a lot of good food and good talk (maybe only horror writers and medical people can reminisce fondly about heart attack patients they have known). We promise we’ll stay in closer touch, and maybe we even will.

Starting the 140-mile drive back to western Maine, I remember that the Sox are playing the rare weekday afternoon game. I can’t find it on the FM; nothing there but rock music and what a friend of mine calls “macrobiotic talk shows.” On the AM, however, I find it crackling through the static on WEEI, the self-proclaimed Red Sox flagship station, and am delighted to discover that Boston is winning handily. My man Kevin Youkilis kicked off the day’s festivities, swatting one over everything and into the Manny Zone, aka Lansdowne Street. At the one end of the East Coast, Tampa–St. Pete is girding its loins for the arrival of tropical storm Bonnie and the more dangerous Hurricane Charlie. At this end, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have run into Hurricane Pedro. He almost always pitches well against the D-Rays, but he hasn’t thrown this well in…what? Three years? Four?

It’s a hot, muggy afternoon in what Mainers sometimes call New Hamster. Due to road construction, the two eastbound lanes of Highway 101 are down to one, and the traffic is bumper-to-bumper. A roadworker points at me, shakes his head, and draws a thumb across his throat. It takes me a minute to realize it’s almost certainly my truck he’s pointing at—specifically to the bumper sticker on the tailgate readingSOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT. All of this should conspire to put me in a foul mood, but I’m as happy as a kitten in a catnip factory. Pedro goes nine innings and strikes out 10 (in the postgame he admits to Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano that in his old age he’s come to appreciate quick ground-ball outs and ten-pitch innings as much as the Ks). We’re now 7-3 over the last ten games, we need only to split the next two with Chicago to finish the Dirty Dozen at 8-4, and as of today there’s a game’s worth of sunshine between us and the Anaheim Angels in the wild-card race.

Best of all, though, the last few innings of the game lightened what otherwise would have been a very tiresome drive through heavy traffic, and I think that’s really what baseball is for, especially baseball on the radio…which is, as Joe Castiglione says in his book Broadcast Rites and Sites, the last bastion of the spoken image.

Or something like that.

As Ole Case used to say, “You could look it up.”

August 14th

The Red Sox didn’t make it easy (that has never been a part of the deal with them), but they managed to finish the twelve-game stretch that began on August 2nd at exactly 8-4. The opener in the current series against the White Sox was another one-run loss, and tonight’s game began badly, with Curt Schilling giving up consecutive solo home runs to Timo Perez and Carlos Lee almost before the last notes of the national anthem had died away.

But in this game the Red Sox played flawless defense (the highlight was a sliding, twisting, skidding catch in foul territory by Kevin Youkilis, who almost ended up in the White Sox dugout), and you have to admire Curt Schilling, a pitcher whose face—along with those of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, maybe—ought to grace the cover of the Old School Baseball Encyclopedia. Following the home runs, he surrendered only one more hit until the sixth. By then the Red Sox had tied the game on back-to-back solo home runs of their own, one by Manny Ramirez and one by David “Big Papi” Ortiz.

Papi came up again in the bottom of the eighth, after Ramirez had struck out looking on three pitches. By then Schilling was done for the evening, but still eligible for the win if the Red Sox could pull ahead. Ortiztook care of his pitcher, dumping one into the fourth or fifth row of seats beyond the bullpen in right center. It wasn’t quite as mighty as his earlier rocket, but there was still no doubt when it left the bat. I have never seen such a big man who is able to generate such sudden power, not even Mo Vaughn. God knows how long it will last, but Red Sox fans have been blessed to watch it over the last two seasons, and Ortiz may be having an MVP year.

Keith Foulke came on in the top of the ninth. My wife had gone to bed by then, and that was probably just as well; when Foulke walked Chicago’s leadoff hitter on five pitches, my state of jangled nerves approached real terror. It was all too easy to see this one slipping away. Foulke took the mound with 18 saves, not a lot for a club that’s now approaching the 65-win mark, and very few of those saves have come in one-run situations. Tonight, however, just enough of Schilling’s tough-man air seemed to linger on the mound to carry Foulke through. After the walk came a pop-up, after the pop-up came two strikeouts, the last on a faltering half-swing at a changeup by Juan Uribe, and presto, “Dirty Water” was playing over the PA system. Pedro Martinez was first out of the dugout, giving high fives with what appeared to be a fungo bat.

One final note: the Yankees beat the Mariners this afternoon, maintaining their bonecrushing ten-and-a-half-game lead in the AL East and winning their 75th game of the year with August not yet half over. They are on a pace to win 110 games, perhaps more. This is more than unreal; this is surreal.

August 16th

Ten in the morning and I have no idea who won the game last night. We’re at camp, away from TV and computers and even the newspaper. The director usually posts the bare-bones scores on a wall in the dining hall (often with a synopsis of the Pirate game), but today he’s bumped them for the Olympics. Yesterday, anticipating this, I shelled out five bucks for the modern equivalent of a transistor radio and listened to the Indians and Twins’ afternoon game from the Jake, but last night at bedtime I couldn’t catch a round-the-league wrap-up.

We’ve been gone a week now, and this is the first time I haven’t naturally run across a score. While we were at my dad’s cottage on Lake Chautauqua, Wake’s six-homer win over the D-Rays made the Jamestown paper, complete with a photo of Tim-may. The Buffalo TV news at eleven featured our next game, since a local family threw out the first pitch in memory of their son, a high school star and Sox fan, dead of cancer, who’d dreamed of playing at Fenway.

Most nights I’d get just a score and then have to wait for the morning paper to fill me in, though during one newscast after the Bisons beat Pawtucket, we were treated to the Real Deal Player of the Game going deep twice against a skinny submariner wearing number 15—the elusive Mr. Kim.

A straight score, lumped with others from around the league, is flat and paralyzing. If we win, it’s great for about twenty seconds, then I’m pissed that I don’t know how we won, or why. A loss is awful—irrefutable, infuriating—and terrible for about a minute, until I realize that I don’t know anything about the game, not even who pitched. It’s a mindless, uninvolved way to follow baseball, almost zero content, as if the game is just about winning or losing.

We don’t watch a lot of TV at Chautauqua (getting only two snowy channels will do that), so inevitably I fell a day behind, picking up the paper and dissecting last night’s box score, looking for signs. Manny was finally back; Trot and Pokey and Bellhorn weren’t. Cabrera continued to struggle at the plate. Bill Mueller, still playing out of position, made another error. Terrible Terry Adams put men on and Mendoza let them in, while Takatsu, the White Sox reliever, inherited three runners and stranded them. Even uglier, their seven and eight hitters combined for 7 RBIs.

Sometimes it’s fun to puzzle out backwards what happened, but even a box score is cold matter, a map to treasure already dug up. Stanley Kubrick, insulated in his compound in the English countryside, used to have an assistant here in the States tape the playoffs and World Series so he could devour them at his leisure, and while I admire Kubrick’s taste (and appetite), watching a game that’s long been over, and watching alone, seems to leach the immediacy from what is essentially a shared experience. Ideally, I want to be at the game, reacting to every pitch and situation as part of the loud, honest-to-God crowd; short of that I’ll join the far-flung (and far from imaginary) audience all across New England watching Don and Jerry or listening to Joe and Troop or Uri Berenguer and J. P. Villaman, knowing that when David Ortiz cranks one, citizens of the Nation—from the capital of Fenway to the borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and the Dominican—are hollering like idiots the same as I am. A box score or even a decent recap can’t show me what kind of location Lowe has, or how much of a lead Dave Roberts is getting. I need to see it now, before what happens happens.

So this is limbo, not knowing anything until it’s already over (and even then not knowing the results from Anaheim or Oakland). All I can say, today, is that in mid-August we’re solidly in the wild-card race, and possibly in the lead, and that, from all evidence, as a team we’re having the exact same problems we had two months ago—the same problems, really, we had last year.

August 17th

I need to go back to the Garciaparra trade again, and it probably won’t be for the last time. It’s going to be one of the big Red Sox stories of the year, certainly the big story if this wounded, limping, patched-together team[38] doesn’t make postseason (or even if it does but doesn’t advance).

When we got Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in return for Nomar, we were assured by management that this was a lot more than trade-mania, the equivalent of the crazy buying that goes on at the annual Filene’s Wedding Sale. We were “plugging defensive holes.” In addition to that, Cabrera’s .246 batting average was deceiving; he was “a doubles machine.”

Right, and we won in Vietnam; mission accomplished in Iraq.

Mientkiewicz, although not used as an everyday player by Terry Francona, has played solid, unflashy baseball for Boston, and no surprise there; as a Minnesota Twin he’s played on plenty of contending teams, and he’s used to the pressure. Cabrera is a different story. Players who come from forgotten teams (and surely the Montreal Expos are the forgotten team) either blossom or shrivel when they come to contending teams and pressure-cooker venues like Boston; Cabrera has so far done the latter. The press has been patient with him, but you’d expect that; in Boston most of those guys shill for management, and while they have no problem making Nomar look bad, they’d love his replacement to look good so they can say, “See? He’s great. Toldja.”

More interesting to me—also more surprising and endearing—has been the fans’ patience with Cabrera…who probably helped himself enormously by hitting a home run in his first at-bat in the Red Sox uniform. None since, though, and his Montreal batting average of .246 has shrunk to something like .225. Worse, he hasn’t looked like anyone’s idea of a Gold Glover at shortstop. Last night, in Boston’s game against Toronto—the first of a three-game set—Cabrera racked up a pair of RBIs, one on a base hit and one on a sac fly. Then, in an agonizing, rain-soaked seventh inning that seemed to go on forever, he gave them both back plus one to grow on with two box-score errors and a third, mental, error that allowed a run which should have been kept right where it was, at third base.

Cabrera’s hitting in the clutch has been nonexistent. In the game previous to last night’s—the final game of the Red Sox–White Sox series—Cabrera ended things by grounding softly back to the pitcher, leaving the tying run stranded at third after the Red Sox had battled back from a multirun deficit. So in last night’s game I was a little saddened but not really surprised to hear the first scattered boos in the rain-depleted crowd when Cabrera came up following his seventh-inning follies, which turned a 5–1 Red Sox cruise into a 5–4 nail-biter against the American League’s bottom dogs. The crowd wants him to be good, and I have no doubt that he is—no doubt that Terry Francona is exactly right when he says that Cabrera (who, unlike Mientkiewicz, plays every day) is pressing at the plate—but I also have no doubt that the Nomar trade has already cost this Red Sox team at least three games it could ill afford to lose, and that it will quite likely cost them more unless Orlando Cabrera quickly finds his stride.

I’m not man enough to predict that the Sox will win eight of the current twelve, but they could, with half of the next dozen coming against the abysmal Blue Jays and two more against the only slightly better Tigers. And they should, if they are to retain their position as the team to beat in the wild-card race, and perhaps even put some distance between themselves and the other contending teams. But the injury situation continues to grow worse rather than better; with Youkilis down, we were last night treated to the bizarre sight of Doug Mientkiewicz playing second base for the first time in his life. And, aside from getting knocked down once by Carlos Delgado, he did a damned good job.

One final note: as the season wears on, I find it easier and easier to spell Mientkiewicz. People can adjust to just a-damn-bout anything, can’t they?

August 18th

Having said all that, let me tell you that no one in all of Red Sox Nation was any happier than I was when Orlando Cabrera finally did come through in the clutch, turning on an 86 mph Justin Speier changeup and clanging it off the scoreboard in the bottom of the ninth inning last night, chasing Johnny Damon home with the winning run in the second game of Boston’s current series against the Toronto Blue Jays.

Fenway giveth and Fenway taketh away. In the first game of the series, it tooketh away big-time from Mr. Cabrera. Last night, that funky just-right bounce gaveth back, and I went dancing around my living room, singing the Gospel According to K.C. and the Sunshine Band: “That’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it.”

Does this mean I think the Garciaparra trade is suddenly, magically okay? No. But I was rooting for Cabrera to come through—not just for the Red Sox but for Cabrera as a Red Sock? You bet your tintype. Because, no matter what I or any other fan might think of the trade, the deal is done and Cabrera’s one of us now; he wears the red and white. So, sure, I root for him.

Thus, hooray, Orlando. May you clang a hundred more off that funky old scoreboard. Welcome to Fenway Park. Welcome home.

August 21st

It hasn’t been Boston’s best week (I firmly believe that this season’s best weeks are still ahead of them), but we’re riding our fifth four-game winning streak of the season, and if we win again this afternoon, the Red Sox will be proud possessors of their fourth five-game winning streak of the season. There’s better news: I’ve lost track of All My Children almost completely, and am hoping that when my viewing habits once more regularize on that front, the child of Babe and the odious JR will be in middle school and developing problems of his own (kids on soap operas grow up fast).

August has certainly been the best month of the season for the Red Sox, and the team couldn’t have picked a better time to get hot. There isn’t a lot of wild-card competition on the horizon in the Central Division, but with the exception of the Mariners (now better than twenty games off the pace), the West is a shark tank. For the last week or so, all the sharks—Oakland, Anaheim, and Texas—have been feeding on their weaker Midwestern brothers, and all of them have been winning.[39] One of these clubs will win the division. The other two—along with the Red Sox—are swimming full-tilt at a door only big enough to admit one of them. I comfort myself with thoughts of the schedule, which will eventually force the sleek sharks of the Western Division to begin dining upon each other.

The Yankees, in the meantime, have finally begun to falter a bit as their pitching arms become more and more suspect (may I note—and not without glee—that their trade for Esteban Loaiza is looking especially doubtful; there are already trade rumors floating around). They’ve lost three out of their last four—the one win an almost miraculous come-from-behinder against the Twins—and while I don’t think anyone among the Red Sox Faithful are counting on a total Yankee el floppo (but how sweet it would be), I’d guess that few among us are unaware that the New York lead, which was ten and a half ten days ago, has now shrunk to seven and a half. Still a lot, but on August 21st, seven and a half games doesn’t seem like an insurmountable lead.

August 22nd

I’m addicted to the Little League World Series the way a college hoop junkie craves March Madness. Every game is high drama, and you never know what to expect. Tonight we switch back and forth between the Sox and the Lincoln, Rhode Island, team, and after a while, like the end of Animal Farm, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Both survive late scares. The kids’ defense falls apart in the sixth. In Chicago, the Sox are up a run in the eighth, thanks to back-to-back jacks by Manny and David, when Manny goes to plant himself under an easy fly, slips on the wet grass, recovers, then slips again, and the ball falls behind him. Timlin gets us out of it and Foulke closes, looking sharp. The Angels have swept the Yanks, and the Rangers finally lost, so we’re five and a half back in the East and a game up in the wild card. And the New England kids win.

This is terrific—we beat the White Sox again, making us 5-1 in our last six games. The Rangers also won, but the trade-off is that the Yankees took another drubbing from the Angels (and at the Stadium, hee-hee), meaning that the New York lead is down another full game. Knowing that their team has lost almost half their seemingly insurmountable lead in the space of a week cannot make Yankee fans happy. (That lead probably is insurmountable, but north of Hartford the only thing we love more than seeing the pin-stripers have a bad week is seeing them have two bad weeks.)

The Red Sox have scored 20 runs against the White Sox in the last two games. Varitek is thumping the ball, and so is Millar, but I think the big offensive story in Chicago has been Manny Ramirez. He’s been sluggish at the plate since the All-Star break, but in the last two games he’s shown a return to the batting brilliance that made him such a catch for us in the first place. He hit the 16th grand slam of his career in the second inning of the Friday night game (August 20th) and added a three-run job yesterday. He has a total of 9 RBIs in the two games.

To this you should add in Manny’s glovework, especially back home in Boston, where he has become more and more comfortable with the eccentricities of left field at Fenway, a position that has made strong baseball players cry. Manny has gotten a reputation as a bad defensive baseball player and will almost certainly carry it with him for his entire career (the only people less likely than baseball fans to change their minds about a player are other players, coaches and, of course, Ted Williams’s “Knights of the Keyboard”), but he has mastered the knack of playing the carom off the Green Monster in such a way as to hold runners at first (the world-famous “wall-ball single”), and he has made some brilliant, fearless catches, especially going to his right, into the Twilight Zone territory beyond third base where the wall is hard and foul territory is measured in mere inches. He’s no Yaz, but is he at least the equal of Mike Greenwell, and maybe a little better? Our survey says yes.

And damn, ain’t he a likable cuss! That wasn’t always the case in Cleveland, where Manny had a reputation for taciturnity (he rarely did interviews), standoffishness and laziness. In Boston, Manny always seems to be smiling, and it is a beautiful smile, boyish and somehow innocent. He hustles, and the camera frequently catches him goofing with his teammates in the dugout (in one beautifully existential contrast, the viewer sees Curt Schilling studiously poring over paperwork while Manny mugs crazily over his shoulder). He has even done a shoe commercial which has its own brand of goofy Manny Ramirez charm.[40]

Some of the change from Growly Manny to Don’t Worry, Be Happy Manny may have to do with the Dominican Mafia that, simply by chance, now surrounds him: cheery-by-nature players like Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz. Some of it may be a kind of weird alchemy in Manny’s lungs: he pulls in the baleful, media-poisoned air of Boston and exhales his own brand of nonchalant good cheer in its place. I actually sort of buy this, because not even the trade rumors that swirled around him in the off-season changed Manny as we have come to know him: he comes to work, he does his job, and if the Red Sox win, he gives a postgame interview in which he shakes his head and says, “We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man, you know? We got another sees wee’s in the season and we gotta jus’ keep goin’.”

One of the reasons I’d like the Red Sox to win the World Series is so I can see if Manny would say “We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man” in his postgameinterview, if he’s that much on cruise control. Probably not, but I’m sure he’d smile, and that smile is worth a thousand dollars.

August 23rd

Curt Schilling calls the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Little League team to give them a pep talk before their game tonight. The kids and their coaches are gathered around a speakerphone on a table. Everyone’s pumped.

“Are you gonna win it?” Schill asks.

“Yeah!” everyone says.

And then one kid—a skinny little joker—leans over the phone and asks, “Are you?”

Just as the room busts up (there’s no more explosive laughter than nervous laughter—Vincent Price Masque of the Red Death laughter), the ESPN crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: GARCIAPARRA (CHI-NL) OUT WITH STRAINED WRIST.

The advantage we have in the wild card is that with the unbalanced schedule the teams in the West will be facing one another while we feast on scrubs like the Jays and D-Rays. Tonight we plan to cash in, throwing Pedro against Ted Lilly in the mostly empty SkyDome. Reed Johnson leads off the Toronto first with a home run. Orlando Hudson follows with a triple. Again, Pedro’s come out like his brother Ramon, as if he’s not warmed up to game speed. He settles down after that and throws a great game, only giving up two more hits, but Lilly’s on, and with our lack of righty power (and Tek serving his suspension for shoving A-Rod), he shuts us down, 3–0, a three-hit complete game—only the second shutout against us (Jason Schmidt’s is the other). The Yanks beat Cleveland on a Sterry Sheffield home run, and the Angels won to pull even with us. And the kids from Rhode Island lost.

August 24th

This is a true adventure in surrealism: I’m in Boston (exploring possibilities for a musical play with John Mellencamp) and the Red Sox are in Toronto (exploring possibilities for extending their season into October). Tim Wakefield, the pitcher who’s closest to the center of this Red Sox fan’s heart, is on the hill, and I keep running out to check with Ray, my long-time limo driver, who’s parked in a loading zone and listening to the game on the radio. At first things don’t go well; for most of the season Wakefield’s had problems with the gopher ball, and he gives up another in the first. The Jays keep pecking and are leading 3–0 when the Red Sox begin to crawl back, courtesy of Manny “We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man” Ramirez, who plates a couple with a base hit to center. Then Doug Mirabelli, who regularly catches Wakefield (and will be standing in for Jason Varitek this week while Tek finishes serving his four-game suspensionfor the brawl with Alex Rodriguez), hits a monster three-run homer to left center, putting the Sox up, 5–3.

I’m headed back to my hotel with Ray when Wake leaves the game. At that point the Red Sox still lead by two, but the Blue Jays have loaded the bases with nobody out. Enter Mike Timlin, who strikes out two…and then we lose WEEI’s AM signal amid the tall buildings. Ray and I sit, not speaking, at a seemingly endless red light, listening to static. When we get rolling again and the static finally clears, I hear the merry voices of the Giant Glass singers (“Who do you call when your windshield’s bus-ted?”), and know that Timlin either gave up a disastrous multibase hit and is being replaced—the barn door securely locked by Terry Francona after the horse has been stolen—or he actually wriggled out of it. When the game comes back on, the Red Sox are batting. It turns out that Timlin coaxed Alex Rios, the third batter to face him, into hitting a mild ground ball. Ray and I slap hands, and we’re back at the Boston Harbor Hotel before the Red Sox have finished batting.

I rush upstairs, ready to watch the final inning of what turns out to be another one-run nail-biter on TV…only to discover that the Boston Harbor may be the only hotel in the Boston metro area that doesn’t carry NESN. No Red Sox on TV, in other words. I try the radio. Nothing on the FM but opera and Aerosmith, nothing on the AM band but one constant blat of static. I do the only reasonable thing, under the circumstances; I call my son in New Hampshire and have him call the final three batters Joe Castiglione–style over the phone. It feels like bad mojo—the Red Sox always seem to lose when I watch or listen with my kids—but this time the Sox hold on, and I go to bed happy even though the Yankees have turned relentless again. We’re now 7-2 over the last nine games, and it’s hard to be unhappy with that.

Top of the sixth, down 3–2 with two on and one out for Doug Mirabelli against a tiring Miguel Batista. Doug’s the slowest guy on the team, a real double-play threat. The book here is to pinch-hit a lefty, and we’ve got a whole bench full. Problem is, with Tek still out, and Theo and Francona not wanting to waste a roster spot on Andy Dominique, our backup catcher is Doug Mientkiewicz. Mirabelli stands in and crashes a three-run bomb off the scoreboard in left-center. How does that proverb go: some have greatness thrust upon them?

Same thing in the bottom of the inning, when the Jays load the bases with none out. Embree’s arm is dead from overwork, and Leskanic and Adams have had control problems. Mike Timlin’s thrown way too many innings lately, but Francona’s got no one else. Timlin goes to the slider and whiffs Reed Johnson and Orlando Hudson, then gets Alex Rios on a force-out. He gives one back in the seventh, but Mendoza (another unlikely hero) gets two outs in the eighth, and Foulke handles things from there. So, thanks to some clutch play from the shallow end of the depth chart, we keep pace.

August 25th

With Nomar gone and Trot possibly lost for the season, we don’t have a true number five hitter to protect Manny and David. Francona’s tried a number of guys there lately—just as he tried Dauber and Tek early in the season. When he posts the lineup for our nineteenth and final game of the season against Toronto, Bellhorn sees that Bill Mueller’s in the number five slot and jokes, “Are we trying tonight?”

Dave Wallace likes to say that if your eight best pitchers throw 80% of your innings, you’ll be in good shape. That’s great if you have eight good pitchers. Toronto has two. Kid righty Josh Towers implodes in the fifth, giving up back-to-back jobs to Manny and David, and then, two batters later, a two-run shot to Cabrera on a hanging curve. Schilling goes 6 1/3 and leaves with the score a comfortable 10–1, giving Francona a chance to use some of our worst arms (Terry Adams, Mike Myers, Mendoza—who actually throws well) and rest the real pen for one night.

The Yanks and Rangers lose, but the Angels put up 21 runs against the Royals to stay even in the wild card. Next Tuesday we start a nine-game stretch against the Angels, Rangers and A’s. If we can go 6-3 or better, we’re looking at the playoffs.

August 26th

You never take the field expecting to lose, but when your number five starter is on the mound, you know you’ve got to work a little harder. Number five guys can be kids on their way up (Clemens, early on; Aaron Sele; Casey Fossum), vets on the way down (the execrable Matt Young; the puzzling Ramon Martinez; the scuffling Frank Castillo; the iffy John Burkett), or guys in the middle just trying to hold on (usually junkballers like Al Nipper or Wake). The recent number five fad is the converted closer (Derek Lowe, Anaheim’s Kelvim Escobar), which makes more sense, giving a shot to a guy who actually has good stuff—as opposed to the normal borderline number five guy stuff—and hoping he develops into a number two or three.

All number five guys have promise, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the majors, but it’s rare to see one over the age of thirty bloom into a solid starter, the way ex-Sock Jamie Moyer did in Seattle. More often, the number five who exceeds expectations isn’t the vet or the phenom (he’s already a number one or two, like the Cubs’ Kerry Wood or Mark Prior) but a guy in his mid-to-late twenties getting his second shot and putting it all together, the way Bronson Arroyo does tonight.

Arroyo’s skinny as a stick, but he’s no kid. At twenty-seven, he’s been a pro for ten years, signing with Pittsburgh out of high school and rising through their farm system, seeing limited action with the big club for parts of three seasons until they waived him before spring training last year. He pitched brilliantly for Pawtucket, earning a September call-up, and threw so well—especially against the Yankees—that we made room for him on our playoff roster. This year, with Kim out, by default he became our number five guy, and though his record’s only 7-9 (partly due to lack of run support, partly to our weak middle relievers), his ERA is 4.07, a full run better than Lowe’s, just .29 behind Pedro—better, in fact, than all the Yankee starters except Kevin Brown. Tonight he has his curve working and shuts down the Tigers for 7 1/3, giving up only an unearned run in a clutch 4–1 win. On the mound he’s contained but assured, then almost cocky, sauntering off after striking out the side, as slow as Pedro. It’s the kind of performance that makes you wonder if he’ll turn into a number one someday.

August 27th

As previously noted, the Boston baseball writers are masters of the bad vibe, maestros of dark karma. If cast away on a cannibal isle, I have no doubt they would soon be kings…at least until reduced to dining upon each other. Hardly anything seems to knock them off-stride—how could it, when they cover a team which has been denied the ultimate brass ring for eighty-six years?—but one thing that does give them pause is a protracted winning streak. When Bronson Arroyo notched last night’s win over the Detroit Tigers, he helped make the Boston Red Sox nine for their last ten, and the Hub sports pages were flooded with sunshine, most of it thin enough to…well, thin enough to read a newspaper through.

Leave it to Dan Shaughnessy to find a reassuring dark spot; just the right familiar note of negativity. In today’s Globe column (untrustworthily titled “Dark Days Appear to Be Long Gone”), Shaughnessy says, in effect: “Does all this winning upset you? Does it leave you with a feeling of vertigo to get up in the morning and discover the Sox have won yet again? BLAME NOMAR!” That’s right; blame Number 5, now living it up in Chicago under a different number. Shaughnessy dates the current roll of distressing good times (ooh, my tummy hurts, somebody pass the Dramamine) from July 31st, the day of the Big Trade. Never mind the two horrible losses that followed on its heels, or Orlando Cabrera’s terrible struggle to find his feet in the field and his stroke at the plate as he plays for the first time in years in front of a live audience. No, it’s Garciaparra’s fault, and why? Two reasons. First, because management pulled the trigger and management has to be right. Second, because we have just got to find the dark lining inside this silver cloud. How else can we define ourselves as Cursed, for God’s sake? I think George Orwell said it best in his classic allegory, Baseball Animal Farm Team: “Orlando good, Nomar bad.”

Now—have all you little piggies got that straight?

August 29th

I recently read an interesting note from a sports psychologist—can’t remember who or where, or I’d be happy to attribute it. Anyway, this guy said that when the local team wins, they’re we, as in we beat the Tigers last night for the third time straight. When the locals lose, they’re they, as in can you believe how lousy they were in July?

You can call Boston’s recent spectacular run—eleven Ws in the last thirteen games, if my math is right—as a lesson in just how great the disparity is between the haves and the have-nots in the American League, but that would ignore the so-so way they played against the same clubs earlier in the season.[41] It also ignores the fact that we’re doing it now with many players either on the DL or going out there hurt.

It’s a great run, and probably Stewart’s and my e-mails show this best. I hope he’ll lay a couple of those daffy suckers in here. (“Waaba-waabawaaba, do you beleeeve this shit, Steve?” and I’m back with “Waaackawaaacka-waaacka, no fuckin’ WAY!”) And, to top things off, Anaheim finally lost a game yesterday. That means that when the Red Sox/Angels showdown—mini-Armageddon—starts on Tuesday at the Fens, we’re guaranteed the wild-card lead, and if things go the way I’ve got them planned, that lead will be up to two and a half games.

Even the folks at Scribner, who commissioned this book (at no small cost, either, hee-hee), have stopped crying doom. For the time being, at least.

We won again yesterday behind a strong outing by Pedro, and this afternoon there’s a carnival mood around Fenway. Manny, who fouled a ball off his knee and missed last night’s game, comes out for batting practice wearing coach Ino Guerrero’s #65. In the field Manny’s manic, flashing how many outs there are to Johnny, to the family section, to the Monster. In the fifth, down 1–0, he comes up with bases loaded and two out, and the crowd rises, chanting, “MANN-y, MANN-y.” First pitch, he drills a single to give us the lead. Ortiz rips another, then Millar. Wake throws eight strong, and the party doesn’t stop.

It’s strange, this high from winning—a straight drug, uncut. Faithful as the Faithful are, we tend to nitpick, even after a win. Not today. Everything’s clicking, and, sure, it’s only Detroit, but we’ve won 20 games this month. The underachieving Red Sox have become overachievers, and no one is happier than the Faithful.

August 30th

The last time Tim Wakefield pitched against the Tigers, he gave up six home runs and still got the win, a feat only accomplished once since the days when most big-league teams rode to their away contests on trains.[42] Yesterday, though, on a day so hot the pitchers in the bullpen used a groundskeeper’s hose to spray the fans in the lower right-field bleachers to keep them cool, Wakefield beat the Tigers again, this time more tidily, going eight strong innings and giving up only three hits. No one was any happier than me. I hate to sound like Annie Wilkes here, but I’ve got to be one of Wake’s biggest fans.[43]

And why not? Look at all we have in common. Wakefield stands 6′2″; I stand 6′3″. Wakefield weighs 210; I weigh 195 (and used to weigh 210). Wakefield’s middle name is Stephen; my first name is Stephen. Wakefield got hit by a car while jogging in 1997; I got hit by a van while walking in 1999. When Wakefield started against the Braves in the 1992 National League Championship Series, he was the first rookie to do so in nine years. When I started for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 ALCS, I was the first rookie to do so in ten years.[44]

More importantly, Wakefield is the sort of player George Will was talking about in his overidealized book-length essay Men at Work, one who really is a man at work. There is… well, I was going to write there’s little star-time ego about him, but in fact there seems to be no star-time ego at all about him. He comes to the ballpark not full of prime-time flash like Jose Canseco did, not wearing the ostentatious earring like Barry Bonds does, or with the panhandle-sized chip on his shoulder as Roger Clemens still seems to do (the Rocket still wants everyone to know they climb when he walks, by God).

Tim Wakefield comes almost the way a man would come to a factory, not plodding but not strutting, just walking steady, with his shirt tucked in all the way around, his belt buckled neatly in front, his hair (what’s left of it) trimmed close, his time card in his hand. You almost expect to see him deposit his lunch pail on the bench before going out to the mound.

He is the egoless workhorse[45] who signed with Boston in 1995, after being let go by the Pirates, and promptly won sixteen straight for the Sox. He gave them innings, innings, innings… including one harrowing stint as the club’s closer. (He was successful in the role—as he has been in almost all of his roles—but he was also almost impossible to watch.) He became a free agent in November of 2000 and re-signed with Boston a month later, taking a $1.5 million pay cut to stay with the big club (following his heroics in the 2003 postseason, when he came within five outs of being named the League Championship Series MVP, his salary went back to where it had been in 2002). Since then he has again given the big club innings and more innings, keeping his mouth shut while he does it.

Now, after various stints in long relief and that one scary two- or three-week turn as the closer a couple of years ago, Wake is back where he belongs, starting games for the team of which he is the longest-standing member. He’s run his ’04 record to a respectable 11-7, seems to be rounding into stretch-drive form, and if he doesn’t garner the sort of fan adulation the Pedro Martinezes and Curt Schillings receive (not too many people come to the ballpark with 49 WAKEFIELD on their backs), that’s probably to be expected. Working joes—guys who keep their heads down and their mouths shut, guys who just do the job—rarely do. In fact, some guy once quipped, “No great thing was ever done by a man named Tim.” Our Tim could prove himself the exception to that rule.

August 31st

My wife’s gone to see her parents for the night and she even took the dog ’cause I’m going to Boston, so I feel it’s perfectly okay to give a yell of triumph when the Sox close out the month at 10:07 P.M. with their twenty-first win and their seventh straight, beating the Angels 10–7. The end of this one wasn’t pretty, with Sox reliever Mike Myers giving up four straight hits—the last a grand slam by a late-game sub—but in the end we prevail (tonight the Sox can be we), and even if Anaheim should get up off the mat and take the next two, they’d still leave trailing in the wild-card race.

And what puts the icing on the cake, the absolute perfect cherry on the banana split? The Yankees lost. Oh, wait—did I say lost? With a final score of 22–0, I think it would be fair to say that Cleveland administered a pants-down butt-whuppin’. Pricey midseason acquisition Esteban Loaiza gave up not one but two three-run homers in the ninth inning. The question, of course, is where the Yankees go from here. When the Houston Astros no-hit them by committee a year ago, it served as a wake-up call… but that was earlier in the season, before their bullpen had taken such a severe pounding (Yankee starters have recorded just one win in the team’s last sixteen victories). Baseball has seen plenty of amazing late-season chokes; this could be the beginning of yet another.

But the Red Sox players would undoubtedly say they can do nothing about the Yankees. They have thirty-two more games of their own to play, and the next eight are going to be very tough. I hope to be at Fenway for as many of them as I can.