Faithful

September 1st

I haven’t been to Fenway since this terrific Red Sox run began (eight in a row now; 21-7 for the month of August), and I’m astonished by how radically the atmosphere of the old park has changed. The glums and glooms of July are gone, replaced by a giddy nervousness that’s not quite a playoff atmosphere. Seconds before Bronson Arroyo throws his first pitch, the PA announcer informs the sellout crowd that it’s seventy-seven degrees—the exact temperature of perfect childhood summer evenings, if I remember correctly. New England’s First Church of the Baseball Unfulfilled is once more ready to rock, my son and three-year-old grandson are with me (the latter more fascinated by the Hood blimp cruising overhead than anything happening on the field), and the Yankees are now almost close enough to touch.

For the second night in a row I wait for Anaheim’s pitching, which has been largely responsible for taking them to eighteen games over .500 in the fiercely competitive AL West, to show up, and for the second night in a row it never does. For the second night in a row Boston puts a four-spot on the board in its half of the first. The difference is that we’ve got Bronson Arroyo going instead of Curt Schilling, and Arroyo is still years away from Curt Schilling’s craftiness. Also, for some reason the kid just doesn’t pitch well in Fenway. Tonight the Angels come back from what sportscasters like to call “the early deficit” and briefly make a game of it; after three innings the score is tied 5–5 and Arroyo is gone. In the end, it makes no difference; the final score is 12–7 Boston, and my scorecard suggests there are going to be some very tired Anaheim outfielders tomorrow. I see fourteen fly-ball outs and five strikeouts through eight innings. Add in the sixteen or eighteen hits that had to be chased down, and that’s an awful lot of running for the, ahem, Angels in the outfield.

Anaheim came into Fenway on fire. After two consecutive poundings, I’d have to guess that the fire is out, and that when Bartolo Colon takes the mound tomorrow, he’d better have his best stuff working if he wants to help his team avoid a clean sweep. As for the Red Sox, it’s now a nice balance: the team is three and a half back in the division and three and a half ahead in the wild card. The stretch drive has begun, and right now it looks as if we could go either way. Of course, I know what I’d like to see: the Yankees scrambling madly for that wild-card berth. And losing it on the last day of the season. I am a Red Sox fan, after all.

Tonight we’re on the Monster, switching between two single seats and two standing rooms. The matchup of Arroyo versus former Sock Aaron Sele seems to be in the Angels’ favor, but Sele comes out shaky and slow. Our guys are hacking at every pitch, and banjo hitters like Bellhorn are swinging for the fences. We score four in the first. The ump is squeezing Arroyo, and he gives two back in the second. We add another in our second, but the Angels tie it at five in the third, and Arroyo’s history. Francona calls on Mike Myers to get lefty Darin Erstad. The crowd groans; the PA plays the theme from Halloween. Myers comes in…and gets it done.

Mike Scioscia gives Sele an extra inning to find his bearings. Instead, he gives up three straight hits and we take the lead.

Like Mike Myers, Terry Adams has had his problems, but, like Myers, he comes in with two down and gets his man, then settles in for two scoreless innings of work (one, I must say, belongs to Tek, who throws out two runners in the fifth).

Scot Shields is their crummy middle reliever. We beat him like a rock, Millar sealing the win with a three-run Coke-bottle shot. And to cap it, after Johnny catches the last out on the warning track directly beneath us, he throws the ball up to me. The game’s on ESPN, and when we get home I’ve got e-mails from people who saw it. There I was, filling the screen, pointing and hollering thank-you, letting Johnny know—once more—that he is still The Man.

September 2nd

Improbable or not, the Sox Express keeps rolling along—this makes nine in a row and we are rapidly leaving the land of the unusual and entering that of the out-and-out, please-pass-the-happy-gas unreal. No question tonight’s game is the toughest of the lot, with Bartolo Colon throwing in the mid-nineties and the Angels offense struggling hard to salvage at least one game of the three. It is important that they do, of course, because of “the swing” that comes into play when the clubs in first and second play each other;[46] there’s a hell of a big difference between leaving Fenway two and a half games out and leaving it four and a half out. The Halos end up leaving it four and a half out mostly because baseball is also a game of luck and Boston’s still running. It would have to be, wouldn’t you say, for the Sox to go 2 for 14 with runners in scoring position…and still manage to eke out the win?

The tragickal Mr. Lowe, who has been snakebit most of the year (there have been innings when he’s been forced to get not just four outs but sometimes even six), only has to endure a couple of miscues tonight, and Adam Kennedy is the beneficiary of both. One is an error by right fielder Dave Roberts; the other is a triple that center fielder Johnny Damon should have caught, and in neither case does the speedy Kennedy end up scoring.

Lowe settles down after giving up single runs in each of the first three. The Red Sox are only able to touch up Colon for four, also in the first three (tonight the Angel bullpen is superb), but four is enough. Between the first of April and the end of July the Red Sox made losing one-run games an art, but now they have turned that around. By the time Keith Foulke faces the last Anaheim batter of the series, thirty-five thousand or so of the Fenway Faithful—Stewart O’Nan and myself among them—are on their feet, screaming, “SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP!”

Foulke induces a harmless fly ball to Orlando Cabrera at shortstop and the Standells launch into “Dirty Water.” Stewart and I (not to mentionthe rest of the Faithful) have what we came for. It’s unbelievable, but we have swept the Angels. Bring on Texas.

And can I say we? I think I can, and in a wider context than just my Fenway friends on this clear and slightly fallish-feeling Boston night. According to the New England Sports Network (NESN), the first of the three-game series against the Angels drew the biggest ratings of any regular-season baseball game in the network’s history. Seen in 18.5 million homes from Canada to Connecticut, it blew away all the big-network competition. Said color commentator Jerry Remy, “I don’t even know how to think about numbers like that.” (Only Remy, a Massachusetts native, cannot seem to say numbers; he says numbizz.)[47] In any case, the numbizz only underline the meaning of the ninth-inning Fenway Thunder I’ve now heard at the ballpark two nights in a row. This team has caught the imagination of New England. This year it took a while to happen, but it finally did.

And the team has caught mine, as well. This time they—and we—could go all the way. Not saying they will; the odds are still against it. But some team will become the 2004 World Champions, and yes, this could be that team. They certainly have the tools.

Christ, I hope I haven’t jinxed them, saying that.

We’ve won eight in a row and tonight we’re going for the sweep against the Angels, a very good club, yet when Derek Lowe stumbles out of the gate, the Faithful grumble. Not this Lowe, not again. The Lowe who just misses his location and gets frustrated, puts runners on and gets distracted, gets ahead of batters and then throws too nice of a strike. The Lowe who kicks absently at the air like a bummed Little Leaguer after an RBI single.

Colon is having an even worse night. It seems we have two on or bases loaded every inning, but he slows the pace of the game (doing a whole lot of yardwork on the mound), and manages to weasel out of what should be big innings. After three, it’s 4–3 Sox, and at the rate the game’s going, we’ll be here till midnight.

With one down in the Angels’ fourth, Adam Kennedy flies one to Dave Roberts in right. Roberts isn’t a right fielder by trade, and he tracks this one awkwardly, as if he doesn’t quite see it, freezing and then waving at the ball as if it’s suddenly reappeared out of the lights. It hits his glove, then his leg, then the grass. Booooooooo!

It’s tough to hear, since Roberts is an eloquent and genuinely nice guy and a recent addition, and he’s playing out of position, but it’s an important game, and the ball should have been caught. Still, I can’t help reflecting that, even in the best of times, the Faithful are a hanging jury.

Lowe walks the next guy. He’s struggling, and in even more trouble when Chone Figgins pokes a shallow liner to right-center that should drop. The one real tool Roberts has is speed. He reads this ball perfectly, flashing in and diving, picking it cleanly with a nifty backhand. The runner on second is halfway home, and Roberts doubles him up easily to end the threat. A huge, deafening standing O, and gratifying as hell to see a good guy go from goat to hero in a matter of a few pitches.

Lowe seems to take the lesson to heart, and battles into the eighth, when he leaves to a standing O from the same folks (including me) who were shaking their heads a couple hours ago. We hang on for the sweep, knocking the Angels to four and a half back. The turnaround’s complete. Like Dave Roberts and Derek Lowe, with the August it’s had, this team has redeemed itself, and the Faithful are more than grateful, we’re wild with hope.

September 3rd

Tonight’s starter for Texas once pitched for Boston. Red Sox fans remember him well, and not with affection; because of all the home runs he gave up, mostly in a relief role, he became known as John “Way Back” Wasdin. Since then he’s been around, and he’s improved. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to return to the show after a stint in triple-A and land a starting gig with the Rangers, who have performed above expectations all season long and are only now beginning to fade a little in the wild-card race.

We have Pedro Martinez on the mound, and on paper this game looks like a ridiculous mismatch, but I enter Fenway feeling really nervous for the first time since getting here for the second game of the Angels series. Yes, Wasdin is only 2-2, and yes, his current ERA is an unremarkable 7.01, but he remembers perfectly well what the fans here used to call him and he’d really like to be the guy who ends the Red Sox streak. Also, Texas has a formidable hitting lineup. Guys like Michael Young, Kevin Mench, Hank Blalock, and Alfonso Soriano (who came to Texas in the A-Rod trade and has lit it up at Arlington) seem made for Fenway.

All my worries about “Way Back” Wasdin turn out to be justified, and it doesn’t help that two more Red Sox players are sitting wounded on the bench: David Ortiz (shoulder) and Johnny Damon (ankle). Wasdin is throwing some kind of heavy shit[48] that has our makeshift lineup popping up all night, and when Wasdin finally departs, he has given up less than a handful of hits. Luckily for us, one is a home run to Manny and another is a home run to Bill Mueller.

Pedro strikes out nine, and faces only one serious threat, in the seventh. With runners on first and third and two out, Gary Matthews Jr. tests Jason Varitek’s arm by trying to steal second. Varitek passes the test. Orlando Cabrera slaps the tag on Matthews, and that takes care of that. Timlin and Embree tag-team-pitch the eighth and Foulke closes out the ninth. The Standells are singing “Dirty Water” no later than ten past ten and the crowd goes insane. The Sox have won their tenth straight, and I find myself doing the Funky Chicken in the aisle with a seventysomething woman I don’t know from the Lady Eve. She’s wearing a Curt Schilling T-shirt, and that’s good enough for me.

Did I say the crowd goes insane? That’s wrong. They already went. It happened at approximately 9:50 P.M., when the scoreboard showed the Orioles beat the Yankees in the Bronx by a score of 3–1, reducing the Yankees’ lead in the AL East to a mere two and a half games. We’ve gained eight in the East since the middle of August, a stretch of less than three weeks. Later, in my hotel room, I learn that Kevin Brown, who started that game for the Yankees, broke his hand after being pulled. He punched the clubhouse wall in frustration. As so often happens in such battles, he fought the wall and the wall won. At least it was his nonpitching hand, and he’s vowed not to miss a start, but I wonder. For one thing, how’s he gonna wear a glove on that baby?

I never expected to see John Wasdin starting again in Fenway, but with the expanded roster, he gets another chance. And as the Sox complete their fifteenth shutout of the season, and their tenth straight win, Adam Hyzdu, the twenty-sixth man, the last one cut in spring training, makes his 2004 debut as a replacement right fielder. Like Wasdin, he’s made his way back to the show, and if it’s only for a short stay, still, he’s here, playing under the bright lights.

September 4th

Sarah McKenna, a Red Sox media rep, calls me while I’m still doing my morning workout and flummoxes me by asking if I’ll throw out the first pitch before this afternoon’s game. The Farrelly brothers, she says, creators of such amusing (if not quite family-friendly) movies as Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, are making a romantic comedy called Fever Pitch with a Red Sox background, and they want to re-create Opening Day, complete with sellout crowd and giant flag unfurling across the Green Monster.[49] I guess neither Ben Affleck nor Matt Damon is in town, and of course native son John Kerry is otherwise occupied this Labor Day weekend.

I want to do it—hell yes—but I’m still slow about agreeing. Some of my reasons are purely superstitious. Some, although pragmatic, are about superstition. The purely superstitious reasons stem from having thrown out the first pitch at Fenway once before, around the time I published a book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. That was a work of fiction, but in 1998, the year before it was published, Gordon was brilliant—that was a fact.

We lost the game at which I threw out that ceremonial first pitch, and not long after (my memory wants me to believe it was at that very game, but surely that can’t be right), we lost Gordon to an arm injury for the rest of the season. When the 2004 version of Tom Gordon shows up in these pages, he is, of course, wearing the uniform of the hated New York Yankees. And, only a month later, I was struck by a van while walking at the side of the road and badly hurt. Certainly if I had been a baseball player instead of a writer, my career would have been over.

So the last time I threw out a first pitch, bad things happened—for the team, for my favorite player on the team, and for me. Those are the superstitious reasons I’m slow about agreeing to Sarah McKenna’s proposal. The pragmatic reasons about superstition? Well, look. I know how superstitious the ballplayers themselves are, and the fans put them to shame. I mean, some guy actually risked his life to change that Storrow Drive overpass sign from REVERSE CURVE to REVERSE THE CURSE. And the press only eggs them on. Lately there’s been a story on several TV stations about a local Massachusetts teenager who got two of his front teeth knocked out by a foul line drive off the bat of Manny Ramirez. Because this kid just happens to live in the house where Babe Ruth once lived, the curse is now supposed to be broken. Broken teeth, broken curse. Geddit? This is the sort of numbnuts story you kind of expect from the local “If it bleeds it leads” TV in the doldrums of summer…but then, holy shit, the local papers pick it up too. So of course some people actually believe it. Why not? There are still people out there who think Fidel Castro had JFK shot and that cell phones cause brain cancer.

So one thing I know: if I throw out the first pitch and the Red Sox lose, if their ten-game streak ends this afternoon, I will get some of the blame. Because I’m not only a Red Sox fan, I’m (creepy music here) NEW ENGLAND’S HORRORMEISTER!!! And worse—what if someone gets hurt (someone else to go along with Trot, Pokey, and Johnny Damon), or the game ends with a bum call, or—God forbid—there’s some sort of accident in the stands? Or what if the Red Sox go on to lose ten straight, end up nine back of the Yankees again, and four behind Anaheim in the wild card? Nor is this an entirely unbelievable scenario, with three coming up against Oakland (on their turf) and then three more in Seattle, who has suddenly gotten hot. I’LL GET BLAMED FOR THAT TOO! THEY’LL SAY IT ALL STARTED WHEN THAT BASTARD KING THREW OUT THE FIRST PITCH ON SEPTEMBER 4TH!

So of course I say yes.

1 P.M.: It’s stifling hot behind the gigantic American flag, and I’m scared out of my mind. I can’t believe I’ve agreed to do this. On my previous pitching adventure, I only had to walk from the Red Sox dugout to the mound, a matter of twenty-five or thirty steps. Now I’ll be walking in from the deepest part of the park. I am, in fact, positioned just beneath CLE in the out-of-town section of the left-field scoreboard.

My introduction finishes. Marty, my Red Sox minder, lifts the flag forme. I step out into brilliant sunshine and off the warning track, onto green grass. The crowd roars, and I have to remind myself that the PA announcer has cued them to go batshit, has told them that the cameras are rolling, and that they should make as much noise as possible. Still, that forty-second walk is a remarkable period of time for me, every second crystal clear, and as I approach the rusty red dirt of the infield, the exact color of old bricks in a factory wall (I cross at shortstop, where Orlando Cabrera will soon be standing and where Nomar Garciaparra stood for so many years before him), I remember that I promised my daughter-in-law that I’d give the crowd the Manny Salute. I do so without delay, cocking my free hand and glove hand like guns, and the crowd roars louder, laughing and delighted, giving me a verbal high five. It’s probably the best moment, even better than toeing the blinding white strip of the pitcher’s rubber and looking in at Jason Varitek, squatting behind home plate.

Except maybe the moment before I throw is the best moment, because I can see him so clearly (there’s no batter, of course, and he’s not wearing the mask). His face is grave, as if he actually expects me to throw a sixty-foot strike in front of thirty-five thousand people—me, who does his best work in an empty room with a cup of lukewarm tea for company.

And I almost do. My pitch dips at the last second and hits that red-brick dirt just in front of home plate. Varitek catches the ball easily and trots out to give it to me (it’s beside me as I write this, a little red scuff on one curve) as the crowd roars its approval. Varitek is kind, calling it first a sinker, then a “Hideo Nomo strike three.” Too cool.

I try to shake his hand with my glove. That’s how dazed I am.

3:45 P.M.: The good times have rolled and now my darker fears are coming true. Tim Wakefield—my current favorite Red Sox player—is on the mound, and he’s getting lit up. When Terry Francona finally comes out and takes the ball, the score is 8–1, Texas.

4:25 P.M.: The Sox make a game of it, at least—Mark Bellhorn hits a grand slam, and David Ortiz follows with a bases-empty round-tripper—but in the end Boston falls two runs short. There is even that bum call I obsessed about, a phantom tag on Dave Roberts the second-base ump sees as one-half of the game-ending double play. Manny Ramirez is left in the on-deck circle, and the Sox streak ends at ten. I am 0-2 in games where I throw out the first pitch, and tomorrow the newspapers will blame me. I just know it.

SK: I got a LARGE charge out of throwing the first pitch today. Broke off a slider that hit the dirt in front of home plate. Varitek, laughing, called it a “Nomo strike three.” And then we lost. Shit. But still a great game.

SO: Saw you on the tube joking with Tek—v.v. cool. Taped it if you want it. Wake looked awful. What’s his record in day games? Because I’ve seen him at least twice get shelled on beautiful Saturday afternoons. I called the Bellhorn granny, and had a feeling Big Papi would solo right after that. If Bill Mill’s shot up the middle gets through in the eighth, Tek pinch-hits with one out, but that galoot made a skate save. Least the Yanks lost. One more and The Stand’s over. Be sweet to bury the Rangers right here right now. Mr. Schill on the hill.

September 5th

Bob Hohler’s Boston Globe piece on yesterday’s game leads like this: “Searching for scapegoats? Try horrormeister Stephen King, who tossed out a ceremonial first pitch.”

Blame the horrormeister. What did I tell you?

Please, baseball gods, let Curt Schilling win today.

A weird, glancing Sox experience today. We drive the two hours from Avon to Boston, and around game time we deliver Caitlin and all her stuff to her dorm at B.U., then go over to Beacon Street for a farewell lunch. Fenway’s less than a block from us, and fans headed for the rubber game against Texas stream past, decked out in their Red Sox best. So not only do we feel lost, losing Caitlin, it feels like we’re going the wrong way, or doing the wrong thing, as in some unsettling, ominous dream.

On the way home, three now instead of four, we listen to the game unfolding farther and farther behind us. Schilling throws well, and we hold a 4–1 lead until the seventh, when Gabe Kapler adds two more with a bases-loaded single. It turns out that we need them, as Francona unwisely gives Schilling a chance at a complete game. Michael Young—again!—hits a Monster shot, and it’s 6–3 with one down when Foulke comes in. He gets an out with his first pitch, then gives up a single, a double, a single that makes it 6–5, until, finally, as we’re just pulling into the driveway, Bellhorn snares a knee-high bullet to save the game. Yi yi yi.

9:45 P.M.: It was closer than it should have been—the Rangers turned a 6–1 laugher into a 6–5 nail-biter in the top of the ninth—but in the end, Father Curt and the Red Sox prevailed. The Yankees also won (on a bases-loaded walk), and the Angels are winning, but for tonight, at least, I don’t care about the other guys. My personal curse has been lifted. Of course all that superstition stuff is the bunk, anyway, and we all know it. And with that said, I can take off my lucky shirt, turn my pillow lucky side up, and go to bed.

September 6th

While some of the Faithful grouse that we’ve become more and more like the Yankees—signing free agents rather than developing our prospects—the team we most consciously resemble is Oakland. Theo and Bill James tend to follow the tenets of Moneyball, valuing on-base percentage above other indicators, and in our two seasons under their reign, we’ve approached the playoff chase like the A’s, staying close until the All-Star break, making a few deals and then charging. Beyond absorbing Billy Beane’s philosophy, we also appear to be importing players he’s already poached from other teams. Mark Bellhorn, Johnny Damon, David McCarty and Keith Foulke are all recent A’s, as is manager Terry Francona, Oakland’s bench coach in 2003.

So it’s no surprise that the A’s are our constant competition, and that the games we play with them are tight—a situation that ironically does not benefit a Moneyball club (since defense, speed and a closer are less highly prized in Billy Beane’s universe), but a smallball team like the Angels or a more traditional slugging club like the Yankees.

Tonight out by the East Bay, Mark Kotsay (who lost the last Sox-A’s game with his bobble of a Bill Mueller double on the track) solos twice off Arroyo early, but Bronson settles down, retiring eleven in a row. In the fourth Manny and David go back-to-back against Barry Zito to tie it. The game stays that way till the seventh, when Bill Mueller and Dave Roberts hit RBI doubles. The A’s rally to make it 4–3 after a terrible call in the eighth—Manny clearly traps a line drive by Kotsay, yet the ump calls him out—but in the ninth their lack of a pen shows, as Chad Bradford and the ever-unreliable Arthur Rhodes combine to give up four runs, three of them on a David Ortiz bases-clearing double, and we win 8–3. Thank you, Moneyball!

The Yankees, meanwhile, were scheduled to play a doubleheader against Tampa Bay in the Bronx, but due to Hurricane Frances the D-Rays were late getting to the Stadium and missed the first game. Yanks general manager Brian Cashman immediately lobbied the league office for a forfeit (the league turned him down, I’d hope with a look of disbelief). So while in Florida the storm has torn people’s homes and lives apart, the Yankees’ only thought was to use it to pick up an unearned win. Now that’s class.

September 7th

It wasn’t that long ago—at the end of this season’s fantasy August, in fact—that Red Sox writers and commentators (not to mention your run-of-the-mill bleacher creatures) were saying that Boston’s postseason chances might hinge on how well they could do in the upcoming nine-game stretch against the big fish of the AL West, before leaving those sharks to swim—and hopefully to bite one another as seriously as possible—in their own tank. Most hoped for six wins at most, two against the Angels, two against the Rangers, and maybe two against the Oakland Athletics. Many partisans would have been satisfied with five. Few, I think, would have guessed at our current position: six wins and one loss with two of the nine-game set left to play.

When the Red Sox last visited Oakland, during the playoff seriesagainst the Athletics in the fall of 2003, they left a bunch of pissed-off A’s and A’s fans behind. The same was true following last night’s rematch, the only difference being that we have to play them again tonight instead of next year, and tonight the chief object of the A’s ire will be on the mound. That would be the tragickal Mr. Lowe, who supposedly made an obscene gesture toward the Oakland bench after striking out the final player of the game.

The animus of last night’s Oakland Coliseum attendees was directed not at any Red Sox player so much as it was at the ump who ruled Mark Kotsay out after Manny Ramirez appeared—from the ump’s perspective—to have made a rolling, tumbling catch of Kotsay’s dying-quail line drive. Manny actually caught it on what’s known as “the trap-hop,” a fact his diving body obscured from the umpire, who fearlessly made the call, anyway. Manny himself acknowledged this in the locker room, after the game. “I knew I din’ catch the ball,” he said, “but the umpire say I catch the ball, so the guy’s out.” He then shrugged, as if to add, Tough luck, Mark…but we gotta jus’ keep goin’.

To add insult to injury, Kotsay made almost exactly the same play on a Red Sox dying quail of a liner later on in the game, only this time the ump saw the ball hit the ground and ruled the batter safe. Kotsay raised his arms in frustrated body English even a baby could read: Aw, come on! Gimme a makeup call here, Blue!

No makeup calls for Oakland (not last night, anyway), and it probably wouldn’t have helped; in the end, the game just wasn’t that close. That didn’t stop the angry Oakland fans from hurling their trash into the outfield, however. It was a sight that filled me—I admit it—with childish glee. I had zero sympathy for their outrage, given the ump’s honest effort to make an honest call; not so soon after the blown call on Dave Roberts that ended our game against Texas three days ago, and probably, if I’m to be honest, in no case.[50] Blown calls are, after all, a part of the game, and the fans’ rage somehow made this one even tastier. That’s right, ya babies! I thought, watching the hot-dog cartons and empty beer cups rain down. The umps are relaxing in the Officials’ Room, probably soakingtheir tired feet, so take it out on your grounds crew! Go on and chuck that shit, why not?

Are Oakland fans coming to hate us the way we hate the Yankees? There’s an interesting thought.

Trot comes off the DL today, and Pokey, and Johnny, who’s been out with a strained pinkie (when in doubt, pinkie out), is back in the lineup. Scott Williamson, who’s been gone a long time, throws batting practice to Trot and may be ready soon. Mr. Kim, however, appears done for the year. The PawSox finished their season yesterday (as did Cesar Crespo and Brian Daubach, who both contributed to the big club early on), and Theo says they’re putting together a conditioning program so the $10 million man (and his eleven innings of work this year) will be ready in the spring.

Of course, there’s nowhere to put all these guys. The roster, like the dugout, is overflowing. Youk hasn’t seen action in weeks, or McCarty, or Ricky Gutierrez.

No one’s going to rock the boat, though. The team’s doing too well. Tonight Johnny celebrates being back in action by leading off the game with a home run. It’s Derek Lowe’s first appearance in Oakland since his alleged crotch-tugging in the direction of the A’s bench after clinching last year’s divisional playoffs, and the crowd lets him know it. He scuffles early (as usual), but Gabe Kapler clocks a two-run shot for a 3–0 cushion, Billy Mueller makes three highlight-reel stops at third, and once again we bulldoze their number four starter Mark Redman for a 7–1 win, making us 7-1 in our gut-check stretch against Anaheim, Texas and Oakland.

September 8th

I’m primed to stay up late and watch the Pedro–Tim Hudson series finale, hoping for the sweep, but Hudson can’t find the plate, and after three it’s 7–0 Sox and he’s gone, and we haven’t really even hit the ball yet. What do you do when the one strength of your club fails you? You lose. We sweep the A’s at home after sweeping them in Fenway in July.

Even better, the Angels lose, so we’re five up in the wild card. And the rain left over from Hurricane Frances—in a fitting revenge—wipes out the Yanks-D-Rays doubleheader, so we’re only two back in the East, and with the makeups, their rotation’s a mess.

September 9th

The Red Sox offense didn’t beat Tim Hudson last night, and Pedro Martinez can’t exactly take credit, either. After walking the first three batters of the game (four in the first inning) and giving up a double to David Ortiz and a single to Jason Varitek, Hudson pretty much did the job on himself.

Meanwhile, the Yankees’ current series with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays,[51] a seemingly endless exercise in baseball existentialism during which the D-Rays never win and the Yankees never seem to gain ground in the standings, is continuing this afternoon, with the New Yorkers leading in the first game of a doubleheader by a score of quite a bunch to one. I could check and get an exact score, but it hardly seems worth it. Based on my last peek I can tell you that a.) there’s hardly anyone in the stands at the Stadium, and b.) Rocco Baldelli looks like he wishes he were playing for the Tokyo Sunflowers, assuming there is such a team. After last night’s rainout and the Red Sox win in Oakland, the gap in the AL East shrank to a mere two games for the first time since early June, and reading the sports pages of the New York tabs has become a wonderfully cheering pastime for Red Sox fans; the Post and Daily News baseball columnists, used to a steady diet of Yankee triumphs down the stretch, have started to sound like holy-rolling revival-show ministers, warning that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on the horizon: Behold, I saw a pale horse, and on him was Manny, and he spake, saying, “Hey man, we gotta jus’ keep goin’.”

Meanwhile, on other fronts:

The hapless Devil Rays will be more hapless still if Ivan, third and worst hurricane to menace Florida in the last thirty days, blows away their JuiceDome down there in Tampa; like a certain unlucky Jew, they may be doomed to simply wander, dragging their dusty equipment bags behind them, playing everywhere and always batting in the top of the first. “We once had a home,” they’ll tell those who will listen. “It wasn’t very full, and most of the folks who showed up were old, many equipped with shunts and pee bags, but by God it was ours.”

In Foxboro, the New England Patriots, proud winner of exactly one preseason game, prepare to defend their Super Bowl title.

And on I-95, just north of Augusta, Maine, at a little past noon and in a driving downpour (the remains of Hurricane Frances, or so the radio assured me), I saw an oak tree blazing with orange leaves.

Football, autumn colors, hurricanes: omens of the end. Hurry up and finish your four games with Seattle, Red Sox. Hurry up and come home. It’s almost time to deal with the Yankees.

Tonight in the top-left corner of the country, Seattle throws a rookie lefty I’ve never heard of—Bobby Madritsch, whose route to the bigs included time in the independent leagues, the outlaws of the minors—while Tim Wakefield takes the hill for us. Wake came out flat in his last start (our last loss), so he’s due for a solid game. Wrong. The Mariners score early and often, and when a fly to the track goes off Manny’s glove in the fifth for a two-run error, this one’s done. We lose 7–1 while the Yanks sweep a doubleheader from the D-Rays, the first game of which has an officially reported attendance of zero. Zero, as in no one. Zero, as in one less than the guy sitting at his desk writing this. If the Yankees win and no one sees it, does it still count?

September 10th

Losing two straight to the last-place M’s, with Schilling going, isn’t likely, and I’m uncharacteristically certain of this one from the start. Seattle keeps it close till the fifth, when David Ortiz sneaks a line-drive homer over the wall, and then, after an error by backup second baseman Jose Lopez, with two outs, Bill Mueller singles, Dave Roberts doubles, Johnny Damon triples and Mark Bellhorn singles. The next inning, Manny, who started our scoring with a solo shot, piles it on with his 17th career grand slam, and Schilling cruises to become the majors’ first 19-game-winner.

Meanwhile in Baltimore, Javier Vazquez melts down, walking and hitting batters with the bases loaded, and the Yanks go down hard, so we’re two and a half back. Anaheim wins and the A’s lose again, so the Angels are a mere game off the pace in the West. With the unbalanced schedule, the Angels have six games remaining against the A’s and a chance to make them our wild-card rivals.

September 11th

Manny Ramirez hit home runs 39 and 40 last night to amble past Boston’s Dwight Evans on the all-time list and further enhance his MVP chances (although for that to happen Boston will almost certainly have towin the American League flag). Boston didn’t look particularly good against Seattle’s collection of battered veterans and freshly called-up farmhands in the first of the teams’ four-game series and Tim Wakefield suffered for it, but the whole team appeared to be ambling in that game, probably a natural enough result of having just finished an 8-1 tour of duty against Oakland, Texas, and Anaheim. Father Curt took matters in hand last night, thank God (he “righted the ship,” as the Sports Cannibals like to say), and bagged his 19th win in the process.

The Angels, currently five back in the wild-card race, are now the only other contender for that ticket to the postseason dance.[52] They have nineteen games left, two against the so-so ChiSox, seven against the shlubby Seattle Mariners, and ten against good teams, including six against Oakland. We, on the other hand, have six games left against the Yankees, and eight against Baltimore, who has played us tough all year. The moral of this story is simple—we gotta jus’ keep goin’, man.

Arroyo threw well against the Mariners in his other start against them and got screwed out of a W when the pen fell apart. Tonight he’s wearing some of the ugliest dirty-blond white-boy cornrows I’ve ever seen, but he pitches beautifully, that hard curve of his dropping off the outside corner, making hitters lunge. Manny homers again, and Mark Bellhorn. Kevin Youkilis starts at third to give Bill Mueller a breather, and by the late innings Pokey Reese, David McCarty and Ricky Gutierrez all get some playing time.

In the ninth we’re up 7–0 when Adam Hyzdu sees his first at-bat as a Red Sock. He looks anxious—and awful, chasing pitches away. He’s down 1-2, and I think how much that would suck, striking out in your one at-bat all year. Hyzdu lines a double to the wall in left, knocking in a run. So he’s batting a thousand and slugging two.

When the Sox have to declare their playoff roster (knock wood), some of these guys aren’t going to be on it. We keep having to make room on the expanded roster for people coming off the DL—like Scott Williamson last night—and with all the guys we added in midseason, I wonder if guys like McCarty and Pokey won’t be going to the party. And can we keep Dave Roberts, Trot and Kapler as backups? Someone’s going to be left out the way Dauber and Cesar Crespo have already been left behind.

September 12th

My “too quiet” prediction comes true, as righty Gil Meche scatters five Red Sox hits for a complete-game 2–0 shutout. Manny sabotages our best scoring chance in the first: with one out and two on, he forgets how many outs there are and gets doubled up off second on what should be an easy sac fly. Derek Lowe’s only mistake is a two-run shot to Raul Ibanez. Time of game: two hours, twenty-two minutes.

September 13th

In the mail, a gift from Steve: The Year of the Gerbil, by Con Chapman, a chronicle of the 1978 pennant race. The Gerbil, of course, was just part of Bill “Spaceman” Lee’s nickname for then Sox manager Don Zimmer. The whole name was The Mad Gerbil. On the cover is a shot from the TV feed from the one-game playoff, the center-field camera keying on Bucky Dent just after his fateful swing, Mike Torrez starting to follow the ball up and to his right. Torrez, I’m surprised to see, is wearing Roger Clemens’s #21. Another good reason to retire it.

September 14th

The Yankees got roughed up again last night, roughed up bad, this time by lowly Kansas City. The final score of that game was 17–8, and this morning the New York sportswriters will once more be eating their gizzards out about the pinstripes’ lack of pitching—lovely. The Red Sox, meanwhile, only split with cellar-dwelling Seattle, which is a long way from wonderful, but the road trip is over, four more games are off the schedule, and we’re coming back to Fenway Park almost exactly where we were in the standings when we left: three games behind the Yankees in the East, four and a half ahead of the Angels in the wild card. Furthermore, we’re looking at three with the hapless Devil Rays, and the Sox have been strong against them this year. So, at least until we meet the Yankees on the seventeenth, all’s okay with the world, right?

Wrong. There’s a problem. A big one. Father Curt is on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week, that’s the problem. He’s standing on the mound at Fenway with his arms spread and every letter on the front of his uniform clearly visible.

How could they?

With all the other stuff we have to worry about, how damn could they? Because while there’s no evidence of the Curse of the Bambino other than the failure of the Red Sox to win the World Series since 1918 (and they are not alone in that), there’s plenty of evidence that the Sports Illustrated Curse actually exists.[53]

Two games after his cover appearance on SI, Kurt Warner suffered an injury that sidelined him for five games (although in Warner’s case I’m at least willing to admit the possibility that Campbell’s Soup may have been a contributing factor). One day after Anna Kournikova appeared on the SI cover, she was bounced from the French Open, her earliest exit from a Grand Slam event in three years. In his first Monday Night Football game after his cover shot, Howard Cosell went from hero to zero by referring to a Redskins wide receiver as “that little monkey.” After Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves appeared on the cover, the Braves dropped fourteen of their next fifteen games. Other sufferers of the SI Jinx have included Tom Watson, Kirk Gibson, George Brett, Pedro Martinez’s brother, Ramon…and ex–Red Sox franchise player Nomar Garciaparra. After Nomar, stripped to the waist and looking most righteously buff, appeared on the cover, he went down with a popped wrist tendon and played hardly at all during the first half of the season.

And now, in addition to all our injuries and our far-from-secure lead in the wild card, in addition to a three-game bulge for the Yankees that won’t seem to shrink any lower than two games, I have to cope with the near certainty that Curt Schilling will not manage to win twenty games in the regular season, but will remain stuck on nineteen instead. Martinez, Wakefield, Arroyo, and the tragickal Mr. Lowe will have to take up the slack.

Thanks, Sports Illustrated.

Thanks a pantload.

You guys suck.

Behind Fenway, at the corner of Yawkey Way and Van Ness Street, sits the players’ parking lot. Four hours before game time the Sox take over Van Ness, barricading both ends and evicting any parked cars. By then a sizable clump of autograph hunters is already waiting. There’s no way you can get close enough to the players’ Mercedeses and Volvos and Range Rovers as they pull in (or Gabe Kapler’s and Kevin Millar’s chromed-out hogs), and the tall fence surrounding the lot is lined with a heavy green tarp so you can’t see in, but a hundred feet down Van Ness there are three horizontal slots cut into the fence about thigh-high, and as the players walk from their rides to the clubhouse entrance, some will stop to sign.

The slots are uncomfortably close to glory holes, with all that that implies. The only way to tell who’s coming is to kneel on the concrete, press your cheek against the metal edge and peer sideways through the slot like the opening of a pillbox.

Today I’m the first one there, and stake out a spot at the end of the first slot. Position is everything: some guys will sign just a few and then break off, leaving fans at slots two and three grumbling. I’ve also chosen a weekday for my hunting because weekends people are packed six and seven deep, and I’d feel like a heel claiming a spot before some little kid (little kids also have no qualms about stepping on you or crawling over your back).

As the other hunters show up, I realize that compared to them, I am a little kid, a rank amateur. They’re mostly pros, dealers who owe each other money and merchandise. They bring bat-bags full of Big Sticks, boxes of balls, albums of eight-by-ten glossies—high-ticket items they can sell on eBay. As we stand there waiting for the Sox to arrive, they’re cutting deals and boasting of recent acquisitions, trading information about upcoming shows.

“What are you working there?” one asks me. “Hat? Couple a balls?”

I try explaining that the hat’s for me—to wear—but it’s impossible for him to understand that I’m just a fan.

The coaches arrive first, together. No one wants them but me. No one seems to know who Ino Guerrero is, or care. I’m psyched to get Adam Hyzdu’s autograph on his PawSox card, while they just shrug. Likewise, when the middling Devil Rays players come walking right past us on Van Ness, the pros let them pass (“Damian Rhodes,” one calls Damian Rolls, “used to play for Baltimore”—mixing him up with old closer Arthur Rhodes).

When Jason Varitek signs, everyone behind me mobs the slot, crushing me down against the fence, reaching their merchandise over my shoulders and past my ears. Because all Tek can see of us are our hands, the pros get a first autograph, bounce out and grab a second bat or ball from their arsenal, shove in again and snag another. Double-dipping, it’s called, and while frowned upon (especially when not everyone gets even one autograph), it’s the pros’ bread and butter.

“How many Variteks you get?”

“Three.”

“Ha, I got four.”

I get one and I’m happy. Thanks, Tek.

Johnny Damon signs for a long time. Like Tek, he always tries to sign for everyone, and is always polite and nice. For a guy who looks like a wild man, he’s surprisingly soft-spoken, and has impeccable manners, even with the pushiest fans; his parents should be proud. Pokey signs (he doesn’t always), and Mark Bellhorn. The pros gripe about some other players who blow us off—Schilling and Wake especially (though Wake, I’ve heard, only signs for charities, and you have to respect that). They say Pedro and Manny are almost impossible to get out here, and that they hardly ever even see Orlando Cabrera.

Doug Mientkiewicz takes the time to sign, and Doug Mirabelli, Dave McCarty, Ricky Gutierrez, Billy Mueller, Dave Roberts. The hat looks great—silver Sharpie on black. By four o’clock I’ve got half the club. If I came tomorrow and Thursday as well, I’d be able to get most everyone. And even after three hours of being squashed and elbowed and having to listen to the dealers brag and haggle, I know I’ll be coming back. Because while most of these guys are pros, and hustling hard, there’s still something kid-like and hopeful about them. The rumor is that next year when the team enlarges the clubhouse the slots in the fence will be no more. I hope that’s not true, because for a fan like me, this is as close to the players as I’ll ever get.

September 15th

Pedro Martinez has pretty much owned Tampa Bay, the Red Sox have pretty much owned everyone while at Fenway Park, and the hapless Devil Rays were sending a twenty-year-old rookie named Scott Kazmir to the mound last night. The result, of course, was a comfy Tampa Bay win. At one point Kazmir struck out five in a row, and the only bright spot for the Faithful was an eighth-inning home run from the newly returned Trot Nixon. We have fallen a game further behind the Yankees (the Mariners beat the Angels, at least, there is that much joy in Mudville), and I find myself doing two things this morning to start the day. One is marking another game off the schedule. The other is wondering why, why, why Father Curt ever agreed to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Tim Wakefield has struggled—to be generous—in his last few starts. Tonight he gives up a run right out of the gate. Mark Bellhorn’s two-run shot off D-Rays starter Dewon Brazelton in the bottom of the first gives us the lead, only to have Wake give it back. In the fourth we scrap for two more, but Wake immediately surrenders a pair. It’s not that they’re shelling him, it’s just the usual fallout from the knuckler: some walks, a wild pitch, five stolen bases. That’s it: when Kevin Millar’s two-run Monster shot gives us a 6–4 lead in the fifth, Francona turns to Curtis Leskanic (he threw okay last night, right?). Three batters later, Tampa triple-A call-up Jorge Cantu ties the game with a blast high off the Sports Authority sign. Not to be outdone, in the bottom of the inning Lou Piniella counters by using four pitchers to worm out of a bases-loaded no-out jam. It almost works—all we get is one on a Manny sac fly. We tack on another in the seventh when Trot’s grounder goes through shortstop Julio Lugo’s legs and pinch runner Dave Roberts motors around. We’re leaving men on all over the place, but Timlin sets up and Foulke closes neatly, and we bag a long, ugly 8–6 win. Since the streak we’ve been playing terrible ball, splitting the last six with cellar dwellers, and yet, with the Angels and A’s losing once again, we’re now five and a half up in the wild card, our biggest lead yet, with only eighteen games to go. In other words: we’re closer to the postseason than we’ve been all year.

September 16th

Tonight’s the kind of game we’ve overlooked in the past: the last home game with a patsy before heading down to the Stadium. Before the advent of Curt Schilling, we’d be scrambling to get our rotation in order for the Yanks, try to throw a number four or five guy and get burned. With Schilling going tonight, we’re confident of a quality start and can rest assured that Petey will be going Sunday.

So this one’s the mismatch we want (the one we’ve paid for). We jump on D-Rays starter Mark Hendrickson for three quick runs. Lou’s going to play us tough though: with one down in the first he’s got a guy warming. It’s pointless; Schill wants his 20th. His splitter’s nasty and his location is spot-on. We’re up 6–0 when Kevin Millar hits a Monster shot to spark a five-run seventh, and we’re set for the big (but probably hurricane-rainy) weekend in the Bronx.

September 17th

Two more games off the schedule. Boston’s three-game series with the hapless Devil Rays—the last time the Red Sox will see them at home this year—is concluded. The Sox won games two and three. Father Curt stood up to the Curse of Sports Illustrated last night by remaining in the game until the eighth (with a three-hit shutout until a Rocco Baldelli home run in the sixth) and becoming the first pitcher in the majors this year to win twenty games. The man is a horse, no doubt about it, but he’s also had the kind of run support he almost never saw in his Diamondback days, and there’s no doubt about that, either. His teammates, who have provided him with a staggering number of runs per start,[54] last night staked him to three in the first and eight more by the time he left to a standing O.

Wakefield’s start two nights ago was a smellier kettle of fish. I purposely stayed away from this manuscript when it was over, because any words I wrote would have begun harshly: “This team is almost ready for postseason, where they will become some better club’s stepping-stone.” Tim Wakefield did not figure in the decision, and looked terrible for the third outing in a row. The talking heads have begun to speculate that Terry Francona may go to a four-man rotation in postseason, and that if he does, Wake will be the odd man out.

This may or may not happen, but the simple fact of Boston’s 8–6 win over Tampa Bay on the evening of September 15th was that almost every pitcher Francona sent to the mound in Wakefield’s wake (with the sole exception of Keith Foulke, who pitched a one-two-three ninth) looked terrible. There may not be a Curse of Sports Illustrated (I’ll wait and see on that one), but there certainly is a Curse of Middle Relief in the big leagues, and once you get past Mike Timlin (and—maybe—Alan Embree), the Red Sox also suffer from the disease.

I’ve rarely gone to bed after a win feeling as unhappy and unsettled as I did after that game on the fifteenth. Usually when I can’t sleep, what I see are key plays that went against my team (Jorge Posada’s flare of a single against Pedro in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, for instance). What I kept seeing after that second game against Tampa Bay—a game we probably deserved to lose—was Curtis “The Mechanic” Leskanic shaking his head after giving up the two-run dinger that allowed the hapless D-Rays to pull even, 6–6, late in the game. Why are you shaking your head? I wanted to scream at him. This is a team filled with weak hitters, Punch and Judy hitters, but they’re still major league hitters, my friend, and if you hang one, it’s going out of the yard. What’s so hard to figure out about that?

Never mind, I tell myself; that night’s ugly piece of work and Father Curt’s thing of beauty last night are both going to look the same in the win column at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, we’re just three and a half games out of first, and tonight it’s Yankees–Red Sox.

I really don’t expect to get this one in, with the train of Hurricane Ivan due, but there’s been such hype (and that rarity—an actual capacity crowd at the Stadium, not just a paper sellout, thanks to us) that George will do whatever it takes to play it. In the third there’s a rain delay. From their cozy NESN studios, Tom Caron and Eck gush over highlights from the last Yankee series in Fenway. Here’s the Tek–A-Rod tiff, and Bill Mueller’s walk-off shot against Mo—tape we’ve seen hundreds of times already.

In fifteen minutes we’re back, though it still seems to be spitting. And then a few outs later, it’s pouring, and here comes the tarp.

TC and Eck babble for a good twenty minutes before resorting to canned stuff. And what canned stuff should they run first but Steve himself, dispelling the curse and telling us where he was in ’78 and ’86 and ’03 when the roof caved in. In ’86 he’s in his car outside his place in western Maine because that’s the only reception he can get; he’s sitting there with the door open and an unopened bottle of champagne on the seat beside him. Now that’s a storyteller, putting you right there with just the right details.

You know it’s a serious rain delay when NESN cuts to the nature shows. At least it’s not Canadian football.

And so, like Yeats’s great rough beast, The Rivalry has once more come round at last.[55] The Red Sox are in New York for three. I’m here for the middle game, and so is Stewart O’Nan. Between publicity for Faithful (not to mention work on the book itself, which I am now doing) and more publicity for the children’s version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I expect to be immured in hardball until I go back to Maine on Monday night.

With that in mind, I decided I would take Friday night off entirely, and give my nerves a rest. I decided to go to a movie—something with subtitles, the sort of thing that never plays at the North Conway Sixplex or the Bethel Station Fourplex back home—and then return to my hotel, where I’d go straight to bed without even checking the score, lest I be sucked in. I thought the Sox would probably lose the opener, anyway (with the exception of the August streak, they have made a career of losing openers this season, it seems) and I could read about it in the New York Times the following day—not the Post, the Post is simply too gloaty when the hometown teams win.

Well, I didn’t exactly give my nerves a rest; I saw an extremely nervous-making French suspenser called Red Lights, but my plan remained on course until I got back to my hotel at around 10 P.M. Then everything fell down. And why, you ask? Because the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry is simply in the air if you happen to be in one of those two cities, and especially if you happen to be in the one where the games are being played. Oh, it’s maybe not a big deal among the sort of people who flock to see French suspense movies (with white subtitles that are almost impossible to read when superimposed on white backgrounds, as at least 60 percent of these seemed to be), but when I got back to the hotel, the doorman took a look at my T-shirt (a gift from Stewart O’Nan, it features a picture of David Ortiz and reads I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BIG PAPI) and greeted me with “Hey, Mr. King! Welcome back! Your Sox are up one-zip in the third!”

One of the car-park guys joined us at that moment, favored me with a rather loathsome smile—if it was supposed to project sympathy, it failed miserably—and said, “Nah, it’s tied, one to one.”

Then the house detective, for whom I’d signed a book earlier, came out through the revolving doors. “Nope,” he said. “It’s two to one, Yanks. Olerud just homered.”

So much for my resolution. Five minutes later—no, three—I was sitting in my room with my Red Sox cap out of my suitcase and on my head, watching the game.

Now, the players—some of them, at least—will try to tell you that a match like this is just another game, and that if it is more important, it’s because of the lateness of the season and “the swing”—first playing second. Few if any of them actually believe such nonsense. You can see it in their eyes during their locker-room interviews, and you can certainly see it in the level of play they bring to the field.[56] Yankees–Red Sox is a classic rivalry, last night’s game was one of the best in it I’ve ever seen… and I only saw it from the fifth inning on! If not for two rain delays totaling almost an hour and a half (almost exactly the length of my foreign film), I probably would have missed the whole damned thing, and I’m so glad I didn’t miss all the excitement in an effort to spare my nerves another jolt of what I was sure they would have to endure: Rivera successful, Yankees triumphant.

The part I did miss was Johnny Damon’s upper-deck shot to put the Red Sox ahead 1–0 (I also missed chortling gleefully over how George Steinbrenner must hate all that hair flying gaily in the wind as Damon rounds the bases) and the Ramirez Show: first the Shakespearian non-homer (fair was foul after all) and then the sensational Air Manny catch that robbed Miguel Cairo of his own home run. The fun of that one, of course, every bit as good on the replays, was watching Cairo run the bases in absolute surety that he’d hit the ball out, and his blank look of amazement when he was informed—after slapping the bemused third-base coach’s hand on his way home—that he’d been out during his whole tour of the base paths.

I was there, however, by then in my underwear (but still wearing my David Ortiz T-shirt and my Red Sox hat) when Mariano Rivera came in to seal the deal with the Yankees leading, 2–1, in the top of the ninth. That he’s one of the great ones there can be no doubt (Johnny Damon says flatly that Rivera is the greatest closer of all time), but he has problems with the Red Sox. Bill Mueller touched him—hard—for a two-run walk-off home run in the July rhubarb game at Fenway, and last night Rivera blew the save with one out and then blew the game with two out. You didn’t have to be a lip-reader to see what he was yelling at center fielder Kenny Lofton when Damon’s broken-bat flare (another of those dying-quail shots that seem to have decided so many games between these two clubs) dropped ten or twelve feet in front of Lofton on the wet grass:Catch the ball! But in fact, Rivera had no one to blame but himself… or the Red Sox, who simply wouldn’t quit and let Rivera pick up his fiftieth save in peace.

The Yankee closer walked Trot Nixon, who was replaced by the speedy Dave Roberts. Then he hit Kevin Millar, who was replaced by the fairly speedy Gabe Kapler. With two on and one out, I expected a game-ending double play. Instead, Orlando Cabrera singled through the hole into right. Kevin Youkilis followed with a strikeout (I love Youk, but he was simply overmatched in the ninth last night). Then came Damon, and… ball game.

You would say that tomorrow’s game—assuming the remains of Hurricane Ivan don’t wash it out—couldn’t possibly measure up. But with these two teams, I’m afraid to say anything but this: it’s going to be another game off the schedule, and last night we maintained our good hold on the wild card. The gap between us and the Yankees for the top spot in the AL East has, meanwhile, once more shrunk to a mere two and a half games.

Like happy families, all blown saves are alike. You overthrow and leave the ball up and out and walk the leadoff guy. Get behind the second guy and hit him. Miss your location and a .260 hitter goes the other way on you, and your right fielder with the best arm on the team throws one up the line so their speedy pinch runner scores. Next guy bloops one that your center fielder usually gets, but this time—for no other reason than things are going to hell—he pulls up and the ball drops, another run scores, and you’ve just blown another save.

Closers blow saves; that’s just a fact of baseball. Yankee fans will say that Mariano Rivera doesn’t, but here’s proof—-again—that it doesn’t matter if you’re Mo or John “Way Back” Wasdin or the old Derek Lowe or Eric Gagne or Eck in his prime. Closers blow saves. You just hope they aren’t important ones. Like Game 7 of the World Series. Oh, sorry, Mo.

September 18th

For our publicity mission to Yankee Stadium (where the only sellouts are the players), I wear my Bill Mazeroski jersey. On the train down, I sit beside an older Yankee fan wearing a Yogi Berra cap. As you’ll remember, Yogi was playing left that fateful October day in Forbes Field and watched the Yanks’ hopes fly over his head and over the wall. The guy next to me doesn’t recognize the jersey, and I think—perhaps uncharitably—that being oblivious of history is a luxury we, as Sox fans, can’t afford.

Later, at the Stadium, in response to the chant “Nineteen eighteen,” I turn around and bellow “Nineteen sixty.”

And—I swear to God—one kid says, “What happened in 1960?”

September 19th

The first game of this series was a pulse-pounder which the Red Sox won in their last at-bat. In yesterday’s, played under swag-bellied gray skies and in a drizzle that had become a steady rain by the seventh, the Yankees really won it in the first, when they tacked a five-spot on the tragickal Mr. Lowe, to the joy of the not-quite-full Stadium. (Not to say the relief.) They added four more in the second and were off to the races. By then Mr. Lowe was gone, suffering from a tragickal blowe to the ankle, inflicted by ye olde horsehide sphere. It was, we are told, his earliest exit from a game in five years. I wasn’t terribly surprised at how poorly he performed. Mr. Lowe is simply having one of Those Years.

As for the Yankees…well, they seem to be making a kind of goal-line stand: This close and no closer, with the this close part being two games. At one point in yesterday’s game it was 13–0 bad guys, and the mostly unremarkable Yankee hurler Jon Lieber took a no-no deep into the game, before David “I Love It When You Call Me Big Papi” Ortiz hit a home run to break up that nonsense.

Worst of all, Scribner, who plans to publish this book, had set up an interview with Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today at the ballpark, along with a photographer who took pictures of Stewart and me until every Yankee fan in our immediate vicinity[57] had gotten a good gawk and a chance to boo. I have decided that hell is probably an endless photo op at an opposing team’s ballpark where your club is getting its fudge packed most righteously, to the great glee of the sellout crowd where you are not being allowed to hide like the microbe you would dearly love to be.

At last we were allowed to escape, and could I have written all that yesterday? Technically, yes. It was a Saturday-afternoon game, and I had plenty of time later on to jot these fan’s notes. Emotionally, no. I was too bummed out. And the bottom line? The ironic bottom line? After all the emotional highs and lows of the last two games, the Boston Red Sox are exactly where they were before coming to New York. Yes! We’re three and a half behind in the AL East, and thanks to an Angels loss to Texas yesterday, we are five and a half ahead in the wild card. So in the end, it’s just two more games off the ever-diminishing schedule.

Ah, but this afternoon comes the cherry on the banana split: Martinez versus Mussina. 1:05 P.M., at the Stadium. Wonder if I could scalp myself a little ticket to that game?

Hmmmm.

Later: I did, and Pedro was awful. The Red Sox were awful. The New York fans were loathsomely jubilant. I paid $350 for a box seat and watched the Yanks put an 11–1 pounding on my Sox. This afternoon, even the sunshine was awful. It was, in many ways, the apotheosis of the Dark Side Red Sox fan experience: the Red Sox fan not as Fearless Booster of the Underdog but as Beaten Loser, slinking from the park with his head down, eager to put the sound of those cheering fans behind him and clinging to the twin tenets of the Manny Ramirez Credo for comfort: Turn the page and We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man.

Tomorrow, Wakefield faces the Birds at Fenway Park. I hope, because I am faithful. I fear, because I know that when you’re going bad, you usually get more of the same.

The best news is quiet news from the West Coast: the Angels are also weekend losers, and we’re still five and a half games up in the wild-card race. On that side of the dance card, it’s just two more games off the schedule. But yes, I fear the Orioles, with whom we have gone 1-4 so far this season at Fenway, where we have won so many against other teams.

Today we get our asses kicked again, 11–1, with most of the damage done in an eight-run fifth, as the Yanks chase Pedro. It’s humiliating, the kind of loss your friends at school will taunt you about tomorrow.

It’s also strangely unreal. The Yankees aren’t this good (even with performance-enhancing drugs), and we’re not this bad, and I have a creeping suspicion that this is payback for Friday night. We—Sox fans, I mean—get the thrilling comeback win, and their fans get the revenge blowouts. Looking back at how Mo blew the save Friday night (walk, hit batsman, missed location (and Sheffield’s bad throw), bloop that Lofton for some reason pulls up on), I suspect (at the risk of being labeled paranoid) this is all being orchestrated to ramp up interest on both sides. When a team does nothing to win and still wins, you have to wonder. Of course, 1986’s Game 6 is a classic example of that: walk, hit batsman, muffed grounder.

Mo also blew the Tek–A-Rod game with a gopher ball to Bill Mueller after throwing one to Trot that he just missed.

And Mo blew Game 7 of the 2001 series. This fan’s got to wonder.

The goal would be the dullest but most important of goals—financial security. Obscene TV ratings lead to obscene TV contracts. And who could blame the league? TV money floats the whole show. Just look at the NHL (if you can find them) for the flip side.

September 20th

Wake tonight against Baltimore, and there’s a sense of letdown, as if these games mean less. It’s not true, of course; it’s just a by-product of all the hype, and the fact that it’s Monday. (It’s no coincidence that of the six series we play against the Yanks, all but one straddle a weekend.)

Wake’s lost three straight and has looked awful. Tonight he’s sharp until the fourth, when he walks a batter, gives up a ground-ball single, hits a guy, walks a run in, then surrenders a grand slam to B. J. Surhoff. The O’s add three more in the fifth, walking and stealing bases, taking advantage of a passed ball and a blown rundown, and while we chip away late to make the final 8–6, this one was in reach only for one or two at-bats.

The Angels win so they’re four and a half back. Most of the Faithful think the wild card’s in the bag, but we have problems with the O’s, and face them seven times in our last thirteen games. Honestly, I’d rather play the Yankees.

September 21st

Dear Red Sox,

It’s my birthday, and I’d like you to give me a present. After three straight losses, I’d like a win tonight, and with Father Curt on the mound, I think I have a chance of getting one. Even more than a win, I’d like you guys to take stock of your current situation—do you think you could do that for me?

First, since the splendid (and cattily crafty) win over the Yankees on the 17th, when Red Sox pitching gave up just two runs, the Boston staff has given up an average of eleven runs per game. The starters, so good during the August run, have been horrible.

Second, Baltimore continues their absolute dominance of the Red Sox, and this had better change. The regular season has now dwindled to a mere thirteen games, and seven of them—the majority, in other words—are with these perennial Red Sox killers.

Third, the Angels show signs of snapping out of their funk. They won last night, shaving a full game off your wild-card lead. You guys had better realize that wild-card deal isn’t sealed yet. Yes, the Angels have six games left against the A’s…but we have three left against the Yanks. It’s time to start winning some damn games against Baltimore. It’s been a long time since a sellout Fenway crowd was as quiet as the one last night (especially with the Yankees losing). I think they sense you guys going bad and are waiting, hoping, for you to shake it off. So am I. So start tonight with a win, okay? Because, after the glory of the last six weeks, a September choke would be dismal, indeed.

Thanking you in advance,

Stephen King

10:35 P.M.: Baseball’s a funny damn game. I got my birthday present, but it was Red Sox second baseman Mark Bellhorn who gave it to me after thehome-plate umpire tried to snatch it away (and after he did snatch away Curt Schilling’s twenty-first win of the season).

After seven and a half innings of scoreless baseball, during which Father Curt bagged fourteen Birds by way of the K, the Red Sox—who have had to struggle far too hard for the five or so wins they’ve managed against the O’s this year—manufactured a single skinny run. On came Keith Foulke, the Boston closer. He got the first two guys, then surrendered a base hit. This brought Sox-wrecker Javy Lopez to the plate. Foulke, who had never surrendered a hit to Mr. Lopez before tonight, massaged the count to 0-2. Then, twice, he threw clear strikes[58] which the umpire called balls. Finally Foulke hung a 2-2 slider that Lopez lost, high and gone, into the night.

In the bottom of the ninth, Boston put runners on second and third with nobody out (my man Kevin Youkilis led the inning with a walk). Then David McCarty popped up and Johnny Damon struck out. Just when I was absolutely convinced that the Sox were going to scuffle to their fourth loss in as many games, this time squandering a brilliant pitching performance in the process, Bellhorn laced a double to right, winning the game and bringing the Sox out of the dugout in a joyous mob of red-and-white uniforms while the Standells played and the crowd went bonkers: a little touch of Fenway magic on my birthday, not bad.

And even a little something extra: tonight we have a magic number in the wild-card race. It’s eight. Any combination of Boston wins and Anaheim losses adding up to that number puts us in the postseason.

September 22nd

NESN, in a strange late-season move, changes the format of their morning SportsDesk to thirty minutes and replaces beloved girl-next-door anchor Jayme Parker with heavily coiffed and tailored Hazel Mae, formerly a postgame analyst (read: talking head) with the Toronto Blue Jays. In an introductory guest spot between innings with Don and Jerry, she lays down a swinging patter, trying to be chummy and knowledgeable, but comes off as slick and insincere as a game-show host, without a touch of irony. She’s a pro, no doubt, but her style is wrong for dumpy, low-budget NESN: we New Englanders distrust fast-talking outsiders. And she’s talking mighty fast now, flying out ahead of herself as if she’s nervous—as if she suddenly realizes what she’s gotten herself into. I can smell the flop sweat through the TV. Don tries to help, feeding her cues to lighten and redirect her spiel. Jerry just stands there, giving her enough rope.

Foulked again. For the second straight night, he gives up a bomb in the ninth to tie the game, this time to the literally hobbling Rafael Palmeiro. We go to extras, where Curtis Leskanic makes us hold our breath before getting out of a bases-loaded jam with an improbable 3-2-4 DP (Pokey alertly covering first), and then Orlando Cabrera, who had a chance to win it in the ninth but ducked a pitch that would have hit him with bases juiced, knocks one onto the Monster for a walk-off and another bouncing celebration at home.

September 23rd

The Birds are making it outrageously hard, and Keith Foulke has blown a pair of saves (one with the help of outrageously bad home-plate umpiring, ’tis true), but the Red Sox pulled out another one last night (walk-off home run in the bottom of the twelfth, advantage Mr. Cabrera), and the Angels dropped another one. The magic number thus drops to five, and with the Yankees’ loss to Toronto and New York’s impending weekend visitto our house, even the AL East gold ring seems within our reach. This September still ain’t a patch on August…but I’d have to say it’s improving.

Grady Little is no longer the Red Sox manager, ostensibly for his mistrust of the bullpen in an important game. Tonight new manager Terry Francona shows his faith by resting the hard-ridden Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke and letting lefty specialist and submariner Mike Myers pitch to a right-handed hitter with bases loaded and the score tied in the eighth. Then in the ninth, he lets righty specialist and submariner Byung-Hyun Kim (no, that’s not a typo) pitch to a left-handed batter with two on. Bill James—hell, any Strat-O-Matic junkie—could have told you these were low-percentage moves. Francona’s trust in his idiotic luck costs us four runs, and, when Manny gets two of those back in the ninth and David Ortiz’s two-out, two-strike blast to right settles into David Newhan’s glove, proves to cost us the game. Wake up the talk-radio cranks, it’s Grady time!

(A side note: Ellis Burks, who’ll be retiring after the season, pinch-hits in the ninth for what may be his last major league at-bat. When he first came up from Pawtucket in 1987, he was a reedy outfielder just beginning to develop power. Since then he’s ripped over 2,000 hits and 350 home runs (nifty trivia: he’s homered against every club in the majors). This year he was hurt and wasn’t really part of the on-field effort, but he’s a clubhouse presence and sentimental favorite. After receiving a warm standing O, Ellis fights B. J. Ryan deep into the count before blooping a single to center. At forty, on creaky knees, he’s still a professional hitter. We applaud long and loud as he’s lifted for a pinch runner, and he goes into the dugout with a smile. Thanks, Ellis.)

September 25th

Was there the slightest hitch in Terry Francona’s walk last night in the eighth inning when he finally went out to take the ball from Pedro Martinez’s hand, and the boos began raining down from the Fenway Faithful? I was sitting in my usual place, just a row up from foul territory between home and first on the Sox side of the field—just about the best seat in the house—and I say there was. If so, such a hitch would indicate surprise. And if Francona was surprised, it would indicate that not even a full season at the helm of this team has taught him the most fundamental thing about the clientele it and he serves: this is no ordinary hardball fan-base. The New Englanders who follow the Red Sox are as deeply scarred by loss, particularly loss to the Yankees, as they are loyal to their club. But it’s more specific than that. They are especially scarred—traumatized would not betoo strong a word—by loss to the Yankees in the late innings, with Pedro Martinez, long regarded as the team’s ace, on the hill. If Francona cannot grasp that, he cannot succeed in Boston.

The Red Sox lost to New York last night 6–4, in spite of home runs by Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and the fiery, not-to-be-denied Trot Nixon. That they played otherwise with remarkable dullness for a team facing its archrival in a last-ditch effort to capture the divisional flag hardly matters, even when you add in the fact that they did it in front of the fans that have loved them so long and so well (if fruitlessly). Love is blind, and most of them will either be back in the park (that would include me and Stewart) or in front of their televisions tonight, rooting for David Ortiz to hit a couple of bombs, and for Orlando Cabrera to make a few more sparkling plays (my scorebook says he made a six-pack of them last night, although he went only 1 for 4 at the plate). We’ll find something to cheer, you may depend on it. To a lover, even a smallpox scar is a beauty mark.

What we won’t forget—and what the newspapers are full of this morning—is Terry Francona leaving Pedro Martinez too long at the fair, in a gruesome replay of the 2003 ALCS Game 7. We came into the eighth leading the Yankees, 4–3. I think everyone in the park, including Yankee skipper Joe Torre, expected to see Timlin and Embree tag-team that frame while Pedro took his well-earned rest on the bench. But Francona, who apparently never read that thing about how the coach who doesn’t learn from the past is condemned to repeat Remedial Baseball, sent Martinez trudging back out, although the little guy’s pitch count was well over a hundred by then. The result was what everybody who wasn’t asleep expected. Hideki Matsui lost the second pitch he saw, tying the game.

Francona, then giving a perfect demonstration of why we stayed in Vietnam as long as we did, left Martinez in to prove he had not made the mistake he had in fact made. Williams doubled. Francona still left Martinez in, taking him out only after he had fanned Posada and then given up the go-ahead RBI single to Ruben Sierra. My theory is that if Martinez hadn’t gotten at least one out to prove Terry Francona hadn’t made a mistake, Martinez might still be in there at 10:30 A.M. the following day, with the score Yanks 949, Sox 4, and blood trickling down from Pedro’s burst biceps.

But in my fury I jest.

I have serious doubts about Terry Francona’s thinking processes and have all year (there are times when I’ve thought there’s nothing but a bowling alley up there between his ears), but Pedro Martinez is as brilliant as he is brave. After the game he said, in effect, “I can only tip my cap to the Yankees. They’ve proved they’re my Daddy.” Meaning, in baseball vernacular, they’re better than me; they have my number. Martinez knows the chances are quite good that he may not be done with the Yankees even yet, and that if he sees them again, the next game will be exponentially more important than this one. His remark was a way of resetting all the dials to zero. If he does have to face them again, he’s lifted a lot of the internal pressure by publicly stating that they can somehow get over, under, or around the best he can do. When (and if) he takes the mound against the Yankees in postseason—probably in the Bronx—he will be able to tell himself that, based on what he’s told the world, he is not the one with something to prove; they are.

None of which solves the riddle of why a manager would deliberately go out and replicate a course of action which has already visited defeat and unhappiness on so many in the very recent past. When you think about it, being a Red Sox fan may have quite a lot to teach about what we’re doing in Iraq.

At Starfleet Academy, every cadet has to confront the problem of the Kobayashi Maru. The Maru is a freighter caught in a gravitic rift in the Neutral Zone. Cadets naturally respond to its distress calls, but once their star-ship enters the Neutral Zone, three Klingon cruisers surround and attack it. The Klingons have overwhelming resources and show no mercy, and the cadet needs to realize he or she is in a no-win situation—that, as Kirk says, there are times when a commander doesn’t have the luxury of winning.

Red Sox fans don’t want to hear that. For all our gloom-and-doom reputation, we expect to win, and we expect our manager to make the right moves to make that happen. And because we’re knowledgeable fans, we know what those moves are before they should take place.

Last night Terry Francona took the Grady test—the Red Sox version of the Kobayashi Maru—and from his solution, it appears he was peeking at Grady’s paper. Since the mid-eighties, the standard sequence has been: get seven strong from your starter, setup, close. Simple stuff, and the night before Francona sacrificed a tie game to rest his setup guy and his closer. So there’s no excuse for Pedro starting the eighth, or continuing to pitch after Matsui’s home run, and we all know it. Once again, the only one who didn’t pass the test was the Red Sox manager.

And the Angels and Rangers both won, so our magic number remains 5—it’s the Curse of Nomar!

September 26th

When Yankee starting pitching goes south, as Roger Clemens replacement Javier Vazquez did last night in the fifth inning, Joe Torre now has essentially two choices in the matter of middle relief: Tom Gordon (whose loss from the Red Sox I understand and accept but still lament in my heart) and the Bronx Delicatessen Brigade. Having used Gordon to get to Rivera in the first game of this late-season Yanks-Sox series, Torre was stuck with the Deli Brigade last night. After Vazquez came Tanyon Sturtze; after Sturtze came Heredia. And lo, Heredia begat Quantrill and Quantrill begat Nitkowski; so too did Nitkowski begat Proctor, also called Scott. By that time the Yankees were pretty well baked, and the usually crafty Quantrill—left in far too long last night[59]—took the loss by default.

This was a good night to be at the ballpark and a good game for the Red Sox to win. Although the Angels and the Rangers, now tied for wild-card runners-up (and nipping at the heels of the Athletics in the AL West), both won their games, we reduced our magic number for clinching a playoff berth to three. Better yet, we have made it impossible for the Yankees to clinch this year’s AL East flag on ground taxed by the State of Massachusetts. Best of all, at least for the head sitting beneath the bright red YANKEES HATER hat I see in the mirror, is this: no matter how we do against our long-time nemesis this Sunday afternoon, in 2004’s last regular-season game at Fenway Park, we will have won the nineteen-game season series. The worst we can do is 10-9, and if Father Curt is on his game, it will be 11-8. This isn’t as good as it could have been—especially for a team that was at one point 6-1 against the pinstripers—but when it comes to the Yankees, we take our satisfactions where we can get them.

7:00 P.M.: It’s by no means a sure thing that the Red Sox and Yankeeswill meet in the ALCS for the second year in a row—I am sure that baseball stat wizards like Bill James will tell you it’s odds against, given the fact that the opening postseason series are nasty, brutish, and short[60]—but given the level of competition between the two clubs this season, I have to believe that such an American League Championship Series would be a boon to that larger faithful that loves not just the Red Sox or the Yankees but the game itself.

Last weekend at Yankee Stadium, the Sox won a close one Friday night and then endured two shellackings, to the glee of packed Stadium crowds. At the Fens this weekend, it was the Yankees winning a close one Friday night and the Red Sox winning the two weekend games by lopsided scores, today’s final being 11–4, with a woefully unready-for-prime-time Kevin Brown taking the loss (and not escaping the first inning). At Yankee Stadium, the joint resounded to sarcastic choral cries of PEDRO! PEDRO! as Martinez left his game on the mound; today at Fenway Park, the cry was JEE-TER! JEE-TER! as the New York shortstop flubbed a potential double play and then made way for a pinch hitter in the eighth after going one for a dozen (.083) over the three games.

In the end, Boston took the season, 11-8, but in the crucial runs-scored category, there was in the end almost no difference: 106 for the Sox, 104 for the Yanks. When you think about 171 innings of baseball (excluding games that may have gone beyond the regulation nine), that’s an amazingly small margin; hardly more than a coat of paint.

In terms of playing into October, the team’s job is now clear-cut (if slightly complicated by Jeanne, the fourth hurricane to strike Florida in the last five weeks). Of the seven games remaining on the regular-season schedule, the Red Sox need to win only a pair to assure themselves of a postseason berth. Another (and more meaningful) meeting with the Yankees may or may not lie ahead; in the meantime, let Trot Nixon, Boston’s rejuvenated right fielder, have the final word on this exhaustive (and exhausting) regular-season slate of Red Sox/Yankees matchups. “Nineteen is too many,” he said flatly in a postgame interview this afternoon. “We’ve seen everything they’ve got, and they’ve seen what we’ve got. I don’t mind playing them… but nineteen is just too many.”

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome once again to Super Pro Wrestling! For no other reason than he doesn’t like the way Doug Mientkiewicz is standing on the bag at first (or might it have something to do with Lofton’s mysterious ejection during the Tek–A-Rod brawl?), Kenny Lofton deliberately elbows him as he goes by—on a play that isn’t close, in a game that’s a runaway. Maybe Kenny’s frustrated, or just dumb, because he seems surprised—nay, outraged—when reliever Pedro Astacio throws behind him late in the game. The next inning, the Yanks’ kid reliever throws at Dave Roberts’s head. Uncool, and Roberts is justifiably pissed.

There’s a huge difference between throwing behind a guy and throwing at his head, and everyone in the game knows it. Likewise, if you purposely elbow someone, you had better expect to be thrown at. In both cases, the Yankees broke the unwritten code. If there’s any justice (and wrestling is all about poetic justice), the game will make them pay.

Side note: Today’s sellout was our 81st of the year. Only three other clubs in the history of baseball have sold out their entire home season. All three were playing in brand-new stadiums.[61]

September 27th

Hurricane Jeanne has knocked out the electricity in the Tampa Bay area, and for a while it looks as if the game may not be played. The juice is restored, but someone seems to have neglected to tell the Boston bats. Or maybe it’s just young Scott Kazmir, exerting the sort of limited but malign influence certain pitchers seem able to cast over certain teams. When Kazmir faced Martinez two weeks ago, you’ll recall, he won easily. He seems well on his way to a second win tonight, striking out batter after batter (Kevin Millar on egregiously high cheese), so when my youngest son—up on a wonderful extended visit from New York—suggests we turn off the game and go to a movie, I agree at once, even though the Sox technically have a chance to clinch a playoff berth. I now believe they will clinch; I just don’t believe it will be tonight.

The code is absolute, and beyond partisanship. Tonight Bronson Arroyo hits Aubrey Huff unintentionally with a curve that breaks down and in too sharply. No big deal, even though it puts Huff out of the game with a bruised shin, but then, a batter later, with men on second and third and first base open, Bronson drills Tino Martinez in the back, and Tino rightfully has some things to say.

Former Mets phenom Scott Kazmir, who has yet to give up a hit, retaliates, hitting Manny low. And Manny’s cool, Manny understands, and hoofs it down to first without a word. Now that things are evened up, the ump warns both dugouts. Any more of this and both the pitcher and the manager are going. But Kazmir—maybe on Lou Piniella’s orders—isn’t done. He hits the very next batter, Millar, in the ribs. Millar takes exception and the benches clear briefly. Good-bye, unhittable Kazmir. Good-bye, Lou.

It’s a foolish move. We jump all over reliever Jorge Sosa for five runs, including a drive to dead center by Manny that lands on the roof of the fancy restaurant out there, and go on to win 7–3 and clinch the wild card. See? That’s what happens when you go against the code.

And, ironically, since being on the same team overrides the code, during the locker-room celebration Manny hugs Terry Adams, who he came close to charging back in April after a little chin music.

It’s the late show of The Forgotten we go to, and in Bethel Station on a Monday night, my son and I are two of just six attendees. As we’re leaving, the guy cleaning up behind the candy counter tells me—casually—that the Red Sox were leading Tampa Bay by a score of 7–2 and he thinks that might be a final. Owen and I look at each other in delighted amazement, then hurry to his car and tune the radio to WOXO, Norway–South Paris (which advertises itself as Everybody’s Country…when, that is, they’re not broadcasting NASCAR racing, Boston Red Sox baseball, or Oxford Hills High School football). We discover that the game has indeed ended, and that the final score was 7–3. Bronson Arroyo hit a couple of batters (he leads the American League in that category), and Scott Kazmir retaliated. The umpires let him get away with drilling Manny Ramirez in the knee, but when Kazmir whacked Kevin “I Brake for High Cheese” Millar in the ribs, the kid was gone, taking an incipient no-hitter with him.[62] Three or four home runs later (Manny hit number 43), the 2004 Red SoxParty Boys are in a clubhouse so wrapped in plastic it looks like a condom, laughing and shouting and pouring beer on each other.

They all acknowledge that the regular season isn’t over as long as catching the Yankees remains a technical possibility (by winning, the Red Sox cut the lead of the idle Yanks to three games, and in that light the two we lost to the awful El Birdos during the last home stand look bigger than ever), but in their raucous celebrating, there is an undeniable sense that they feel the real work is now done. Given their lackluster level of play in June and July, that is understandable. In some ways, they are lucky to be here at all.

September 28th

Tonight’s game against Tampa Bay is an audition for pitchers on the bubble. Derek Lowe pitches dreadfully, scuttling his chance to be the number three starter in the playoffs (Bronson Arroyo seems to have won that spot with his strong second half). Terry Adams throws two-plus ugly innings, so count him out. By the time Alan Embree comes in to throw one shutout inning, it’s 8–8. Scott Williamson, who’s been injured, walks one guy in his stint, but his velocity is still down around 89, so I doubt he’ll make the roster. Pedro Astacio’s just getting some work in before he starts half of Saturday’s doubleheader in Baltimore. Ramiro Mendoza, though, nails his assignment, pitching a perfect ninth and tenth, striking out two and giving us a chance to win it when Kevin Millar cranks a two-run shot off fireballing closer Danys Baez, who Lou has left out there throwing 96 (and then 94, 93, 92) for three innings. Foulke crafts a one-two-three eleventh and we’re two and a half back of the Yanks with five to go.

Much more exciting is the West, where the Angels and A’s are now in a dead heat with a three-game showdown looming on the season’s final weekend, the results of which will determine the playoff matchups. Right now the Central champs the Twins have a better record (by a mere one win) than Oakland and Anaheim, meaning they’d play us and have home-field advantage, and the Yankees would host whoever won the West (an easier task, given the Twins’ brilliant lefty Johan Santana). The Yanks have some control over the situation: tomorrow they start a three-game series against the Twins. They can avoid Santana by rolling over for them, but that’s a risk: if they lose too many, we have a shot at catching them. Slim, sure, but a shot.

September 29th

I’m back in Maine rather than at Fenway Park or at Yankee Stadium, where a sparse crowd is watching the rare afternoon game, but I’m once more wearing my bright red YANKEES HATER cap, and for a perfectly good reason: the sparse Stadium crowd is in attendance at the first of this year’s last three really important games, two between the Twins and the Yankees, one between the hapless Devil Rays and the Red Sox.

The Minnesota Twins, represented on the mound in the first of these crucial tilts by Johan Santana, who will almost certainly win this year’s Cy Young Award in the American League, are leading 3–1 in the fifth inning. If the Twins go on to win this game (Santana hasn’t lost since the All-Star break) plus the nightcap of this hurricane-induced doubleheader, and if the Red Sox can win tonight in Tampa,[63] the Yankees’ lead in the AL East would drop to a single scrawny game. I’m not saying this will happen, but if it did, considering the fact that Boston and New York have a combined total of eight games left to play… well, in a case like that, all bets would be off.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Probably it doesn’t matter, in terms of what comes next; once you get to postseason, all the matchups are tough. But I want that home-field advantage. Even more, I’d like to see the Yankees humbled. So come on, you Twins! Go, you Johan!

It’s weird: here we have the Yanks’ ace Moose against Johan Santana in a rematch of last year’s ALDS, in a game with playoff implications, yet when I tune in during the second inning I discover the Stadium is a sea of blue seats. There can’t be more than two thousand people there—less than the number of folks who turn out for BP at Fenway. Later, the Yankees will list the official attendance as N/A—not available. Hey George, I hear Montreal’s looking for a team.

10:15 P.M.: One doesn’t like to believe God is a Yankees fan—it’s a terrifying idea—but days like this make me wonder. I thought that, with New York playing two against a strong Minnesota team and the Red Sox playing one against the hapless Rays, we really had a chance to pull within a breath of first place. At worst, I thought, New York would split their twin bill with Santana taking the opener.

But no. Santana left after five with a 3–1 lead, pulled by the Twins’ skipper, who quite naturally wants to protect his young ace with the playoffs looming. The Yankees then scored a bazillion runs and the camera caught the aforementioned young ace in the dugout, hucking helmets at the cement floor. Getting quite a bounce, too. The Yankees went on to win the second game, 5–4.

In Tampa, Tino Martinez hit a three-run bomb to put the game out of reach in the eighth, but the really disturbing development was how mortal Pedro Martinez looked in his last start of the regular season—how downright lousy. The hapless D-Rays won that one, 9–4, and instead of picking up a game and a half, we lost a game and a half. The Yankees’ margin is now four games, and given that the Red Sox have just four to play, I think that pretty well cooks us in the AL East, don’t you? The bottom line is simply that when the pressure got really intense, the Yankees refused to buckle. The Red Sox—aided by the Baltimore Orioles and at times by Terry Francona, who has a tendency to freeze at critical moments like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny—did. Now we turn our eyes—ever hopeful, ever faithful—to the playoffs, where we can only hope the script will change.

September 30th

October 1st

As a Red Sox fan, I am of course aware that there is another baseball league, but my grasp of it is vague, like a European’s grasp of the New World in the seventeenth century or an American’s grasp of the solar system in the nineteenth. Yes, somewhere in the American Midwest there lives a fearsome wand-wielding wizard named Pujols, and I know that in California there be Giants, for my Red Sox did truly visit them once in the season which is now almost over. But like most Red Sox fans, my focus will remain fiercely fixed on what is sometimes called “the junior circuit” until—and if—we have to play one of those quasi-mythological Others in the World Series. And that’s okay, because in this final weekend of regular-season baseball, I find plenty to occupy me within the familiar geography of the American League.

Three of the four AL postseason teams have now been decided: the Yankees (AL East champs), the Twins (AL Central champs) and the Red Sox (AL wild card). The winner in the AL West will be decided this weekend, in Oakland, when the A’s and Angels, with identical 90-69 records, go head-to-head. It will be, in effect, a mini-playoff, one the Red Sox and their fans will be watching with great interest. We’ll play the team out of our division with the best record, but as I write this on Friday afternoon, Minnesota’s record is also 90-69. That means we could wind up facing any one of those three. All I know for sure is that I’m hoping Cleveland will put a hurtin’ on Minnesota this weekend, because we have to start by playing two away games no matter who our opponent is. Given that, I would prefer to steer clear of the Metrodome as long as possible.

Not to mention young Mr. Santana.

The Sox had last night off, ceding center stage (at least here in the East) to the Yankees, who clinched the division with their 100th win (so that’s what—16 against Tampa, 15 against Baltimore, 14 against Toronto…), beating the Twins’ second-line relievers late after Ron Gardenhire pulled starter Brad Radke in the fifth. By resting, in effect the Twins rolled over this whole series, handing the Yanks the sweep. With the Angels losing and the A’s winning, the West is knotted again, and the Twins, Angels and A’s all share the same record. Because the Angels and A’s play each other this weekend, the winner of the West will have at least 92 wins. The Twins lost their season series with both clubs, so to face the Sox they have to sweep their last three. I have to wonder: By losing this series, are the Twins purposely shooting for a rematch with the Yanks?

October 2nd

Last night the Angels humbled the A’s 10–0 at home, and today they come back late against setup guy Ricardo Rincon and new closer Octavio Dotel to win the West. Chokeland has done it again. Billy Beane, you are not a genius. With no defense, no smallball and no pen, and ace Mark Mulder denying an obvious hip problem, the A’s went into a September-longs woon that their fans will taste for the entire off-season. The Angels, missing Adam Kennedy with a knee injury, and suspending Jose Guillen for throwing his helmet and dissing manager Mike Scioscia, overcame everything to beat their rivals at the wire.

The Cubs, who had a two-game lead in the NL wild card a week ago, eliminate themselves by losing their sixth in seven games (including three blown saves by high-priced free-agent closer LaTroy Hawkins and crucial home losses to cellar dwellers the Mets and the Reds).

On the home front, the Sox sweep a meaningless doubleheader from the O’s—something we could never do when the games really counted. Mr. Kim picks up a garbage win. Ellis Burks plays in his 2,000th and most likely last game, adding a single to his career stats.

Afterward, Terry Francona announces that Arroyo and Wake will start in the playoffs and that Lowe won’t. Lowe leaves the clubhouse without a comment, and in the postgame, Eck says, “Will Derek Lowe be back next year? Who cares?”

And we still don’t know who we’re playing in the division series.

I continue to believe that it was our play against Baltimore—identified in my game notes from July on as the LEBs[64]—that cost us the AL East. Now that that little matter has been decided, we’re doing all right against the LEBs, having already guaranteed ourselves at least a split in the season’s final, meaningless four-game series (please note that they has once again become we, and will now likely stay that way, for better or worse, until the season ends).

On the West Coast, the Athletics have suddenly—and rather shockingly—come unglued. Anaheim beat them last night, 10–0, and came from behind to beat them again today, 5–4. So the Angels win the West, and all the AL postseason teams are now decided. The only remaining question is who the Red Sox will draw in the first round—the Angels or the Twins. Today’s game between Minnesota and Cleveland would have settled that issue if Cleveland had won, but the game was suspended in the eleventh with the score tied, 5–5, so the groundskeepers could prepare the field for a University of Minnesota football game.

Say what?

October 3rd

It’s the last day of the regular season, and in the majors, the last few games are being played out by the subs, scrubs, and—in a few cases—the stars of tomorrow.

In Chicago, disconsolate Cubs fans are telling each other—without much real hope—that next season may be better (on the South Side, the ChiSox fans gave up on this season long ago).

In Tampa, Lou Piniella has packed away his horrible snot-green pullover for another season and bid his hapless Devil Rays adieu.

In Baltimore, the baseball writers have already begun beating the MVP tom-tom on behalf of Miguel Tejada, but given what Gary Sheffield’s done for the Yankees and what Manny Ramirez has done for the Red Sox, I don’t give them much of a chance.

In Texas, the plotting has already begun to turn this year’s AL West dark horse into next year’s favorite.

In Oakland, wunderkind Billy Beane may, like Lucy Arnaz, have some ’splainin’ to do.

In Toronto, the wunderkind disciples of Billy Beane have probably left their offices for the year only after dropping their cell phones into their shredders.

And in Minnesota, the last playoff question was answered late this afternoon, when the Indians came up with two insurance runs in the top of the ninth and beat the Twins, 5–2. Thus it’s Minnesota opening against New York on the East Coast and Boston opening against Anaheim on the West,both the day after tomorrow. I’ll be at Fenway for the third game of the Sox-Angels series, and for the fourth, if needed (it probably will be). My heart beats a little faster, just writing that. At this point everything gets magnified, because when the second season ends, it does so either with shocking suddenness or—could it be?—with the sort of success of which Red Sox fans hardly dare dream.

The Twins win the resumption of their suspended game, but then lose to the Indians, making the last Angels-A’s game meaningless (though no less painful to those A’s fans who bothered to show up).

We lose our last game to the O’s (McCarty throws two scoreless, striking out three) and finish 98-64, our best record since 1978. Manny wins the home run and slugging crowns, Schilling has the best won-loss, though it appears the MVP will now go to Vladimir Guerrero for his big September, while Santana should take the Cy Young. Ichiro breaks George Sisler’s all-time record for hits in a season, but, coming for a last-place club, and most of them being singles, it doesn’t wow serious fans; he’s just the new Rod Carew. And the Astros win their final game, snatching the NL wild card from Barry Bonds and the Giants. It’s still possible we’ll see Roger Clemens in the World Series.

October 4th