Faithful

October 10th

October 11th

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Yogi said that—not the one from Jelly-stone National Park, but the one who hung out in New York and swung a productive bat at many bad pitches back in the good old days when men were men and baseball players still smoked Camels.[69] Once more the Red Sox have entered postseason via the wild card. Once more they have faced the West Coast team and beaten them (this time quite a bit more tidily, ’tis true). Once more it was Mr. Lowe—magickal rather than tragickal—who was the Last Pitcher Standing, this time notching the win instead of the save. And once more the Yankees have beaten the Minnesota Twins after spotting them the opening victory. It is our ancient enemy—now routinely called the Evil Empire almost everywhere north of Hartford—that we will have to face, and vanquish, if we are to go to the World Series.

I spent most of the weekend in Boston, although this book did not precisely demand it; the Boston-Anaheim series was over, and the Boston–New York series wouldn’t start for another four days. Mostly what I wanted was to sample the atmosphere, and what I found myself breathing in was disturbing, bad for sleep.[70] I would describe it as a kind of nervy bravado—think of all the old gangster movies you’ve seen where the bad-guy hero is driven into a final blind alley, draws both automatics from the waistband of his gabardine pants, and then screams, “Come and get me coppers! But I’m gonna take a buncha youse wit’ me!”

Doormen, taxi drivers, a guy from Boston Public Works, a driver on the Boston Duck Tour, a clerk at Brentano’s, two homeys at the mall with their hats turned around backwards (Homey A in a METALLICA RULES T-shirt, Homey B wearing one showing Albert Einstein in the audience at a Ramones concert), a woman on the Boston Common walking her little white furball, even a grizzled old two-tooth toll-taker on New Hampshire’s Spaulding Turnpike—all these hailed me with variations on the same theme: “Yo, Stevie! We got just who we wanted, right?”

I’m back with a sick smile and a little wave, like Whatever, dude. Because I’m thinking of that old saying, the one that goes Be careful what you wish for. And when you get right down to where the rubber hits the road, does it even matter? When you get right down to where the rubber meets the road, the Yankees just seem to be our fate, our ka, our name written on the bottom of the stone.

Or maybe that’s just so much literary bullshit. Probably is. God knows the Boston Red Sox have generated enough to fill two or three hundred Mass Pike Port-o-Sans. It’s déjà vu all over again, that much is a pure fact. We can only hope that this time Act II will be different, allowing us still to be onstage, and in uniform, when the curtain goes up on Act III.

Odd news: two relatives of Yanks closer Mariano Rivera were killed over the weekend in a freak accident at his house and he has to fly down to Panama for the funeral, meaning he’ll have to jet back just in time for Game 1. And former NL MVP Ken Caminiti, who admitted his steroid use and became a baseball pariah, dies of heart failure at age forty-one (a cautionary tale for anyone on the juice, not just Gary Sheffield).

We also declare our ALCS roster, making only one change.

October 12th/ALCS Game 1

The hype leading up to Game 1 is typical and idiotic. The game’s on Fox, and they’ve prepared a five-minute Star Wars intro, complete with Johnny as Chewbacca. If that’s not enough, they play the theme from The Odd Couple over and over. The announcers are desperate to tell us what the story lines are, and the personal dramas. This is one reason I hate playoff baseball—the national networks think the viewers have just tuned in. On NESN, Jerry and Don have no need to fill us in on “The Rivalry,” they just call the game. They also don’t call Bronson Arroyo “Brandon” (McCarver—the true inspiration behind the mute button) or compare A-Rod’s and Jeter’s mediocre years to Manny’s and David’s MVP-type seasons.

The game itself is dull and disappointing from the very first. Schilling can’t push off on the ankle and gives up runs in bunches (later, Dr. Bill Morgan will describe the injury as a tear in a sheath covering a tendon—shades of Nomar!), while the Orioles’ Mike Mussina is spot-on. After three, it’s 6–0 Yanks, through six, 8–0, and the only drama is whether Moose will keep his no-hitter. And then, just as news time is rolling around, and viewers naturally think of bailing, the Sox explode for seven runs, and who should be called in to save the game but plucky Mariano Rivera, who just arrived in the fourth inning from the funeral of blah blah blah native Panama. What an astonishing twist! Why, who could have foreseen such etc., etc.! The announcers play it up for all it’s worth, and if there’s a more egregious use of a human-interest story in sports, please, don’t show it to me. Rivera even gets to start the game-ending DP against his nemesis Bill Mueller. It’s like watching a cheesy movie, every step feels utterly false and plotted. I mean, come on, who writes this stuff?

October 13th

Last night’s game against the Yankees was a good-news/bad-news kind of thing. You know, like in all the jokes you’ve heard. Doctor comes bopping into his patient’s examination room and says, “Mr. Shlub, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. Which do you want first?”

“Gimme the bad news first,” Mr. Shlub says. “Save the good news.”

“The bad news is that you’re going to die of a horribly painful disease in six weeks or so, your blood’s going to boil and your skin’s going to creep right off your body, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it,” the doctor says. “Now do you want the good news?”

Mr. Shlub starts to blubber. “What good news can there be after something like that?” he asks the doctor, when he can speak coherently.

“Well,” the doctor says in a confidential tone of voice, “I’m dating a nurse from Pediatrics, and she is so hot!”

The worst news to come out of last night’s ALCS Game 1 is, of course, that we lost it. The good news is that the Red Sox made a game of it after being no-hit by Mike Mussina into the seventh. Starting with Mark Bellhorn’s one-out double in the top of that inning, Boston smacked a total of 10 hits and scored 7 runs, coming back from what was an 8–0 deficit (with the tying run on third in the eighth, the camera caught father-son Yankee fans exchanging caps in some arcane but endearing good-luck ritual). The Sox gave the Yankees a scare; the Sox silenced the Yankee fans; the Sox even gave their own fans something to go to bed at quarter to midnight feeling good about.

The good news about Curt Schilling’s head is that it’s on straight. Father Curt says he doesn’t believe in the so-called Curse of the Bambino. “I’m a Christian,” he says fearlessly. The bad news about Father Curt’s ankle is that it’s not on straight. He couldn’t push off on his right foot last night, threw only two fastballs at speeds greater than 90 mph, and the Yankees made him pay, pounding out 6 hits and 6 runs over three innings.[71]

The bad news is that this ankle injury happened at a cursedly bad time. The good news is that Father Curt—who doesn’t believe in that publicity-stunt curse, anyway—threw only 58 pitches in last night’s mortar attack, and if the ankle gets better, he should be more than ready for Game 5, always assuming there is one.

The bad news is that the Yankees scored 6 of their 10 runs after two were out. The good news is that the Red Sox scored all 7 of their runs after two were out, and stranded only two runners all night.

The bad news is that the Red Sox don’t win when Johnny Damon doesn’t hit—2004 baseball history pretty well proves this—and last night Johnny wore that fabled golden sombrero, striking out four times and looking more lost each time. The good news is that Jason Varitek socked a two-run dinger over the center-field wall, ending a personal 0-for-36 drought at Yankee Stadium, and followed the dinger with a single against Mariano Rivera to open the ninth when the Red Sox once again—splendidly, against all probability—brought the tying run to the plate. Before the game, Curt Schilling said he couldn’t think of anything better than “making fifty thousand or so Yankee fans shut up.” He wasn’t able to do that, but in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings last night, Boston batters were.

The bad news is that if this series goes more than four games, Moose Mussina will be back. The good news is that the Boston batters who brought the late-inning thunder last night will also be back, and in each and every remaining game.

The bad news is that Boston is a game in the hole. The good news is that at this point in the season they don’t make you turn in your uniform and condemn you to spend the winter playing golf unless you lose three more.

And finally, there’s the most fascinating bad-news/good-news matchup of them all, and the best reason I know to tune in to baseball rather than to the third presidential debate tonight: Pedro will be starting for the Red Sox. The Yankees have hammered him this year, and Pedro has publicly proclaimed them his Daddy. That’s the bad news.

But no one has more heart than Pedro Martinez, and no one will try any harder to send the Red Sox back to Fenway Park with a split. That’s the good news.

Let’s see what news they lead with on the sports page tomorrow.

October 14th/ALCS Game 2

I could continue with the good-news/bad-news thing, there’s plenty of material for it,[72] but with the Sox headed back to Boston down two games to none, I don’t have the heart for it. It’s been thirteen years since a team has climbed out of an 0-2 hole in an LCS, and the Red Sox have never done so.

I blame some of this on numb bad luck. I think most Red Sox fans (certainly this Red Sox fan) were counting on Father Curt to bring the team back from Yankee Stadium with a split. Now it turns out that Schilling’s ankle problem is not a mere tweak, not even a strain, but (oh shit) a probable season-ending injury that will need surgery.

We all know both from gospel music and basic first-year anatomy that the knee-bone connected to the leg-bone and the leg-bone connected to the ankle-bone. The problem here, as I understand it, has to do with the peroneal tendon, where the ankle-bone connected to the foot-bone, can you give me hallelujah. In Schilling’s case, this tendon has come free of its sheath. When pushing off on his right leg during Game 1, Father Curt said he could actually hear the tendon snapping as it rubbed against the bone. Later, when speaking to the press, Sox doc Bill Morgan said additional pitching wouldn’t put Schilling’s leg at risk, and I’m thinking: He can hear that thing snapping like a garter every time he hucks the pill and you say he’s not risking his leg? Jeezis, Doctor Bill, I’m sorta glad you don’t make house calls in my neighborhood.

Well, let it pass. What it boiled down to was a piece of rotten luck (not a curse—I may not be a conventional Christian, but I was raised a Methodist) for the appetizer. The main course was a mostly excellent pitching performance by Pedro Martinez in which his teammates provided exactly two hits (the second by David Ortiz, who was promptly erased on a double play). After the game, Pedro shrugged and said: “If my team doesn’t get the hits, I can’t do nothing.” He said it softly, without rancor. I thought he showed remarkable restraint, considering the fact thathe has been in this position in most of the games he’s pitched this year. Schilling—even in the ALCS game he left trailing 6–0—gets run support. For some reason Martinez does not.

A downcast Johnny Damon echoed the erstwhile Dominican Dominator in a locker-room interview, saying that Red Sox pitching hasn’t been the problem in the ALCS; the problem has been lack of offense. No one is better qualified to speak to this issue than Johnny D, who has gone 0 for 8 in the two games. In my mind it is at this point the crucial difference between the two clubs.

And two points have to be made about the Yankees. First, their much maligned pitching has so far been exceptional. Second, their hitting has been as advertised…or perhaps I should say as expected. The Yanks could almost be renicknamed The American League Hoodoo. National League teams are less impressed by their mystique (witness the success of the Florida Marlins against them last year), but while they remain on their own little patch, the Yankees are awesome in the month of October.

What impresses me most is how balanced their attack is. Of the thirteen runs the Yankees have scored (playing exactly the same lineup both nights), Jeter has two, A-Rod has two, Sheffield has four, Matsui has two, Posada has one, Olerud has one (his two-run bomb last night won the game), and Lofton has one. Only Miguel Cairo and Bernie Williams have failed to score for the Yankees—this is just two games.

It’s true that all but two of the Red Sox players (Cabrera and Damon) have also scored, but Bellhorn, Ortiz, Millar, Varitek and Mueller have each only scored once, and in a single run-through of the batting order (during innings seven and eight of Game 1). Only Trot Nixon, who always seems to step his game up to Yankee levels during the postseason, scored for the Sox in both games.

Meantime, we’re done with Yankee Stadium for a while,[73] and we have the day off to regroup. Compared to those things, there is no bad news.

Yep, Pedro made a quality start (on the forty-fourth anniversary of Maz’s home run). He had some Ramon-like struggles early, but wriggled out of them and settled down nicely. The high-priced, steroid-pumped, former–All-Star, -MVP, -Japanese national hero heart of the Yankee order did as much as our own vaunted Mark Bellhorn, Kevin Millar and Orlando Cabrera, which was nothing. The home run Pedro gave up was to borderline Hall of Famer John Olerud (yet another midseason pickup, not truly a Yankee at all), with his pitch count above 100, to the short part of a shrunken ballpark. We just didn’t hit. Score one run in the AL, you’re going to lose; it doesn’t matter if you’re playing the Yanks or the D-Rays.

So we didn’t get the split. It may be demoralizing, but it shouldn’t be a huge surprise. George paid dearly for the Yankees to have the best home record in all of baseball. But guess who had the second best? We’ll have to win throwing Bronson, Wake and Lowe, but we haven’t taken the easy way all year—and that includes overcoming injuries to key players. We just have to stay hopeful and throw everything we’ve got at them Friday night (weather permitting), win that, battle on Saturday, and even the series. We could even lose a game up at Fenway and win this thing, we’ve just got to hit. Keep the Faith.

October 15th/ALCS Game 3

Stewart and I meet for dinner before the game, and although he agrees to split a BLT pizza on honey wheat crust, he expresses strong doubts about a pizza that comes with a topping of mayonnaise-dressed lettuce. Still, he eats his share. I guess that after some fifty games at Fenway between us, we’ve had our fill of hot dogs. As we munch, we talk about—what else?—baseball. Of that we have not had our fill. Specifically we discuss which team will be most apt to benefit from a rainout, which seems likely; the Massachusetts weather on this October evening is pretty awful.

We agree, reluctantly, that the Yankees would probably be better served by an extra day of rest, because they could bring Mussina back sooner. The stars seem to be aligning themselves, and the horoscope doesn’t look favorable if you happen to be a Sox fan.

When we walk into California Pizza at 5:45 P.M., a light mist is hanging in the air. When we walk back out again at 6:45, the mist has thickened to a drizzle. By the time we’ve raised our arms to be frisked and have given our game bags over for examination outside Fenway Park’s Gate D (it’s just how things are done in twenty-first-century America, where the citizenry now live on Osama Mean Time), the drizzle has become a light rain.

Before clearing around midnight, the forecast calls for heavy downpours accompanied by strong winds. During the regular season, the fate of the game would be in the hands of the Red Sox up until the instant play started, and with the umps thereafter. In postseason, however, these contests are in the hands of Major League Baseball, an organization that seems to care a great deal more about TV revenue (witness the 8 P.M. starts, which ace out millions of little kids who have to get up for school on weekdays) than they do the fans, the players or the game itself. Last night, in the Houston–St. Louis game, play went on through a steady downpour. Base hits spun up wheels of water as they rolled into the outfield. I don’t mind getting wet, but I really don’t want to see Manny Ramirez, Trot Nixon or Bernie Williams leave his career on the outfield grass of Fenway Park.

I don’t have to worry about that for long. An usher I know is leaning nonchalantly against the counter of the Legal Seafood kiosk, chattering away into his walkie-talkie, as Stew and I walk by. He drops it into the pocket of his yellow rain-slicker and waves us over. “Go on home, you guys,” he says. “Game’s gonna be called at seven thirty.”

I ask him if he’s sure. He says he is.

We hang in a little while, anyway—long enough to soak up the rainy atmosphere of Fenway Park (soak it up, geddit?), where the game still hasn’t been officially called. The tarp remains on the infield at 7:58 P.M., however, and that pretty much tells the tale. The news and TV guys arehuddled under canvas mini-pavilions, reduced to taking pictures of and doing interviews with each other. Peter Gammons comes bopping busily along, looking like some strange but amiable human crow in his black trousers and long black raincoat. Stewart and I pass a few words with him, mostly about the possibility of Father Curt pitching again this year (unlikely but not impossible, given Schilling’s fierce competitive drive), and then we leave. I am actually back in my hotel room, drying my hair, before Major League Baseball can finally bring itself to unloose its clenched and rain-puckered fingers enough to let this one go.

October 16th

I open the curtains at 8 A.M. on cloudless blue skies. Tonight the Yankees and Red Sox will play baseball.

I’m bringing the whole famn damily to this one, so I have to buy tickets from a broker, and end up paying through the nose so we can watch what turns out to be the worst game of the year, maybe of my life—worse even than Mr. Lowe’s rainy debacle at Yankee Stadium. It’s fifty degrees, but the wind is gusting up to 40 mph, and we’re sitting in the very last row of the grandstand. Gales blow through the wire fence, around the mercifully insulating standing-room crowds at our backs and into our collars. Caitlin’s shivering, so I break down and sign up for a credit card just to get a free MLB blanket.

Bronson’s got nothing, but Kevin Brown’s equally ineffective. “Kev-in,” we chant. Jeter makes an error that leads to a run, and it’s “Jeeeee-ter, Jeeeee-ter.” (He’s been terrible in the field, just as distracted as last year, fodder for critics who say A-Rod should play short; but Jeter doesn’t have the reactions or the gun for third, and probably won’t accept a demotion to second.) After Bronson we throw the dregs of our pen, as if the Coma is conceding the game—as if he’s okay with being down 0-3. Weird.

Matsui drives in five. After Sheffield powers out a steroid shot, the standing-room crowd disperses and the wind cuts through us. In Little League, there’s a ten-run mercy rule, but not here, and to save our real pen, Wake volunteers to soak up some innings, meaning Lowe will be starting tomorrow (far better, I think, considering how Wake has thrown this season). But instead of holding the Yanks so we can get back in the game, Wake lets a runner inherited from Leskanic score, then gives up five runs of his own, putting the game way out of reach. Embree looks bad, and then Francona leaves poor Mike Myers out there to face righties in the ninth, something that should never happen. Myers sucks it up and ultimately gets it done, but by then it’s 19–8.

It’s ugly, and humbling, but the worst thing that happens is that the Faithful (if these really are the Faithful) turn on Mark Bellhorn, booing him mercilessly when he makes an error that leads to a run, and then with each successive strikeout. It’s as if they don’t remember the Marky Mark who stepped up and kept us in first place through April and May. It’s wrong, and it pisses me off even more than the Yankees taking walks late in the game, or Matsui swinging for the fences with a ten-run lead.

October 17th

The Yankees played. The Sox got shelled.

I slouched into my hotel room well after midnight and jotted only a brief game-related note in my journal (Red Sox lost. Horrible) before falling into bed, where I got roughly six hours of shallow, dream-infested sleep.[74] I got up at 7 A.M. this morning, pulled on a pair of exercise shorts and my new Kevin Youkilis shirt (a gift from Stewart O’Nan, bless him) and went around to Au Bon Pain for orange juice and a croissant. I did not buy a Boston Globe in the hotel newsstand, and I certainly did not turn on SportsDesk when I got back to my room. I turned on the headline news program with the ticker across the bottom of the screen instead, and only long enough to confirm the final score of last night’s abortion. Then I shut the damned thing off and did my morning exercises for once without the benefit of media: no scores, no polls, no reports of suicide bombings in Baghdad.

19–8. That was the final score. Replace the hyphen with a 1 and you have the last year the Red Sox won the World Series. Maybe there’s a curse after all. Or a Curse, if you prefer. Until the third inning of this train wreck, there was actually some semblance of a game. After that, the Yankees simply piled it on. Jason Varitek had a good offensive night for the Red Sox; Hideki Matsui, unfortunately, had a sublime night for the Yankees, the kind of night baseball players dream about and have maybe once, and only then if they’re lucky.

19–8, and I’m sure that Dan Shaughnessy, Boston’s Number One Cursemonger, will make hay of that in today’s unread newspaper, but the fault, dear Brutus, has lain not in our stars but our stats—especially those of our mediocre relief corps, which this series against the Yankees has mercilessly exposed. Arroyo didn’t have much, but Arroyo can only be held responsible for the first half dozen runs or so (ow, it hurts to write that). Leskanic came on and gave up a three-run homer to Gary Sheffield; Wakefield lasted three and a third largely ineffective innings; Embree followed Wakefield and was worse; then came Mike Myers and the song remains the same. There may have been others. “You could look it up,” Ole Case used to say, and he was right, but for that I’d have to buy a Boston Globe, and while I might be able to avoid Dan Shaughnessy’s curse-mongering, my eye would surely fall on the hairy, downcast mugs of the Red Sox players.

Coming back from New York, already down two games to none thanks to Schilling’s bad ankle and Olerud’s home run, the Sox players kept telling reporters they were loose. And so they were; last night they were so loose all four wheels fell off their little red wagon. It’s true that Ramirez, Mueller, Cabrera and especially Jason Varitek found their offensive strokes, but putting eight runs on the board means little when you could double that and still lose by three.

Yet still we are faithful; to steal the title of the movie that played in New England this past spring (a spring that now seems impossibly distant and hopeful), still we believe. Tonight we’ll once again fill the old green church of baseball on Lansdowne Street, in some part because it’s the only church of baseball we have; in large part because—even on mornings like this, when the clean-shaven Yankee Corporate Creed seems to rule the hardball universe—it’s still the only church of baseball we can really love. No baseball team has ever come back from a three-games-to-none deficit to win a postseason series, but a couple of hockey teams have done it, and we tell ourselves it has to happen sooner or later for a baseball team, it just has to.

We tell ourselves Derek Lowe has one more chance to turn 2004 from tragickal to magickal.

We tell ourselves it’s just one game at a time.

We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight.

During BP, a liner dings off the photographers’ well in front of me and bounces out into the shallow outfield grass. Don Mattingly’s walking back from the cages under the center-field bleachers with a balding guy in a champagne-colored suit, and as they near the ball, I realize it’s Reggie Jackson. “Reggie,” I holler, “hit the mitt,” and hold out my glove, and he does—maybe for the first time as an outfielder.

I hustle over to Steve to show him the ball. I can rationalize my excitement because Reggie, in my mind, will always be an A—and one of those hairy, wild A’s from a team much like this year’s Sox, kind of goofy and out of control, full of personality. I’m jazzed, just watching the parade of celebrity sportscasters when Steve hands the ball back. On it, he’s written: The curse is off, and then on the sweet spot has signed it: Babe Ruth.

Later, another piece of luck: in the tenth inning, in an incredibly tight and great game, Bernie Williams fouls one high off the roof facing, and the ball plummets directly toward me. All I have to do is raise my arm and the ball hits dead center in the pocket of my glove. The next inning I’m on the JumboTron with my mitt, and my particles are beamed out across the nation to friends and relatives everywhere—and I have enough sense left (or maybe I’m just too tired) not to point at myself and go, “Look, I’m on the JumboTron!”

And this is just the beginning. From here the night just gets better.

October 18th/ALCS Game 4

It turned out that Mr. Lowe was pretty magickal, and so we live to fight another day. Today, in fact. This afternoon, at 5:10 P.M., when Pedro Martinez and Mike Mussina match up in the year’s last American League game at Fenway Park.

Last night’s twelve-inning tilt was the longest game in postseason history, clocking in at five hours and two minutes. I went with my daughter-in-law, and we finally left when Boston failed to score in the bottom of the eleventh. My reasoning was simple enough: if Boston won, I’d be back the next day (make that the same day; it was ten past one when we finally made our way out of the park). If Boston lost, I didn’t want to be there to see the Yankees dancing on the carefully manicured pair of green sox decorating the infield.

As things turned out, our final (and winning) pitcher of the night—Curtis“The Mechanic” Leskanic—was superb in relief after being just one more slice of bullpen salami in the Game 3 blowout. He gave up one of those dying-quail singles to Posada to open the twelfth (this we heard on the radio, heading back to the hotel on eerily deserted streets), then got Ruben Sierra to ground out and Tony Clark to fly out.[75] Miguel Cairo fanned, setting the stage for the dramatic Red Sox finish, which I arrived back in my hotel room just in time to see.

By then Paul Quantrill was pitching for the Yankees. Joe Torre rolled the dice by bringing Mo Rivera on to pitch two innings and try to close out the series. Rivera is the game’s premier closer, but he has occasional problems with the Red Sox, and last night he blew the Yankees’ one-run lead in the ninth, giving up a single to Bill Mueller with speedy Dave Roberts, pinch-running for Kevin Millar, on second.[76] Gordon replaced Rivera and went two scoreless. Quantrill—not exactly chopped liver—was what was left. He never got an out. After yielding a single to Manny Ramirez, he threw David Ortiz what looked to me like either a fastball or a slider. Whatever it was, it was in Ortiz’s wheelhouse, and Big Papi crushed it.

Like every other Red Sox fan, I’m delighted that this isn’t going to be a sweep, like most postseason series that start off 3–0. As a contributor to this book, I’m even more delighted to have a victory to write about before the ultimate sign-off. But one who loves the Boston Red Sox is also one who loathes the New York Yankees; it’s as true as saying night follows day. So it pleases me most of all to point out we are now 12-11 overall this year against George Steinbrenner’s team of limousine longballers, and that last night’s victory, combined with the ALCS best-of-seven format, ensures an odd and wistfully wonderful statistical certainty: the Yankees can’t beat us this year. Not overall. They can go on to the World Series (and probablywill, although I still harbor faint hopes we can prevent that), but the best they can do against us for the season is a tie…and they can only do that by winning today. That will not matter a single whit to them, of course, but when you’re a Red Sox fan, you take consolation wherever it is available.

Last night after the game, I hung around the dugout to shout “Jefeeeeeeeeeeee!” to David Ortiz and chant “Who’s your Pa-pi?” with the rest of the diehard Faithful. When I finally got out onto Yawkey Way it was two o’clock, and most of the players had left. On Brookline Ave, the riot cops were standing in close formation on the bridge to Kenmore Square, forcing us stragglers to walk down Lansdowne and then along the scuzzy streets bordering the Mass Pike. I didn’t mind. There were a couple other fans in sight, and we were all ditzy from the win and just how very late it was. The street I was on curved up to Boylston, and as I reached the intersection, a motorcycle cop came wailing up on his Electra Glide and stopped in the middle of the street. He hopped off and started pointing to the oncoming cars, waving them to the side of the road, and as it dawned on me what was happening, here came the Yankees’ team bus—appropriately from Yankee Bus Lines, and appropriately yellow—and my legs found a strength and a spring I thought I’d lost back in the fifth inning, carrying me to the exact spot I needed to be in, the right place at the right time. I watched heads inside turn toward me, bleary faces puzzled by this apparition in black in a PawSox hat standing in the vacant other lane, lit like a devil by the red stoplight, proudly holding up his middle finger.

Today the guys show up at the parking lot before Game 5 wearing their very best suits and wheeling luggage like it’s any other travel day—a good sign, I think. Yesterday when Mark Bellhorn walked by, a few people booed, and he didn’t look over. Today I holler, “Hey Mahk, don’t let the bastards get you down!” and he smiles and nods. Johnny’s had an adhesive Ace bandage on the meaty flat of his right hand (his lead hand) for a couple of weeks now, and I wonder if he can grip the bat correctly. Every day I ask, “How’s the hand, John?” and he says it’s okay, but without conviction, as if it’s still bothering him. These are the guys we need to set the table for Manny and David. If they don’t pick it up, we’re going nowhere.

Just before game time, I visit with Bob the usher over in Section 32. We chat and then say good-bye, shake hands. It’s our last home game of the ALCS, and there’s a fall feeling of the season being over, things being packed away, but I can’t let it stand.

“I’ll see you for the Series,” I say.

“I hope so,” he says.

“I know so,” I say, full of false bravado. “Right here, baby.”

October 19th/ALCS Game 5

It probably wasn’t the greatest game in postseason history—I’d still pick Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, the one where Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk waved his extra-inning walk-off home run fair, for that honor—but it was almost certainly the greatest game to be played since the major leagues went to the League Championship format. At five hours forty-nine minutes it was the longest, and the teams who engaged in the struggle were surely the most evenly matched. When it ended, the Red Sox had scored one more run (five to the Yankees’ four) and managed one more hit (thirteen to the Yankees’ twelve). Each team used seven pitchers, and each committed a single error. The game, which began in broad daylight at 5:20 in the afternoon, ended just an hour shy of midnight, in the bottom of the fourteenth. I have never been so simultaneously drained and exalted at the conclusion of a sporting event; would have believed, prior to last night, the two states of emotional being were mutually exclusive.

According to this morning’s box score, there were 35,120 in attendance, but if the Red Sox pull off the ultimate miracle of St. Fenway and go on to the World Series—unlikely, especially with the ALCS now returning to Yankee Stadium,[77] but no longer wildly improbable—ten years from now there’ll be a million New Englanders, most of them from Massachusetts, telling their children, grandchildren, bar buddies and anyone else who will listen that they were there on the night the Sox beat the Yanks in fourteen.

Both managers used up almost every damned reliever they had once the starters (Martinez for Boston, Mussina for New York) were gone. Boston finished up with Tim Wakefield, the goat in last year’s ALCS Game 7 (the Boone home run), the hero last night… in spite of Jason Varitek’s miseries with the knuckleball behind the plate. The Yankees finished with Esteban Loaiza, who barely made the New York playoff roster. Loaiza, nothing short of horrible for the Yankees during the regular season, was terrific last night until the fourteenth… and even then he did not beat himself. David Ortiz, who has pretty much carried the Red Sox offensively this postseason, beat Loaiza and necessitated Game 6; if the Yankees win the ALCS and then lose the World Series, it may be Ortiz who they will blame.

Mark Bellhorn led the bottom of the fourteenth doing what he has, unfortunately, done best offensively for his team in the postseason: he struck out. Then Johnny Damon, who had a good ALDS and is having a hideous ALCS (in his previous at-bat, he popped out weakly to Jorge Posada while trying to bunt, effectively killing what might have been a game-winning rally in the eleventh), worked Loaiza for a walk. Cabrera struck out. Manny Ramirez coaxed a second walk from Loaiza, and that set the stage for Papi.

Ortiz, who won Game 3 against the Angels with a walk-off home run and beat the Yankees in the twelfth the same way two nights ago, has been little short of Jacksonian this October (that would be Reggie, not Andrew). All he did last night was get the first RBI of the game, scoring Cabrera with a single, and then plated the second run himself (bases-loaded walk to Varitek). In the eighth, he struck a solo home run to left-center, meaning that of the four runs Boston scored in the first nine innings, Ortiz was involved in three.

What I remember most clearly about his last at-bat are the fans to the right of the backstop as I looked toward home plate. They were leaning over the low railing and pounding on the padded face of the backstop, screaming for a hit. Everyone in the park was on their feet. The kids in front of me were wearing their hats on backwards, and turned inside-out for good measure. For the first time since I’ve known him, Stewart O’Nan turned his hat around backwards and inside-out. I don’t do that; for me, the rally-cap thing has never worked. I took mine off instead and held it with the bowl up to the sky, shaking it in that ancient rainmaking gesture. Two guys in the row behind me started doing the same thing.

Ortiz put on an incredible ten-pitch at-bat. Loaiza must have made a couple of bad pitches in there, because the count eventually ran to 2-2, but I barely remember them. What I remember are those people to the right of the backstop, leaning over and pounding, pounding, pounding on the green. What I remember is Stew in his rally cap, looking weirdly like someLe Mans race-car driver from 1937. What I remember is thirty-five thousand people screaming and screaming under the lights as Big Papi fouled off pitch after pitch, one to the backstop, one to the glass of the .406 Club, one up the left-field foul line, one screaming down the right-field line, just on the wrong side of the Pesky Pole.

Finally, on the tenth pitch of the at-bat, he hit one fair. The sound of the bat was spongy rather than sharp, not the authoritative crack of good wood, but Ortiz still got all of his broad back into it. The ball flew between Derek Jeter and Miguel Cairo, and well out of reach of either man. Damon was off and running at contact, and the mob was waiting for him at home plate.

“I thought I was gonna be the first one to get to [Ortiz],” Doug Mientkiewicz is quoted as saying in today’s paper, “but Johnny Damon’s hair was already in my face.”

So tonight Father Curt Schilling will get what he probably never thought he would: a second chance to shut up those fifty thousand Yankee fans. He’s got a special boot, they tell us, and several million faithful Red Sox fans—in New England and scattered all across the country—will be praying for that boot. Not to mention the ankle inside it.

The big chant last night was Gary Sheffield’s “Who’s your deal-er?”

The big pitch was Pedro going up and in and putting Matsui—who’s been lunging across the plate all series and hitting .500—on his big Ultra-man ass.

The big run—besides the game-winner—was pinch runner Dave Roberts (once again) scoring on a sac fly to tie the game in the eighth.

The big hit could have easily been Tony Clark’s. In the ninth, with the score tied at 4, two out, and Ruben Sierra on first, he fought off Keith Foulke with two strikes and laced a ball down the right-field line. It hopped off the track, struck the top of the low wall along the corner and popped almost straight up, into the very first row of the stands, for a ground rule double. Sierra, who would have scored easily, had to go back to third, giving Foulke one more chance to work out of the jam, which he did, getting number nine hitter Miguel Cairo on a pop-up. So the Yanks lost this one, literally, by an inch. It’s the kind of break—like El Jefe’s humpback single—we never get, and the kind of break the Yankees always seem to, and I gotta say, it feels good.

And the big stats: our pen threw eight scoreless, and the Yanks left 18 on base. So don’t feel too bad for them, they had every chance to win.

Driving home late this rainy morning, I flash on a usually blank Mass Pike message board on an overpass just before the tollbooths at Newton. There, for every westbound traveler to appreciate, including the several hundred New York fans who’d hoped to drink champagne in our ballpark, instead of a construction or accident report, is a simple message, easily decipherable by our would-be alien invaders:

No team in major league history has ever come back from an 0-3 hole to win a postseason series (no team in an 0-3 hole has even forced a Game 7), but it’s been done twice in the NHL. The last time it was done, it was done to my team. I was a Pittsburgh Penguins fan in 1975 (I’m still a Penguins fan, dammit) when the New York Islanders came roaring back from 0-3 to shame us, winning by the slimmest of margins game after game, several of those in overtime. I was at Game 6 at the Civic Arena, and there was a dispiriting sense in the crowd that we were doomed to lose even though we had a 3-2 lead in games and were playing the last two on home ice. It was like a nightmare, knowing the horrible thing was going to happen but being powerless to stop it. Once we’d lost Game 6, there was hardly any point in playing Game 7, and everyone knew it. We were cooked, broken, useless. We barely showed up, and the Isles push-broomed us into the dustbin of history. Now, granted, the New York Yankees aren’t the Pittsburgh Penguins, but I must say that these Red Sox are as hungry as those young Islanders—a team, you might remember, that matured and went on to win four straight Stanley Cups.

October 20th/ALCS Game 6

At Fenway Park this morning, the groundskeepers will continue their little field-grooming chores instead of embarking on the larger chores that go with making a major league baseball field ready for winter. The concessionaires remain on standby, and the spectator gates will still be up on Yawkey Way. Incredibly, long after the baseball pundits on ESPN’s SportsCenter and the sports cannibals in the Boston media had given them up for dead, the Boston Red Sox remain alive; in the words of the immortal Huey Lewis, the heart of rock ’n’ roll is still beating.

Terry Francona kept Mark Bellhorn on the field and in the lineup even though the abovementioned pundits and cannibals[78] were by yesterday morning all but screaming for the manager to slot Reese in at second base, and Bellhorn responded with a three-run home run in the fourth inning. The rest of the night belonged to Father Curt, who dominated the Yankees for seven innings (his only mistake was a fat 3-1 pitch to Bernie Williams, who made him pay by stroking his 22nd postseason home run), and to Red Sox relievers Bronson Arroyo and Keith Foulke. The former ran into trouble when he gave up a double to Miguel Cairo and a single to Derek Jeter; the latter nearly gave me heart failure by walking Matsui and Sierra in the bottom of the ninth. In the end, however, Tony Clark ended the game by doing what he did so many times for the Red Sox in clutch situations—he struck out. Last night, and in the season’s most crucial situation, the Yankees stranded their comeback on first base.

The worst moment for Sox fans came during A-Rod’s at-bat in the eighth, following the Jeter single. Rodriguez hit a squibber between the pitcher’s mound and first. Arroyo fielded it, saw that his first baseman (Mientkiewicz, at that point) was out of position, and went to put the tag on A-Rod himself. Rodriguez[79] slapped the ball from Arroyo’s mitt, and Jeter raced all the way around to make it 4–3.

After Sox manager Terry Francona came out to protest, the umpires put their heads together and reversed the original decision, which had Rodriguez safe at first, and ruled him out on interference, instead. A sulky Derek Jeter (who slapped a phantom tag on David Ortiz and got an out call in Game 5 at Fenway) was forced to return to first base. He was still there when Gary Sheffield fouled out, ending the inning. Fans pelted the field with various objects; police in riot gear lined the foul lines in the top of the ninth; eventually the Red Sox did what no team has ever done before, which is to come back from a 3-0 deficit to tie a postseason best-of-seven series.

Whether or not they can go all the way and win Game 7 tonight is very much in question, but I intend to be there and see for myself—I called around and wangled a ticket to the game. Yankee Stadium is a horrible place for a Red Sox fan to be at the very best of times, if not Hell itself, then surely the very lowest cellar of purgatory, but I think it must still beat television. After three cold nights at Fenway and one warm one in front of Harlan Ellison’s glass teat (when the Bronx fans were clearly freezing), I am prepared to testify in any court of law that being there is better. I think that if Fox had shown me one more shot of Curt Schilling’s bloody ankle last night I would have screamed—not in horror or pity, but in rage. And anyone with a lick of sense watches such big-money games only with the volume turned all the way down. Listening to the endlessly blathering announcers always makes me think of what my mother used to say about the village idiot when she was growing up in Prout’s Neck back in the late 1920s: “He’d talk about moonlight on a sunny afternoon.”

But never mind. That sounds bilious, and I’m not in a bilious mood this morning. Far from it. Now that the Red Sox have come so far, I find it nearly impossible to believe they will come all the way…yet not completely impossible. I know this much: if there’s to be a miracle, I intend to see it with my own eyes.

Time to hit save, eject the disc, and shut this machine down.

Ruth King’s boy is going to New York City.

ALCS Game 7

I’m not planning on going to Game 7. I don’t have a ticket, I’m exhausted from four straight late nights and rock-hard hotel beds, and the last time I was at Yankee Stadium we didn’t do so well. I figure I’ll watch Steve on TV from my warm comfy couch. Then at three our Fenway neighbor Mason calls. If he can swing me a ticket, do I want to go? Because he just might be able to, but he needs to know right now.

I’m thoroughly burnt from the weekend. I mean, I’ve got nothing left—no voice, no energy. But if we’re going to win tonight, I’m going to be there. I don’t care if we lose—I do, but I think the way we’ve battled, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of one way or the other. And if the guys don’t do it, I’d like to be there to applaud them for the great run they’ve given us, and the great year. I don’t want them to hear nothing but silence or, worse, ugly catcalls.

“Yeah,” I tell Mason. “Come on, how can I not go?”

“I’ve got a good feeling,” he says.

I do too. We really do have nothing to lose. If we lose, so what? Could it be as bad as 1986? I don’t think so. But if we win…If we win it will be one of the greatest wins in Red Sox history. In baseball history. And those are the only two possible outcomes: win or lose. I’ll take those odds.

“Let me check and I’ll call you back,” Mason says, and then when he does, it’s a go. I toss my stuff in a plastic bag, kiss Trudy good-bye (“Be careful!” she urges, sure the Yankee fans will beat me senseless), hop in the car and zoom off to the Bronx. Last year I didn’t go to Game 7, and I was glad. This year, one way or the other, I’m not going to miss history.

I get into the Stadium a half hour before game time, and it’s oddly quiet. I expected a seething full house, but here and there are empy seats, and the Yankee fans—though decked out in some of the ugliest team gear I’ve ever seen—are muttering to each other. Where’s the crude, in-your-face stupidity? The 1918 banners? The guys with paint all over them? The crowd seems wary, tight. I see far more Sox hats and shirts than I did last month. It’s like we’re taking over.

David, the Yankee fan I sit beside, is incredibly polite and well-versed in the game—he’s a baseball fan first, and only then a Yankee fan (he began as a Giants fan, and still owes some allegiance to them). It’s an unexpected pleasure to sit with him and swap lore.

The Yanks call on Bucky “Fucking” Dent to throw out the first pitch, hoping to stir up old ghosts. Yogi Berra, who watched Maz’s homer go over the wall in Forbes Field, catches for him.

Maybe they should have let Bucky start, because Kevin Brown has nothing. In the first, after Johnny is thrown out at the plate on a Manny single—on the very next pitch!—Brown tries to sneak an 88 mph fastball past David Ortiz. Never happen. El Jefe lines it into the short porch (in Fenway it either falls for a single or Sheffield catches it racing in) for a 2–0 lead, and the Yanks never dig themselves out of that hole. With bases juiced in the second, Johnny Damon greets Javier Vazquez with a line-drive grand slam into the same short porch that has padded so many Yankees’ power stats over the years,[80] and the thousand or so Faithful drown out the rest of the Stadium.

And that’s basically it. Tonight Derek Lowe, who was supposed to be the best number three pitcher in the majors, is just that.[81] He gives up one hit in six innings. I’ll say that again: he gives up one hit in six innings. As in Game 4, D-Lowe rhymes with hero. Johnny hits a second dinger off Vazquez, just like he did on June 29th, and we’re up 8–1 and chanting “Reg-gie Da-mon!” The crowd is totally poleaxed, as if they’ve shown up on the wrong night. They revive only when Pedro comes on for a vanity appearance in the seventh and gives up two runs, one of which Mark Bellhorn (from now until eternity Mark “Fucking” Bellhorn to Yankee fans) immediately gets back with a towering blast off the right-field foul pole. Another garbage run on a sac fly, and yes, finally, that is it.

I’m behind home with Steve as we nail down the last outs. We don’t even need our closer. It’s 10–3, and no one can hit a seven-run homer. Jeter looks sick. A-Rod and Sheffield have both gone 0-for—complete and total justice. It’s as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart. It’s quiet and the upper deck is half-empty. The Yankees are cooked, and their fans can’t believe it. In the biggest game ever played in this rivalry, the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees at home, by a touchdown, on Mickey Mantle’s birthday. At one minute after midnight, the start of a new day, when Sierra grounds weakly to Pokey Reese, and Pokey flips to Doug Mientkiewicz (so simple!), the most expensive baseball team in history is history.

And we’re sorry, George, but that’s more than half a billion dollars you’ve spent…for nothing.

Come on now: Who’s your Daddy?

Diamondbacks. Angels. Marlins. Red Sox.

It’s like Papa Jack says: ain’t nuthin’ for free. SOMEBODY got-ta pay. And, Yankee fans, the one you just bought has a lifetime guarantee.

October 21st

Last night, in a game that was never supposed to happen, the Boston Red Sox completed the greatest comeback in the history of American professional sports. In light of that accomplishment, an inning-by-inning postmortem would be pretty anticlimactic stuff, and not very helpful in understanding the magnitude of the event. You might as well try to describe a camel by describing a camel’s eyeball.

Is winning the American League pennant an event of magnitude? We are, after all, fighting some kind of screwed-up war in Iraq where over eleven hundred American soldiers have already died, not to mention at least two hundred American civilians. We are fighting (or trying to fight) a war on terrorism. We are electing a president in less than two weeks, and the dialogue between the candidates has never been hotter. In light of those things, does winning the pennant even matter?

My answer: you bet your sweet ass it does.

One of the eeriest things about this year’s just-concluded Boston–New York baseball tussle is the way it mimicked this year’s ongoing political contest. John Kerry, a Massachusetts resident, was nominated in Boston and threw out the first pitch at a crucial Red Sox–Yankees game. George Bush was nominated in New York City, and Dick Cheney attended a Yankee–Red Sox game, wearing a Yankees cap over the old solar sex-panel while snipers stood posted high above the fans. As with the Red Sox in the ALCS, Kerry started far behind, then pulled even in the polls. (Whether or not he can win his own Game 7 remains very much open to question, and even if he does, it probably won’t be by the electoral college equivalent of seven runs.)

The four playoff games in New York transcended mere sport for another reason. Except for the Irish tenor warbling his way through “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch—now a tradition at most or all parks, I think—there was little or no sign of 9/11 trauma at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks have had their trials and travails this year (poor pitching chief among them), but the need to provide therapy for their hurt and grieving city by winning the American League pennant was thankfully not one of them.

Yet a comfy tradition of winning leaves one—whether that one be an individual or a sociological overset combined of several million fans—unprepared for loss, especially when the loss is so shocking and unexpected. The headlines in this morning’s three New York papers express that shock better than any man- or woman-on-the-street interview ever could.

From the New York Times: RED SOX TO YANKEES: WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR and MONUMENTAL COLLAPSE.

From the Daily News: THE CHOKE’S ON US and (this is a classic, I think) HELL FREEZES OVER. Accompanying the latter is a picture of Pedro with his hands upraised and the caption: “Pedro Martinez celebrates in his daddy’s house.”

From the New York Post, sad and succinct: DAMNED YANKEES.

After the game, out by the gigantic bat in front of Gate 4, most Yankee fans were downcast but magnanimous, considering the fact that the Red Sox fans—there were plenty of them—were delirious with joy, pounding each other on the back, giving and receiving high fives, pogoing up and down. One large, hairy man grabbed me around the waist and whirled me around thrice, screaming, “Stephen! Stephen! We won, ya scary sonofabitch! I LOVE YA!”

“GO, RED SOX!” I screamed back. It seemed safe enough, and besides, it was what I felt.

“GO, RED SOX!” the large, hairy man screamed. “GO, JOHNNY DAMON! GO, MANNY! GO, YOU LONGHAIRED SONSABITCHES!” Then he was gone.

From behind me there came a dissenting note—three Yankee fans, teenagers by the sound (I did not turn around to see), who wanted me to know that “Red Sox suck, and you suck too, Steve.”

A mounted cop clopped by, leaned down, and said, “Tell ’em to blow it out their asses. Tell ’em you been waitin’ eighteen years.”

I might just have done that little thing, but he clopped on, magnificent on his steed and in his riot gear.

Such memories are like raisins in some fabulous dream cake. There are others—the churlish, childish failure of the Yankees to congratulate the Red Sox on their electronic scoreboard; the downcast Yankee fan who hugged me and said he hoped the Red Sox would go all the way this time;two crying children, a boy and a girl, slowly mounting the steps and draggingtheir big foam Number One fingers disconsolately behind them on the concrete, headed out of Yankee Stadium hand in hand—but mostly what I remember this morning are the lights, the noise, the sheer unreality of watching Johnny Damon’s grand slam going into the right-field stands, and being wrapped in a big Stewart O’Nan bear hug while he screamed, “We’re going to the World Series!” in my ear.

And that’s a fact: we are indeed going to the World Series. Right now, after coming back from the dead to beat the Yankees four straight, it almost seems like a postscript…but yes. We’re going to the World Series. It starts in Boston. And it matters. It’s part of an American life, and that matters a lot.

The starting pitchers in tonight’s NLCS Game 7 are both products of the Red Sox: Roger Clemens and Jeff Suppan, who started with the PawSox ten-plus years ago and then returned for the last half of last season. In this one Suppan outpitches and outhits Clemens, executing a beautiful suicide squeeze that scores—of all people—Red Sock spring training hopeful Tony Womack.

And I’m glad it’s the Cards, winners of 105 games and by far the best and most consistent team in the majors this year. If we’re going to finally win it all, I don’t want it to be against a patsy like the Braves or Padres or Mets. Degree of difficulty counts, and whatever we achieve (or fail to achieve) the Cards will make us earn it.

Within hours of last night’s win, our e-mail in-box began filling with satirical Yankee-bashing pages. The classic was an advisory from the Red Cross informing us that the international signal for choking (a man holding his throat with both hands) would now be replaced by this more recognizable symbol (the intertwined N and Y). Marky Mark’s head was cut-and-pasted into a cast picture of Saved by the Bellhorn, and a shot of Derek Jeter and A-Rod glumly watching from the dugout rail bore the caption: “Not Going Anywhere for a While?” and a Snickers logo. And, God help me, until they started repeating, I laughed at every single one.

October 22nd

There will be baseball tomorrow night under the lights at Fenway Park. In the meantime, these intermission notes:

One—Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe columnist and author of The Curse of the Bambino, has been in full damage-control mode since Boston did its Rocky Balboa thing to win the pennant. Shaughnessy’s trying to convince joyful New Englanders that the Curse of the Bambino (largely created by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who has book royalties to protect) is still in full force; beating the Yankees is not enough. “Now Wait Just a Minute: Series Still Must Be Won” is the heading of today’s column, which begins, “Let’s get one thing straight: the Curse of the Bambino has not been lifted. The job is not yet done.”

I happened to catch Shaughnessy on one of the cable news channels last night not long after I arrived home from New York, spinning pretty much the same line. He was on the phone; Red Sox–Yankees highlights were playing on the screen. When he paused for breath, the newscaster asked him what he and Boston baseball fans would talk about vis-à-vis the Red Sox next year if Boston did happen to win the World Series.

Either the query or the concept behind it seemed to catch Shaughnessy by surprise. There was an uncharacteristic pause, and then he said, “You know, that’s an interesting question.” Which to my mind is always aninteresting response, meaning the person to whom the question has been directed has no freakin’ idea. Sure enough, Shaughnessy never did really respond to the newscaster’s question.

Without the curse to fall back on (or the Curse, if you prefer), they might have to actually write about the games? You think? I know some of the Boston sports cannibals would find that a daunting proposition at the outset, but most of them (their taste for the golden flesh of athletes to one side) are pretty damned good writers, and I’m sure they’d rise to the challenge in short order.

Two—During the wee-hours postgame celebration outside Fenway Park, a twenty-one-year-old Emerson College student named Victoria Snelgrove was killed when she was struck by a plastic ball filled with pepper spray. Boston police commissioner Kathleen O’Toole accepted responsibility for the young woman’s death (handsome, and no doubt of great comfort to her family), and in the next breath condemned the “punks” who seized upon the Red Sox victory over the Yankees as “an opportunity for violence and destruction.” Running beside this story is a picture of the late Ms. Snelgrove, looking not like a punk but a Madonna.

Boston mayor Thomas Menino says the city is considering a ban of liquor sales during the World Series (think how proud his Puritan predecessors would be of that), and also of banning live TV coverage of the games in bars and restaurants, because it incites fans.[82] This is causing the predictable howls of outrage from bar and restaurant owners, and they may have a point, especially since Menino failed to mention the sale of beer within Fenway Park itself while the games are going on.

Three—It’s going to be St. Louis rather than Houston when the Series convenes tomorrow for another of those hateful (perhaps even beerless?) night games. The Rocket gave it his best shot last night in Game 7 of the NLCS, and the Astros even led for a while, but in the end the Roger Clemens tradition of just not being able to win the big game again held true.

Red Sox rooters looking for additional reasons to believe—and surely any would come in handy, considering that the 2004 Cardinals won more games than any other pro baseball team—might consider this: in theNLCS, the home team won every game. And in this World Series, the Red Sox have the home field advantage.

And have it thanks to Manny Ramirez’s first-inning home run in the All-Star Game off of… Roger Clemens.