Faithful Read online

  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.

  SO: Thanks for the use of the seats. Let me just warn you: when the sun goes down, it’s fall. Couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees out there. I had to buy a pricey sweatshirt to keep from shivering. The offense didn’t create much heat either. Mason says it’s the return of the pre–July 31st Sox. I think it’s the usual we-don’t-have-to-hit-for-Pedro virus. Funny how that works. We didn’t hit for Clemens either; he was always leaving in the seventh tied 2–2.

  SK: 1) It is a return to the July Sox.

  2) It is the Curse of Sports Illustrated at work.

  3) It was Cabrera (not Nomah) who ended the game first-pitch swinging in the bottom of the ninth.

  Sign me,

  Toldja-So Boy

  SO: Hey, if we’re expecting to win that game down three with two gone in the ninth, we truly are some cockeyed optimists. Ain’t no curse when you lose and deserve to, and we did. The only reliever who stopped the bleeding was Leskanic, and by then it was too late. It’s not just saves we’re missing, it’s HOLDS. Our middle guys, like the Yanks’ the last three years, are our biggest weakness, and have been since spring training.

  SK: Not WIN it, TIE it.

  SO: True: play for the tie at home. Still, we were losing from the very first batter.

  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

  SK: They’re talking about taking Tim out of the postseason rotation. That’s okay. If we keep playing this way, postseason won’t be a problem. I have never—NEVER—gone to bed feeling so depressed after a win. They hit everything we threw at them. And they ran our Sox off. Blah.

  SO: Maybe this’ll cheer you up: before this year, Tim-may was 5-2 lifetime in the Metrodome, 5-2 at the Coliseum, and 5-3 with a 3.32 ERA at Angel Stadium. I wouldn’t pull him just yet. You know how streaky he can be. If he gets unhittable after October 1, we could be wearing some big rings. Have hope.

  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. Usuall
y 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 o
ther 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.