Faithful (17 page)

Two number fives on the downward slide: Mr. Kim returns to Korea for unspecified treatment of his back and hip, while the Yankees give Donovan Osborne his outright release. It’s late May, and the Yankees haven’t figured out their rotation. Having Bronson Arroyo definitely gives us the edge.

Tonight it’s the struggling Derek Lowe against Mark Redman, 3-2 with a 3.60 ERA. By comparison, Lowe’s ERA is 6.02.

We have Steph’s sax recital and then dinner after, and get back in the A’s fifth. It’s 6–2 Sox with two down and no one on. I figure Lowe must be throwing okay. Kotsay doubles, Byrnes singles him in. Chavez homers off the wall behind Section 34, and it’s 6–5.

I wonder if it’s me—if I should turn the TV off and come back later.

I’m glad I don’t. In our sixth, Johnny’s on third with one down. Ortiz can’t deliver him, and with two down and first open, Macha has Redman walk Manny. At this point, Redman’s thrown 120 pitches. The switch-hitting Tek is coming up, so with his relievers up and warm, Macha can choose which side of the plate he hits from. He lets Redman pitch to him. Tek hits one onto Lansdowne Street and we’ve got a four-run cushion again.

Anastacio Martinez relieves Lowe, giving up three straight hits and a run before Embree comes on and gets out of it with a double-play ball.

In the A’s eighth, they have two on and one out when Billy McMillon stings one down the first-base line. McCarty gloves it behind the bag in foul territory; his momentum takes him halfway to the tarp before he spins and throws to Timlin covering. McMillon slides and gets tangled up with Timlin—he’s out! The replay’s crazy: I’ve never seen anyone make that play so far in foul ground, and perfectly. That’s exactly why McCarty’s on the team. It makes me wish I could send him back to 1986 to spell Billy Buck for an inning.

In the ninth, McCarty shines again, with a sweeping snatch of a bounced throw by Bellhorn, helping Foulke to a one-two-three inning for his tenth straight save.

On the postgame show, Eck tries to figure out Lowe’s problem. Of the fifth, Eck says, “It’s a mystical inning,” and we crack up. Groovy Eck with his Farrah Fawcett wings. But he’s right too (right on, Eck!): “When you win a game and your ERA goes up, you know you didn’t pitch too good.”

9 A.M.: Neither Stew nor I made it to the ballyard last night. I had a PEN dinner in Boston’s Back Bay and Stewart had his son’s saxophone recital—which, he assured me, is nonnegotiable. The Red Sox did not miss us. Derek Lowe was once more far from perfect, but the Sox bats stayed hot and in his start against Oakland, Lowe was just good enough to go six and eke out the win. The Red Sox rolled to their fifth straight, their seventh in their last eight games.

But I watch
SportsDesk
this morning musing on my Yankees essay—the one where I talked about how we hate what we fear—and looking at my new hat, which was sent to me from yankeeshater.com. Because the Yankees have
also
been winning, and while we’ve been doing it at home, they’ve been doing it on the road, which is a tougher proposition. They came from behind last night at Camden Yards not just once but
twice,
finally putting the Orioles away 12–9. So in spite of this nifty streak of ours, we’re still only a game and a half in front. Two Sox losses combined with just two Yankee wins, and we’re back in second place. This is what the Yankees do. They hang around.

Those suckers
lurk.

10:30 P.M.: The summer’s disaster movie,
The Day After Tomorrow,
opens this weekend, but disaster struck tonight at Fenway Park, as Boston’s brave little five-game winning streak went bye-bye in a big way. Oakland beat the Red Sox like a drum, pounding out 17 hits on their way to a 15–2 win. Me, I knew it was going to happen. I went to the game with my nephew, Jon, who goes to school in Boston. He came over to my hotel room before the game and tossed my hat on the bed, which everyoneknows is just about the worst luck in the world—talk about bad mojo! But I don’t blame him; the kid just didn’t know.

Also, most (or maybe all) major league teams now insist on a five-man pitching rotation, and our fifth man, Bronson Arroyo, while promising, is still very much a work in progress. That fifth man in the rotation is about stre-et-ching the starting pitching…and that, of course, is all about the money. We’ve been there before in this book, and will undoubtedly be there again. But I can remember a time, children—I believe it was 1959—when the White Sox went to the World Series with what was essentially a
three
-man rotation. Of course, those were the days when a good pitcher still got paid in five figures and a man could take his whole family to the ballyard for twenty bucks, parking included (and smoke a White Owl in the grandstand, if he was so inclined). I’m not saying those were better baseball days…but I’m not saying they weren’t, either.

In the midst of all this, Kevin Youkilis drew a walk in his last at-bat. He still hasn’t played in a major league game where he’s failed to reach base.

A final note before I pack it in for the night: I took myself off this afternoon to see
Still, We Believe,
an entertaining documentary which chronicles the star-crossed Red Sox team of 2003, the one that voyaged so far only to tear out its hull (not to mention the hearts of its fans) on those cruel Yankee reefs in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series. This film is currently playing in theaters all over New England, plus a few New York venues (where it is attended largely by sadists in Yankee caps, one would suppose), and probably nowhere else. It’s a charming, funny, sweetly poignant film. Its token efforts to explore the Mind of Management—always supposing Management
has
a Mind, a hypothesis with little evidence to support it—aren’t very interesting, but when it focuses on the fortunes of four fans, it’s a lot more successful. One is a young man who is wheelchair-bound due to an accident; two are semidaffy (but very endearing) young women I kept thinking of as Laverne and Shirley; the fourth is Angry Bill.

Angry Bill is a piece of work: overweight, hypertensive (he suffers persistent nosebleeds during the ’03 postseason), full of nervous energy, bursting with cynical pronouncements that barely cover his bruised baseball fan’s heart. This guy has lived and died with the Sox for so long (mostly the latter), that he sums up an entire New England mind-set when hestates, in effect, that the Sox are
always
gonna lose, he knows they’re gonna pull an el foldo in August just as sure as he knows the sun’s gonna come up over Boston Haaabaaa in the east, and if they don’t pull an el foldo in August they’ll pull a tank job in September, just as sure as the sun’s gonna go down over Attleboro in the west.

And yet, with Boston ahead during the early going of that climactic Game 7 in October of 2003, Angry Bill briefly allows himself to become Hopeful Bill… because the Red Sox do this to us, too: every year at some point they turn into Lucy holding the football, and against all our best intentions (and our knowing that those who do not learn from history are condemned—fucking
CONDEMNED!
—to repeat it) we turn into Charlie Brown running once more to kick it, only to have it snatched away again at the last moment so we land flat on our backs, screaming
“AUGGGH!”
at the top of our lungs.

And when, after Grady Little leaves Pedro in long after even the most casual baseball fan knows he is toasty—fried, broiled, baked, cooked to a turn, stick a fork in ’im, he’s done—when the coup de grâce is delivered by Aaron Boone long after Pedro has trudged to the shower, Angry Bill stares with a kind of wondering disbelief into the documentarian’s camera (at us in the audience, seven months later, seven weeks into a new season later, us with our tickets to tonight’s shellacking by the Oakland A’s in our pockets) and delivers what is for me the absolute capper, the jilted Red Sox fan’s Final Word: “Don’t let your kids grow up to be sports fans,” Angry Bill advises, and at this point the movie leaves him—mercifully—to contemplate the Patriots, who will undoubtedly improve matters for his battered psyche by winning the Super Bowl…but I’m sure Angry Bill would admit (if not right out loud then in his heart) that winning the Super Bowl isn’t the same as winning the World Series. Not even in the same
universe
as winning the World Series.

Meanwhile, the Yankees—the Evil Empire, our old nemesis—have come from behind to beat Baltimore once again, and our lead in the AL East is down to a mere half game. I’m off to bed knowing that the boogeyman has inched a little bit closer to the closet door.

It’s the big holiday weekend. Once the kids get home from school, we’ve got to drive down to the Rhode Island shore and help my in-laws open up the beach house, so after lunch I run around town trying to fit in my last errands. I’m at the Stop ’n Shop when I remember the new Reverse the Curse ice cream, and there it is in the freezer section. The carton is boring and generic. I’d hoped for more interesting packaging, maybe a nod to the Monster that I could use for a penny bank. Still, the ice cream should be good.

We poke along I-95 with all the other Memorial Day traffic. Trudy and her parents have been lifting and cleaning all day, and don’t feel like cooking, so we go out for dinner. By the time we make it back, the Sox are down 4–1 to Seattle in the fifth. Ichiro’s just driven in a run, and steals third on Pedro, who has that dull, long-suffering look he gets when things aren’t going right. There’s only one out, and Edgar Martinez is up. Pedro gets him swinging, then gets the next guy to pop up.

In our fifth, Millar and Youkilis tag Joel (pronounced Joe-El, as if he’s from Krypton) Pineiro for back-to-back doubles, making it 4–2. See, all the Sox needed was us watching. Pokey Ks, but with two gone Pineiro walks Johnny and Mark Bellhorn to load them for Big David. On the first pitch, Ortiz lofts a long fly to right. Ichiro goes back sideways, and keeps going, all the way to the wall, where he leaps. He hangs there, folded over the low wall, only his legs showing. We can’t see the ball, but the fans behind the bullpen fence are jumping up and down—it’s gone, a grand slam, and we’re up 6–4.

In St. Pete, the Yanks have beaten the D-Rays, so we need to hold on to stay in first. Pedro settles down. In the eighth he gives way to Embree, who throws a scoreless inning. J. J. Putz comes on for the M’s and gives up a smoked single through the middle to Manny (it makes Putz riverdance) and then, after a long at-bat, a double to Dauber off the bullpen wall. Bob Melvin decides to walk Tek to set up the double play, which Kapler foils by popping up. Putz goes 2-0 on Youkilis and has to come in with a strike; Youkilis slaps it down the right-field line for a double and two more insurance runs, and the PA plays the corny old Hartford Whalers theme, “Brass Bonanza.”

Foulke closes, but it’s a battle. He throws 30 pitches and leaves runners on second and third for an 8–4 final. A tougher game than expected from the last-place M’s, but El Jefe (Big Papi, D.O., David as Goliath) brought us back.

It’s Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve had all of Boston and Fenway Park I can take for a while—seven games in eight days is plenty, especially given the uniformly shitty quality of the weather.
[16]
And that’s not all. Hotel living gets creepy after a while, even when you can afford room service (maybe
especially
if you can afford room service). Also, my wife headed back to Maine after the PEN dinner on Wednesday, and I miss her. But as I run north under sunshiny, breezy skies, I keep an eye on the dashboard clock, and when 1 P.M. rolls around, I hit the radio’s SEEK button until I find the voices of Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano, comfort food for the ear.

Listening to a baseball game on the radio may be outmoded in this age of computers and satellite television, but it hath its own particular pleasures; with each inning you build your own Fenway of the mind from scrap-heap memories and pure imagination. Today the wind is playing tricks, Wakefield’s knuckleball is staying up in the zone, and the usually lackluster Mariner hitters pounce on it right from the git. In the second inning a Seattle batter hits a towering fly foul of first, but the wind pushes it back into fair territory. Mark Bellhorn, today playing second, tries to stay with it, can’t. The ball bonks him on the wrist and falls for a double. I see all this quite vividly (along with Manny Ramirez’s homer to left, hit so hard it leaves a vapor trail, Troop assures me) as I drive north between Yarmouth and Freeport with that same wind pushing my own car. Since I can’t read a page of my current book between innings (the galley of Chuck Hogan’s
Prince of Thieves
is now tucked away in my green 1999 All-Star Game souvenir carry-bag), I punch the CD button after each third out and listen to two minutes—timed on my wristwatch—of Larry McMurtry’s
The Wandering Hill,
volume two of the Berrybender Narratives. I have found that two minutes gets me back to the game just in time for the first pitch of the next inning.

In this fashion, the 240-mile trip to Bangor passes agreeably enough. One wishes the Red Sox could have won, but it’s hard to root against Freddy Garcia, a great pitcher who is this year laboring for a bad ball clubin the Mariners. And the worst the Sox can do on the current home stand is 6-4; one may reasonably hope for 8-2.

One may even hope the hapless Devil Rays will beat the Yankees tonight, and we will retain our half-game hold on the top spot a little longer.

Waiting at home in the mail is the Nomar ball from the Nomar Bowl, a nice souvenir of his lost season. My e-mail in-box is sluggish, filled with pictures of Lisa at the Town Lanes with Nomar, with Dauber, with David Ortiz, with Mike Timlin, with Alan Embree, even with Danny Ainge. Everyone’s smiling, though I don’t see any players actually bowling.

The Yanks beat the Rays 5–3, so they’re in first place. I smother my sorrows in a bowl of Reverse the Curse and read the sports page. My Pirates, amazingly, are at .500, thanks to a pair of walk-off homers to take a twin bill from the Cubs. And it says Nomar’s scheduled to start his rehab stint at Pawtucket tomorrow—the best news I could hope for.

9:50 P.M.: I take my wife to the crazy-weather movie, which we both enjoy. I walk the dog as soon as we get back, then hit the TV remote and click on Headline News. Weekends, the ticker at the bottom of the screen runs continuous sports scores, and ohhhh,
shit,
the Yankees won
again
. They’ve regained the top spot in the AL East, one they’ve held for almost
five consecutive seasons,
leaving me to wonder how in the name of Cobb and Williams you pound a stake through this team’s heart and make them lie still. Or if it’s even possible.