Faithful (29 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or something like that.

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