Faithful (30 page)

The Red Sox didn’t make it easy (that has
never
been a part of the deal with them), but they managed to finish the twelve-game stretch that began on August 2nd at exactly 8-4. The opener in the current series against the White Sox was another one-run loss, and tonight’s game began badly, with Curt Schilling giving up consecutive solo home runs to Timo Perez and Carlos Lee almost before the last notes of the national anthem had died away.

But in this game the Red Sox played flawless defense (the highlight was a sliding, twisting, skidding catch in foul territory by Kevin Youkilis, who almost ended up in the White Sox dugout), and you have to admire Curt Schilling, a pitcher whose face—along with those of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, maybe—ought to grace the cover of the
Old School Baseball Encyclopedia
. Following the home runs, he surrendered only one more hit until the sixth. By then the Red Sox had tied the game on back-to-back solo home runs of their own, one by Manny Ramirez and one by David “Big Papi” Ortiz.

Papi came up again in the bottom of the eighth, after Ramirez had struck out looking on three pitches. By then Schilling was done for the evening, but still eligible for the win if the Red Sox could pull ahead. Ortiztook care of his pitcher, dumping one into the fourth or fifth row of seats beyond the bullpen in right center. It wasn’t quite as mighty as his earlier rocket, but there was still no doubt when it left the bat. I have never seen such a big man who is able to generate such sudden power, not even Mo Vaughn. God knows how long it will last, but Red Sox fans have been blessed to watch it over the last two seasons, and Ortiz may be having an MVP year.

Keith Foulke came on in the top of the ninth. My wife had gone to bed by then, and that was probably just as well; when Foulke walked Chicago’s leadoff hitter on five pitches, my state of jangled nerves approached real terror. It was all too easy to see this one slipping away. Foulke took the mound with 18 saves, not a lot for a club that’s now approaching the 65-win mark, and very few of those saves have come in one-run situations. Tonight, however, just enough of Schilling’s tough-man air seemed to linger on the mound to carry Foulke through. After the walk came a pop-up, after the pop-up came two strikeouts, the last on a faltering half-swing at a changeup by Juan Uribe, and presto, “Dirty Water” was playing over the PA system. Pedro Martinez was first out of the dugout, giving high fives with what appeared to be a fungo bat.

One final note: the Yankees beat the Mariners this afternoon, maintaining their bonecrushing ten-and-a-half-game lead in the AL East and winning their 75th game of the year with August not yet half over. They are on a pace to win 110 games, perhaps more. This is more than unreal; this is
surreal
.

Ten in the morning and I have no idea who won the game last night. We’re at camp, away from TV and computers and even the newspaper. The director usually posts the bare-bones scores on a wall in the dining hall (often with a synopsis of the Pirate game), but today he’s bumped them for the Olympics. Yesterday, anticipating this, I shelled out five bucks for the modern equivalent of a transistor radio and listened to the Indians and Twins’ afternoon game from the Jake, but last night at bedtime I couldn’t catch a round-the-league wrap-up.

We’ve been gone a week now, and this is the first time I haven’t naturally run across a score. While we were at my dad’s cottage on Lake Chautauqua, Wake’s six-homer win over the D-Rays made the Jamestown paper, complete with a photo of Tim-may. The Buffalo TV news at eleven featured our next game, since a local family threw out the first pitch in memory of their son, a high school star and Sox fan, dead of cancer, who’d dreamed of playing at Fenway.

Most nights I’d get just a score and then have to wait for the morning paper to fill me in, though during one newscast after the Bisons beat Pawtucket, we were treated to the Real Deal Player of the Game going deep twice against a skinny submariner wearing number 15—the elusive Mr. Kim.

A straight score, lumped with others from around the league, is flat and paralyzing. If we win, it’s great for about twenty seconds, then I’m pissed that I don’t know how we won, or why. A loss is awful—irrefutable, infuriating—and terrible for about a minute, until I realize that I don’t know anything about the game, not even who pitched. It’s a mindless, uninvolved way to follow baseball, almost zero content, as if the game is just about winning or losing.

We don’t watch a lot of TV at Chautauqua (getting only two snowy channels will do that), so inevitably I fell a day behind, picking up the paper and dissecting last night’s box score, looking for signs. Manny was finally back; Trot and Pokey and Bellhorn weren’t. Cabrera continued to struggle at the plate. Bill Mueller, still playing out of position, made another error. Terrible Terry Adams put men on and Mendoza let them in, while Takatsu, the White Sox reliever, inherited three runners and stranded them. Even uglier, their seven and eight hitters combined for 7 RBIs.

Sometimes it’s fun to puzzle out backwards what happened, but even a box score is cold matter, a map to treasure already dug up. Stanley Kubrick, insulated in his compound in the English countryside, used to have an assistant here in the States tape the playoffs and World Series so he could devour them at his leisure, and while I admire Kubrick’s taste (and appetite), watching a game that’s long been over, and watching alone, seems to leach the immediacy from what is essentially a shared experience. Ideally, I want to be
at
the game, reacting to every pitch and situation as part of the loud, honest-to-God crowd; short of that I’ll join the far-flung (and far from imaginary) audience all across New England watching Don and Jerry or listening to Joe and Troop or Uri Berenguer and J. P. Villaman, knowing that when David Ortiz cranks one, citizens of the Nation—from the capital of Fenway to the borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and the Dominican—are hollering like idiots the same as I am. A box score or even a decent recap can’t show me what kind of location Lowe has, or how much of a lead Dave Roberts is getting. I need to see it
now,
before what happens happens.

So this is limbo, not knowing anything until it’s already over (and even then not knowing the results from Anaheim or Oakland). All I can say, today, is that in mid-August we’re solidly in the wild-card race, and possibly in the lead, and that, from all evidence, as a team we’re having the exact same problems we had two months ago—the same problems, really, we had last year.

I need to go back to the Garciaparra trade again, and it probably won’t be for the last time. It’s going to be one of the big Red Sox stories of the year, certainly
the
big story if this wounded, limping, patched-together team
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doesn’t make postseason (or even if it does but doesn’t advance).

When we got Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in return for Nomar, we were assured by management that this was a lot more than trade-mania, the equivalent of the crazy buying that goes on at the annual Filene’s Wedding Sale. We were “plugging defensive holes.” In addition to that, Cabrera’s .246 batting average was deceiving; he was “a doubles machine.”

Right, and we won in Vietnam; mission accomplished in Iraq.

Mientkiewicz, although not used as an everyday player by Terry Francona, has played solid, unflashy baseball for Boston, and no surprise there; as a Minnesota Twin he’s played on plenty of contending teams, and he’s used to the pressure. Cabrera is a different story. Players who come from forgotten teams (and surely the Montreal Expos are
the
forgotten team) either blossom or shrivel when they come to contending teams and pressure-cooker venues like Boston; Cabrera has so far done the latter. The press has been patient with him, but you’d expect that; in Boston most of those guys shill for management, and while they have no problem making Nomar look bad, they’d love his replacement to look good so they can say, “See? He’s great. Toldja.”

More interesting to me—also more surprising and endearing—has been the fans’ patience with Cabrera…who probably helped himself enormously by hitting a home run in his first at-bat in the Red Sox uniform. None since, though, and his Montreal batting average of .246 has shrunk to something like .225. Worse, he hasn’t looked like anyone’s idea of a Gold Glover at shortstop. Last night, in Boston’s game against Toronto—the first of a three-game set—Cabrera racked up a pair of RBIs, one on a base hit and one on a sac fly. Then, in an agonizing, rain-soaked seventh inning that seemed to go on forever, he gave them both back plus one to grow on with two box-score errors and a third, mental, error that allowed a run which should have been kept right where it was, at third base.

Cabrera’s hitting in the clutch has been nonexistent. In the game previous to last night’s—the final game of the Red Sox–White Sox series—Cabrera ended things by grounding softly back to the pitcher, leaving the tying run stranded at third after the Red Sox had battled back from a multirun deficit. So in last night’s game I was a little saddened but not really surprised to hear the first scattered boos in the rain-depleted crowd when Cabrera came up following his seventh-inning follies, which turned a 5–1 Red Sox cruise into a 5–4 nail-biter against the American League’s bottom dogs. The crowd wants him to be good, and I have no doubt that he
is
—no doubt that Terry Francona is exactly right when he says that Cabrera (who, unlike Mientkiewicz, plays every day) is pressing at the plate—but I also have no doubt that the Nomar trade has already cost this Red Sox team at least three games it could ill afford to lose, and that it will quite likely cost them more unless Orlando Cabrera quickly finds his stride.

I’m not man enough to predict that the Sox will win eight of the current twelve, but they
could,
with half of the next dozen coming against the abysmal Blue Jays and two more against the only slightly better Tigers. And they
should,
if they are to retain their position as the team to beat in the wild-card race, and perhaps even put some distance between themselves and the other contending teams. But the injury situation continues to grow worse rather than better; with Youkilis down, we were last night treated to the bizarre sight of Doug Mientkiewicz playing second base for the first time in his life. And, aside from getting knocked down once by Carlos Delgado, he did a damned good job.

One final note: as the season wears on, I find it easier and easier to spell Mientkiewicz. People can adjust to just a-damn-bout anything, can’t they?

Having said all that, let me tell you that no one in all of Red Sox Nation was any happier than I was when Orlando Cabrera finally
did
come through in the clutch, turning on an 86 mph Justin Speier changeup and clanging it off the scoreboard in the bottom of the ninth inning last night, chasing Johnny Damon home with the winning run in the second game of Boston’s current series against the Toronto Blue Jays.

Fenway giveth and Fenway taketh away. In the first game of the series, it tooketh away big-time from Mr. Cabrera. Last night, that funky just-right bounce gaveth back, and I went dancing around my living room, singing the Gospel According to K.C. and the Sunshine Band: “That’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it.”

Does this mean I think the Garciaparra trade is suddenly, magically okay? No. But I was rooting for Cabrera to come through—not just for the Red Sox but for Cabrera
as
a Red Sock? You bet your tintype. Because, no matter what I or any other fan might think of the trade, the deal is done and Cabrera’s one of us now; he wears the red and white. So, sure, I root for him.

Thus, hooray, Orlando. May you clang a hundred more off that funky old scoreboard. Welcome to Fenway Park. Welcome home.

It hasn’t been Boston’s best week (I firmly believe that this season’s best weeks are still ahead of them), but we’re riding our fifth four-game winning streak of the season, and if we win again this afternoon, the Red Sox will be proud possessors of their fourth
five
-game winning streak of the season. There’s better news: I’ve lost track of
All My Children
almost completely, and am hoping that when my viewing habits once more regularize on that front, the child of Babe and the odious JR will be in middle school and developing problems of his own (kids on soap operas grow up fast).

August has certainly been the best
month
of the season for the Red Sox, and the team couldn’t have picked a better time to get hot. There isn’t a lot of wild-card competition on the horizon in the Central Division, but with the exception of the Mariners (now better than twenty games off the pace), the West is a shark tank. For the last week or so, all the sharks—Oakland, Anaheim, and Texas—have been feeding on their weaker Midwestern brothers, and all of them have been winning.
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One of these clubs will win the division. The other two—along with the Red Sox—are swimming full-tilt at a door only big enough to admit one of them. I comfort myself with thoughts of the schedule, which will eventually force the sleek sharks of the Western Division to begin dining upon each other.

The Yankees, in the meantime, have finally begun to falter a bit as their pitching arms become more and more suspect (may I note—and not without glee—that their trade for Esteban Loaiza is looking especially doubtful; there are already trade rumors floating around). They’ve lost three out of their last four—the one win an almost miraculous come-from-behinder against the Twins—and while I don’t think anyone among the Red Sox Faithful are counting on a total Yankee el floppo (but how sweet it would be), I’d guess that few among us are unaware that the New York lead, which was ten and a half ten days ago, has now shrunk to seven and a half. Still a lot, but on August 21st, seven and a half games doesn’t seem like an insurmountable lead.

I’m addicted to the Little League World Series the way a college hoop junkie craves March Madness. Every game is high drama, and you never know what to expect. Tonight we switch back and forth between the Sox and the Lincoln, Rhode Island, team, and after a while, like the end of
Animal Farm
, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Both survive late scares. The kids’ defense falls apart in the sixth. In Chicago, the Sox are up a run in the eighth, thanks to back-to-back jacks by Manny and David, when Manny goes to plant himself under an easy fly, slips on the wet grass, recovers, then slips again, and the ball falls behind him. Timlin gets us out of it and Foulke closes, looking sharp. The Angels have swept the Yanks, and the Rangers finally lost, so we’re five and a half back in the East and a game up in the wild card. And the New England kids win.

This is terrific—we beat the White Sox again, making us 5-1 in our last six games. The Rangers also won, but the trade-off is that the Yankees took another drubbing from the Angels (and at the Stadium, hee-hee), meaning that the New York lead is down another full game. Knowing that their team has lost almost half their seemingly insurmountable lead in the space of a week cannot make Yankee fans happy. (That lead probably is insurmountable, but north of Hartford the only thing we love more than seeing the pin-stripers have a bad week is seeing them have
two
bad weeks.)

The Red Sox have scored 20 runs against the White Sox in the last two games. Varitek is thumping the ball, and so is Millar, but I think the big offensive story in Chicago has been Manny Ramirez. He’s been sluggish at the plate since the All-Star break, but in the last two games he’s shown a return to the batting brilliance that made him such a catch for us in the first place. He hit the 16th grand slam of his career in the second inning of the Friday night game (August 20th) and added a three-run job yesterday. He has a total of 9 RBIs in the two games.

To this you should add in Manny’s glovework, especially back home in Boston, where he has become more and more comfortable with the eccentricities of left field at Fenway, a position that has made strong baseball players cry. Manny has gotten a reputation as a bad defensive baseball player and will almost certainly carry it with him for his entire career (the only people less likely than baseball fans to change their minds about a player are other players, coaches and, of course, Ted Williams’s “Knights of the Keyboard”), but he has mastered the knack of playing the carom off the Green Monster in such a way as to hold runners at first (the world-famous “wall-ball single”), and he has made some brilliant, fearless catches, especially going to his right, into the Twilight Zone territory beyond third base where the wall is hard and foul territory is measured in mere inches. He’s no Yaz, but is he at least the equal of Mike Greenwell, and maybe a little better? Our survey says yes.

And damn, ain’t he a likable cuss! That wasn’t always the case in Cleveland, where Manny had a reputation for taciturnity (he rarely did interviews), standoffishness and laziness. In Boston, Manny always seems to be smiling, and it is a beautiful smile, boyish and somehow innocent. He hustles, and the camera frequently catches him goofing with his teammates in the dugout (in one beautifully existential contrast, the viewer sees Curt Schilling studiously poring over paperwork while Manny mugs crazily over his shoulder). He has even done a shoe commercial which has its own brand of goofy Manny Ramirez charm.
[40]

Some of the change from Growly Manny to Don’t Worry, Be Happy Manny may have to do with the Dominican Mafia that, simply by chance, now surrounds him: cheery-by-nature players like Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz. Some of it may be a kind of weird alchemy in Manny’s lungs: he pulls in the baleful, media-poisoned air of Boston and exhales his own brand of nonchalant good cheer in its place. I actually sort of buy this, because not even the trade rumors that swirled around him in the off-season changed Manny as we have come to know him: he comes to work, he does his job, and if the Red Sox win, he gives a postgame interview in which he shakes his head and says, “We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man, you know? We got another sees wee’s in the season and we gotta jus’ keep goin’.”

One of the reasons I’d like the Red Sox to win the World Series is so I can see if Manny would say
“We gotta jus’ keep goin’, man”
in his postgameinterview, if he’s that much on cruise control. Probably not, but I’m sure he’d smile, and that smile is worth a thousand dollars.