Faithful (33 page)

Bob Hohler’s Boston
Globe
piece on yesterday’s game leads like this: “Searching for scapegoats? Try horrormeister Stephen King, who tossed out a ceremonial first pitch.”

Blame the horrormeister. What did I tell you?

Please, baseball gods, let Curt Schilling win today.

A weird, glancing Sox experience today. We drive the two hours from Avon to Boston, and around game time we deliver Caitlin and all her stuff to her dorm at B.U., then go over to Beacon Street for a farewell lunch. Fenway’s less than a block from us, and fans headed for the rubber game against Texas stream past, decked out in their Red Sox best. So not only do we feel lost, losing Caitlin, it feels like we’re going the wrong way, or doing the wrong thing, as in some unsettling, ominous dream.

On the way home, three now instead of four, we listen to the game unfolding farther and farther behind us. Schilling throws well, and we hold a 4–1 lead until the seventh, when Gabe Kapler adds two more with a bases-loaded single. It turns out that we need them, as Francona unwisely gives Schilling a chance at a complete game. Michael Young—again!—hits a Monster shot, and it’s 6–3 with one down when Foulke comes in. He gets an out with his first pitch, then gives up a single, a double, a single that makes it 6–5, until, finally, as we’re just pulling into the driveway, Bellhorn snares a knee-high bullet to save the game. Yi yi yi.

9:45 P.M.: It was closer than it should have been—the Rangers turned a 6–1 laugher into a 6–5 nail-biter in the top of the ninth—but in the end, Father Curt and the Red Sox prevailed. The Yankees also won (on a bases-loaded walk), and the Angels are winning, but for tonight, at least, I don’t care about the other guys. My personal curse has been lifted. Of course all that superstition stuff is the bunk, anyway, and we all know it. And with that said, I can take off my lucky shirt, turn my pillow lucky side up, and go to bed.

While some of the Faithful grouse that we’ve become more and more like the Yankees—signing free agents rather than developing our prospects—the team we most consciously resemble is Oakland. Theo and Bill James tend to follow the tenets of Moneyball, valuing on-base percentage above other indicators, and in our two seasons under their reign, we’ve approached the playoff chase like the A’s, staying close until the All-Star break, making a few deals and then charging. Beyond absorbing Billy Beane’s philosophy, we also appear to be importing players he’s already poached from other teams. Mark Bellhorn, Johnny Damon, David McCarty and Keith Foulke are all recent A’s, as is manager Terry Francona, Oakland’s bench coach in 2003.

So it’s no surprise that the A’s are our constant competition, and that the games we play with them are tight—a situation that ironically does
not
benefit a Moneyball club (since defense, speed and a closer are less highly prized in Billy Beane’s universe), but a smallball team like the Angels or a more traditional slugging club like the Yankees.

Tonight out by the East Bay, Mark Kotsay (who lost the last Sox-A’s game with his bobble of a Bill Mueller double on the track) solos twice off Arroyo early, but Bronson settles down, retiring eleven in a row. In the fourth Manny and David go back-to-back against Barry Zito to tie it. The game stays that way till the seventh, when Bill Mueller and Dave Roberts hit RBI doubles. The A’s rally to make it 4–3 after a terrible call in the eighth—Manny clearly traps a line drive by Kotsay, yet the ump calls him out—but in the ninth their lack of a pen shows, as Chad Bradford and the ever-unreliable Arthur Rhodes combine to give up four runs, three of them on a David Ortiz bases-clearing double, and we win 8–3. Thank you, Moneyball!

The Yankees, meanwhile, were scheduled to play a doubleheader against Tampa Bay in the Bronx, but due to Hurricane Frances the D-Rays were late getting to the Stadium and missed the first game. Yanks general manager Brian Cashman immediately lobbied the league office for a forfeit (the league turned him down, I’d hope with a look of disbelief). So while in Florida the storm has torn people’s homes and lives apart, the Yankees’ only thought was to use it to pick up an unearned win. Now that’s class.

It wasn’t that long ago—at the end of this season’s fantasy August, in fact—that Red Sox writers and commentators (not to mention your run-of-the-mill bleacher creatures) were saying that Boston’s postseason chances might hinge on how well they could do in the upcoming nine-game stretch against the big fish of the AL West, before leaving those sharks to swim—and hopefully to bite one another as seriously as possible—in their own tank. Most hoped for six wins at most, two against the Angels, two against the Rangers, and
maybe
two against the Oakland Athletics. Many partisans would have been satisfied with five. Few, I think, would have guessed at our current position: six wins and one loss with two of the nine-game set left to play.

When the Red Sox last visited Oakland, during the playoff seriesagainst the Athletics in the fall of 2003, they left a bunch of pissed-off A’s and A’s fans behind. The same was true following last night’s rematch, the only difference being that we have to play them again tonight instead of next year, and tonight the chief object of the A’s ire will be on the mound. That would be the tragickal Mr. Lowe, who supposedly made an obscene gesture toward the Oakland bench after striking out the final player of the game.

The animus of last night’s Oakland Coliseum attendees was directed not at any Red Sox player so much as it was at the ump who ruled Mark Kotsay out after Manny Ramirez appeared—from the ump’s perspective—to have made a rolling, tumbling catch of Kotsay’s dying-quail line drive. Manny actually caught it on what’s known as “the trap-hop,” a fact his diving body obscured from the umpire, who fearlessly made the call, anyway. Manny himself acknowledged this in the locker room, after the game. “I knew I din’ catch the ball,” he said, “but the umpire say I catch the ball, so the guy’s out.” He then shrugged, as if to add,
Tough luck, Mark…but we gotta jus’ keep goin’.

To add insult to injury, Kotsay made almost exactly the same play on a Red Sox dying quail of a liner later on in the game, only this time the ump saw the ball hit the ground and ruled the batter safe. Kotsay raised his arms in frustrated body English even a baby could read:
Aw, come on! Gimme a makeup call here, Blue!

No makeup calls for Oakland (not last night, anyway), and it probably wouldn’t have helped; in the end, the game just wasn’t that close. That didn’t stop the angry Oakland fans from hurling their trash into the outfield, however. It was a sight that filled me—I admit it—with childish glee. I had zero sympathy for their outrage, given the ump’s honest effort to make an honest call; not so soon after the blown call on Dave Roberts that ended our game against Texas three days ago, and probably, if I’m to be honest, in no case.
[50]
Blown calls are, after all, a part of the game, and the fans’ rage somehow made this one even tastier.
That’s right, ya babies!
I thought, watching the hot-dog cartons and empty beer cups rain down.
The umps are relaxing in the Officials’ Room, probably soakingtheir tired feet, so take it out on your grounds crew! Go on and chuck that shit, why not?

Are Oakland fans coming to hate us the way we hate the Yankees?
There’s
an interesting thought.

Trot comes off the DL today, and Pokey, and Johnny, who’s been out with a strained pinkie (when in doubt, pinkie out), is back in the lineup. Scott Williamson, who’s been gone a long time, throws batting practice to Trot and may be ready soon. Mr. Kim, however, appears done for the year. The PawSox finished their season yesterday (as did Cesar Crespo and Brian Daubach, who both contributed to the big club early on), and Theo says they’re putting together a conditioning program so the $10 million man (and his eleven innings of work this year) will be ready in the spring.

Of course, there’s nowhere to put all these guys. The roster, like the dugout, is overflowing. Youk hasn’t seen action in weeks, or McCarty, or Ricky Gutierrez.

No one’s going to rock the boat, though. The team’s doing too well. Tonight Johnny celebrates being back in action by leading off the game with a home run. It’s Derek Lowe’s first appearance in Oakland since his alleged crotch-tugging in the direction of the A’s bench after clinching last year’s divisional playoffs, and the crowd lets him know it. He scuffles early (as usual), but Gabe Kapler clocks a two-run shot for a 3–0 cushion, Billy Mueller makes three highlight-reel stops at third, and once again we bulldoze their number four starter Mark Redman for a 7–1 win, making us 7-1 in our gut-check stretch against Anaheim, Texas and Oakland.

I’m primed to stay up late and watch the Pedro–Tim Hudson series finale, hoping for the sweep, but Hudson can’t find the plate, and after three it’s 7–0 Sox and he’s gone, and we haven’t really even hit the ball yet. What do you do when the one strength of your club fails you? You lose. We sweep the A’s at home after sweeping them in Fenway in July.

Even better, the Angels lose, so we’re five up in the wild card. And the rain left over from Hurricane Frances—in a fitting revenge—wipes out the Yanks-D-Rays doubleheader, so we’re only two back in the East, and with the makeups, their rotation’s a mess.

The Red Sox offense didn’t beat Tim Hudson last night, and Pedro Martinez can’t exactly take credit, either. After walking the first three batters of the game (four in the first inning) and giving up a double to David Ortiz and a single to Jason Varitek, Hudson pretty much did the job on himself.

Meanwhile, the Yankees’ current series with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays,
[51]
a seemingly endless exercise in baseball existentialism during which the D-Rays never win and the Yankees never seem to gain ground in the standings, is continuing this afternoon, with the New Yorkers leading in the first game of a doubleheader by a score of quite a bunch to one. I could check and get an exact score, but it hardly seems worth it. Based on my last peek I can tell you that a.) there’s hardly anyone in the stands at the Stadium, and b.) Rocco Baldelli looks like he wishes he were playing for the Tokyo Sunflowers, assuming there is such a team. After last night’s rainout and the Red Sox win in Oakland, the gap in the AL East shrank to a mere two games for the first time since early June, and reading the sports pages of the New York tabs has become a wonderfully cheering pastime for Red Sox fans; the
Post
and
Daily News
baseball columnists, used to a steady diet of Yankee triumphs down the stretch, have started to sound like holy-rolling revival-show ministers, warning that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on the horizon:
Behold, I saw a pale horse, and on him was Manny, and he spake, saying, “Hey man, we gotta jus’ keep goin’.”

Meanwhile, on other fronts:

The hapless Devil Rays will be more hapless still if Ivan, third and worst hurricane to menace Florida in the last thirty days, blows away their JuiceDome down there in Tampa; like a certain unlucky Jew, they may be doomed to simply wander, dragging their dusty equipment bags behind them, playing everywhere and always batting in the top of the first.
“We once had a home,”
they’ll tell those who will listen.
“It wasn’t very full, and most of the folks who showed up were old, many equipped with shunts and pee bags, but by God it was ours.”

In Foxboro, the New England Patriots, proud winner of exactly one preseason game, prepare to defend their Super Bowl title.

And on I-95, just north of Augusta, Maine, at a little past noon and in a driving downpour (the remains of Hurricane Frances, or so the radio assured me), I saw an oak tree blazing with orange leaves.

Football, autumn colors, hurricanes: omens of the end. Hurry up and finish your four games with Seattle, Red Sox. Hurry up and come home. It’s almost time to deal with the Yankees.

Tonight in the top-left corner of the country, Seattle throws a rookie lefty I’ve never heard of—Bobby Madritsch, whose route to the bigs included time in the independent leagues, the outlaws of the minors—while Tim Wakefield takes the hill for us. Wake came out flat in his last start (our last loss), so he’s due for a solid game. Wrong. The Mariners score early and often, and when a fly to the track goes off Manny’s glove in the fifth for a two-run error, this one’s done. We lose 7–1 while the Yanks sweep a doubleheader from the D-Rays, the first game of which has an officially reported attendance of zero. Zero, as in no one. Zero, as in one less than the guy sitting at his desk writing this. If the Yankees win and no one sees it, does it still count?