Faithful (37 page)

When Yankee starting pitching goes south, as Roger Clemens replacement Javier Vazquez did last night in the fifth inning, Joe Torre now has essentially two choices in the matter of middle relief: Tom Gordon (whose loss from the Red Sox I understand and accept but still lament in my heart) and the Bronx Delicatessen Brigade. Having used Gordon to get to Rivera in the first game of this late-season Yanks-Sox series, Torre was stuck with the Deli Brigade last night. After Vazquez came Tanyon Sturtze; after Sturtze came Heredia. And lo, Heredia begat Quantrill and Quantrill begat Nitkowski; so too did Nitkowski begat Proctor, also called Scott. By that time the Yankees were pretty well baked, and the usually crafty Quantrill—left in far too long last night
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—took the loss by default.

This was a good night to be at the ballpark and a good game for the Red Sox to win. Although the Angels and the Rangers, now tied for wild-card runners-up (and nipping at the heels of the Athletics in the AL West), both won their games, we reduced our magic number for clinching a playoff berth to three. Better yet, we have made it impossible for the Yankees to clinch this year’s AL East flag on ground taxed by the State of Massachusetts. Best of all, at least for the head sitting beneath the bright red YANKEES HATER hat I see in the mirror, is this: no matter how we do against our long-time nemesis this Sunday afternoon, in 2004’s last regular-season game at Fenway Park, we will have won the nineteen-game season series. The worst we can do is 10-9, and if Father Curt is on his game, it will be 11-8. This isn’t as good as it could have been—especially for a team that was at one point 6-1 against the pinstripers—but when it comes to the Yankees, we take our satisfactions where we can get them.

7:00 P.M.: It’s by no means a sure thing that the Red Sox and Yankeeswill meet in the ALCS for the second year in a row—I am sure that baseball stat wizards like Bill James will tell you it’s odds against, given the fact that the opening postseason series are nasty, brutish, and short
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—but given the level of competition between the two clubs this season, I have to believe that such an American League Championship Series would be a boon to that larger faithful that loves not just the Red Sox or the Yankees but the game itself.

Last weekend at Yankee Stadium, the Sox won a close one Friday night and then endured two shellackings, to the glee of packed Stadium crowds. At the Fens this weekend, it was the Yankees winning a close one Friday night and the Red Sox winning the two weekend games by lopsided scores, today’s final being 11–4, with a woefully unready-for-prime-time Kevin Brown taking the loss (and not escaping the first inning). At Yankee Stadium, the joint resounded to sarcastic choral cries of
PEDRO! PEDRO!
as Martinez left his game on the mound; today at Fenway Park, the cry was
JEE-TER! JEE-TER!
as the New York shortstop flubbed a potential double play and then made way for a pinch hitter in the eighth after going one for a dozen (.083) over the three games.

In the end, Boston took the season, 11-8, but in the crucial runs-scored category, there was in the end almost no difference: 106 for the Sox, 104 for the Yanks. When you think about 171 innings of baseball (excluding games that may have gone beyond the regulation nine), that’s an amazingly small margin; hardly more than a coat of paint.

In terms of playing into October, the team’s job is now clear-cut (if slightly complicated by Jeanne, the fourth hurricane to strike Florida in the last five weeks). Of the seven games remaining on the regular-season schedule, the Red Sox need to win only a pair to assure themselves of a postseason berth. Another (and more meaningful) meeting with the Yankees may or may not lie ahead; in the meantime, let Trot Nixon, Boston’s rejuvenated right fielder, have the final word on this exhaustive (and exhausting) regular-season slate of Red Sox/Yankees matchups. “Nineteen is too many,” he said flatly in a postgame interview this afternoon. “We’ve seen everything they’ve got, and they’ve seen what we’ve got. I don’t mind playing them… but nineteen is just too many.”

* * *

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome once again to Super Pro Wrestling! For no other reason than he doesn’t like the way Doug Mientkiewicz is standing on the bag at first (or might it have something to do with Lofton’s mysterious ejection during the Tek–A-Rod brawl?), Kenny Lofton deliberately elbows him as he goes by—on a play that isn’t close, in a game that’s a runaway. Maybe Kenny’s frustrated, or just dumb, because he seems surprised—nay, outraged—when reliever Pedro Astacio throws behind him late in the game. The next inning, the Yanks’ kid reliever throws at Dave Roberts’s head. Uncool, and Roberts is justifiably pissed.

There’s a huge difference between throwing behind a guy and throwing at his head, and everyone in the game knows it. Likewise, if you purposely elbow someone, you had better expect to be thrown at. In both cases, the Yankees broke the unwritten code. If there’s any justice (and wrestling is all about poetic justice), the game will make them pay.

Side note: Today’s sellout was our 81st of the year. Only three other clubs in the history of baseball have sold out their entire home season. All three were playing in brand-new stadiums.
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Hurricane Jeanne has knocked out the electricity in the Tampa Bay area, and for a while it looks as if the game may not be played. The juice is restored, but someone seems to have neglected to tell the Boston bats. Or maybe it’s just young Scott Kazmir, exerting the sort of limited but malign influence certain pitchers seem able to cast over certain teams. When Kazmir faced Martinez two weeks ago, you’ll recall, he won easily. He seems well on his way to a second win tonight, striking out batter after batter (Kevin Millar on egregiously high cheese), so when my youngest son—up on a wonderful extended visit from New York—suggests we turn off the game and go to a movie, I agree at once, even though the Sox technically have a chance to clinch a playoff berth. I now believe they
will
clinch; I just don’t believe it will be tonight.

The code is absolute, and beyond partisanship. Tonight Bronson Arroyo hits Aubrey Huff unintentionally with a curve that breaks down and in too sharply. No big deal, even though it puts Huff out of the game with a bruised shin, but then, a batter later, with men on second and third and first base open, Bronson drills Tino Martinez in the back, and Tino rightfully has some things to say.

Former Mets phenom Scott Kazmir, who has yet to give up a hit, retaliates, hitting Manny low. And Manny’s cool, Manny understands, and hoofs it down to first without a word. Now that things are evened up, the ump warns both dugouts. Any more of this and both the pitcher and the manager are going. But Kazmir—maybe on Lou Piniella’s orders—isn’t done. He hits the
very next batter,
Millar, in the ribs. Millar takes exception and the benches clear briefly. Good-bye, unhittable Kazmir. Good-bye, Lou.

It’s a foolish move. We jump all over reliever Jorge Sosa for five runs, including a drive to dead center by Manny that lands on the roof of the fancy restaurant out there, and go on to win 7–3 and clinch the wild card. See? That’s what happens when you go against the code.

And, ironically, since being on the same team overrides the code, during the locker-room celebration Manny hugs Terry Adams, who he came close to charging back in April after a little chin music.

It’s the late show of
The Forgotten
we go to, and in Bethel Station on a Monday night, my son and I are two of just six attendees. As we’re leaving, the guy cleaning up behind the candy counter tells me—casually—that the Red Sox were leading Tampa Bay by a score of 7–2 and he thinks that might be a final. Owen and I look at each other in delighted amazement, then hurry to his car and tune the radio to WOXO, Norway–South Paris (which advertises itself as Everybody’s Country…when, that is, they’re not broadcasting NASCAR racing, Boston Red Sox baseball, or Oxford Hills High School football). We discover that the game has indeed ended, and that the final score was 7–3. Bronson Arroyo hit a couple of batters (he leads the American League in that category), and Scott Kazmir retaliated. The umpires let him get away with drilling Manny Ramirez in the knee, but when Kazmir whacked Kevin “I Brake for High Cheese” Millar in the ribs, the kid was gone, taking an incipient no-hitter with him.
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Three or four home runs later (Manny hit number 43), the 2004 Red SoxParty Boys are in a clubhouse so wrapped in plastic it looks like a condom, laughing and shouting and pouring beer on each other.

They all acknowledge that the regular season isn’t over as long as catching the Yankees remains a technical possibility (by winning, the Red Sox cut the lead of the idle Yanks to three games, and in that light the two we lost to the awful El Birdos during the last home stand look bigger than ever), but in their raucous celebrating, there is an undeniable sense that they feel the real work is now done. Given their lackluster level of play in June and July, that is understandable. In some ways, they are lucky to be here at all.

Tonight’s game against Tampa Bay is an audition for pitchers on the bubble. Derek Lowe pitches dreadfully, scuttling his chance to be the number three starter in the playoffs (Bronson Arroyo seems to have won that spot with his strong second half). Terry Adams throws two-plus ugly innings, so count him out. By the time Alan Embree comes in to throw one shutout inning, it’s 8–8. Scott Williamson, who’s been injured, walks one guy in his stint, but his velocity is still down around 89, so I doubt he’ll make the roster. Pedro Astacio’s just getting some work in before he starts half of Saturday’s doubleheader in Baltimore. Ramiro Mendoza, though, nails his assignment, pitching a perfect ninth and tenth, striking out two and giving us a chance to win it when Kevin Millar cranks a two-run shot off fireballing closer Danys Baez, who Lou has left out there throwing 96 (and then 94, 93, 92) for three innings. Foulke crafts a one-two-three eleventh and we’re two and a half back of the Yanks with five to go.

Much more exciting is the West, where the Angels and A’s are now in a dead heat with a three-game showdown looming on the season’s final weekend, the results of which will determine the playoff matchups. Right now the Central champs the Twins have a better record (by a mere one win) than Oakland and Anaheim, meaning they’d play us and have home-field advantage, and the Yankees would host whoever won the West (an easier task, given the Twins’ brilliant lefty Johan Santana). The Yanks have some control over the situation: tomorrow they start a three-game series against the Twins. They can avoid Santana by rolling over for them, but that’s a risk: if they lose too many, we have a shot at catching them. Slim, sure, but a shot.

I’m back in Maine rather than at Fenway Park or at Yankee Stadium, where a sparse crowd is watching the rare afternoon game, but I’m once more wearing my bright red YANKEES HATER cap, and for a perfectly good reason: the sparse Stadium crowd is in attendance at the first of this year’s last three really important games, two between the Twins and the Yankees, one between the hapless Devil Rays and the Red Sox.

The Minnesota Twins, represented on the mound in the first of these crucial tilts by Johan Santana, who will almost certainly win this year’s Cy Young Award in the American League, are leading 3–1 in the fifth inning.
If
the Twins go on to win this game (Santana hasn’t lost since the All-Star break) plus the nightcap of this hurricane-induced doubleheader, and if the Red Sox can win tonight in Tampa,
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the Yankees’ lead in the AL East would drop to a single scrawny game. I’m not saying this will happen, but if it
did
, considering the fact that Boston and New York have a combined total of eight games left to play… well, in a case like that, all bets would be off.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Probably
it doesn’t matter, in terms of what comes next; once you get to postseason,
all
the matchups are tough. But I want that home-field advantage. Even more, I’d like to see the Yankees humbled. So come on, you Twins! Go, you Johan!

It’s weird: here we have the Yanks’ ace Moose against Johan Santana in a rematch of last year’s ALDS, in a game with playoff implications, yet when I tune in during the second inning I discover the Stadium is a sea of blue seats. There can’t be more than two thousand people there—less than the number of folks who turn out for BP at Fenway. Later, the Yankees will list the official attendance as N/A—not available. Hey George, I hear Montreal’s looking for a team.

10:15 P.M.: One doesn’t like to believe God is a Yankees fan—it’s a terrifying idea—but days like this make me wonder. I thought that, with New York playing two against a strong Minnesota team and the Red Sox playing one against the hapless Rays, we really had a chance to pull within a breath of first place. At worst, I thought, New York would split their twin bill with Santana taking the opener.

But no. Santana left after five with a 3–1 lead, pulled by the Twins’ skipper, who quite naturally wants to protect his young ace with the playoffs looming. The Yankees then scored a bazillion runs and the camera caught the aforementioned young ace in the dugout, hucking helmets at the cement floor. Getting quite a bounce, too. The Yankees went on to win the second game, 5–4.

In Tampa, Tino Martinez hit a three-run bomb to put the game out of reach in the eighth, but the really disturbing development was how mortal Pedro Martinez looked in his last start of the regular season—how downright
lousy
. The hapless D-Rays won that one, 9–4, and instead of picking up a game and a half, we
lost
a game and a half. The Yankees’ margin is now four games, and given that the Red Sox have just four to play, I think that pretty well cooks us in the AL East, don’t you? The bottom line is simply that when the pressure got really intense, the Yankees refused to buckle. The Red Sox—aided by the Baltimore Orioles and at times by Terry Francona, who has a tendency to freeze at critical moments like Captain Queeg in
The Caine Mutiny
—did. Now we turn our eyes—ever hopeful, ever faithful—to the playoffs, where we can only hope the script will change.