Faithful (43 page)

I’d violently disagree with Steve—Wake is his boy as much as Dave McCarty is mine, and Wake’s been plain awful this year, besides the few usual wins in Tampa; the best thing he did was volunteer to mop up in Game 3 against the Yanks and give Lowe his spot in the rotation
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—but I’m out the door and sailing across I-84 before Steve’s e-mail reaches me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a World Series, and I aim to get my fill.

The souvenir shops around the park don’t open until noon. At eleven-thirty, lines of eager buyers stretch far down the block. The amount of free junk people are handing out is astounding—papers, posters, buttons, stickers, pictures, temporary tattoos, Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Fans are staggering around with bags of the crap, in total material overload. When the stores open, barkers with bullhorns herd customers into switchbacked ropes—“This line only for World Series and AL Champion merchandise—this line only!”

Hanging out by the parking lot eight hours before game time, the autograph hunters are treated to an impromptu concert by Steven Tyler as he runs his sound check for tonight’s anthem. Steven doesn’t actually sing the song, he just blows an A on his harmonica and runs through an ascending series of bluesy scales, and sounds great—a cool reminder that Aerosmith started out as an electric blues band influenced by the early Stones, the Yard-birds and Muddy Waters.

After that, PA announcer Carl Beane warms his pipes, rumbling: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome… the National League Champion, St. Louis Cardinals,” over and over, as if he might have trouble with it later. He goes through a fantastical lineup: “Batting first, number one… Carl… Beane.” A minute later, “Batting fourth, number nine… Ted… Williams,” and the crowd outside applauds. “Batting fifth, number six… Stan… Musial.”

And speaking of old-timers, rumor is that Yaz is throwing out the first pitch, a sentimental touch, and overdue, since it’s said that Yaz and the club haven’t had the best of relationships since he retired. The new owners may be trying to patch things over. We also witness—well in advance—the return of Lenny DiNardo and Adam Hyzdu, two guys who spent time with the club early in the year. It’s nice to see the Sox are giving them a taste of the big show (though, of course, the guy we really want to see is Dauber).

Two other early arrivals of note: team physician Dr. Bill Morgan and, fifteen minutes later, wearing a brace on his right leg and no shoe in the cold, Curt Schilling. Before Game 6, Dr. Morgan sutured Schill’s tendon to his skin, a procedure he practiced first on a cadaver. Rumor (again, rumor, the outsider’s substitute for information) is that he’s going to stitch him up again for tomorrow’s start in Game 2. On those few threads, our whole season may depend.

Inside, there are more banners than I’ve seen all year—a lifting of the normal ban, for TV’s sake, I expect. It’s cold, with a wind whipping in from straight center, which should give Wake’s knuckler more flutter. Even the stiff wind isn’t enough to keep David Ortiz in the park tonight. In the first, in his very first World Series at-bat, El Jefe busts out with a three-run golf shot OVER the Pesky Pole. We chase Woody Williams early, giving Wake a 7–2 lead going into the fourth.

Beside me, Steve is smiling. Kevin, the usher who comes down between innings with a camp chair to keep people off the wall, is overjoyed with how things are going. “No,” I say, glum, “just watch: Wake’ll start walking people. He always does when we give him a big lead.” And I don’t say this to jinx anything, I say it because I’ve seen Wake all year long, and that’s just what he does.

And that’s just what he does—walking four in the fourth to break a World Series record, and soon after he’s gone it’s 7–7. It’s like they used to say about Fenway when it was a launching pad: no lead is safe here.

“Man, that was ogly,” Orlando Cabrera said in a postgame interview. He paused, then added, “But we won.”
Ogly
pretty well sums up the first game of this year’s World Series, which ended with a thing of beauty: Keith Foulke striking out Roger Cedeno a few minutes after midnight.

Speaking of ogly, Orlando wasn’t looking so good himself in that interview, and he seemed uncharacteristically solemn. A Woody Williams pitch hit him on the shoulder in the first inning, then bounced up into his face, leaving him with a bruised chin, a fat lip, and a temporary inability to smile—which, under ordinary circumstances, Mr. Garciaparra’s replacement does often. Pain or no pain, Cabrera must have been at least tempted to test that smile when the Red Sox finally escaped with an ogly but serviceable 11–9 win in spite of four errors (one by Bronson Arroyo—starter Tim Wakefield’s fourth-inning relief—one by Kevin Millar, and two by Manny Ramirez). Every one of those errors led to runs, leading me to wonder if any of the Red Sox players felt tempted to visit the Cardinals’ clubhouse after the game and assure them on behalf of the home team that Boston doesn’t play that way
every
night.

Cabrera might have been even more tempted to test his swollen lip if informed of this statistic: in World Series history, the team drawing first blood has gone on to win the Fall Classic 60 percent of the time. Still, there’s that other 40 percent…and the fact that the Cards have yet to lose during this postseason on their home field. But—fingers crossed, now—you’ve got to like the Red Sox going into Game 2. They’re nice and loose (what could be looser than four errors and four walks issued by Red Sox pitching?), their demonic archrivals are behind them and they’re riding a nifty five-game winning streak.

Last night’s game began with a moment of silence for Victoria Snelgrove, the young woman killed by a pepper-gas ball during riot-control operations outside Fenway following Boston’s final victory over New York,and while it was both decent and brave of the current ownership to remember her (one is tempted to believe that the previous bunch of caretakers would have swept Ms. Snelgrove under the rug as fast and as far as possible), it was also a reminder of what is
truly
ogly in our brave new world, where all game bags are searched and the clocks tick on Osama Mean Time.

There were lines of Boston police, looking like puffy Michelin Men in their riot gear, watching impassively as the happy and largely well-behaved crowd left the old green First New England Church of Baseball with the strains of “Dirty Water” still ringing in their ears and the memory of Mark Bellhorn’s game-winning, foul-pole-banging home run still vivid in their minds. To me those dark lines of armed men outside such a place of ancient and innocent pleasure are a lot harder to look at than the mark on Orlando Cabrera’s face, or his swelled lower lip.

11–9 is a crazy score for a World Series game; so is a total of 24 hits and 5 errors. But the bottom line is that we won, Father Curt takes the mound tomorrow night on home turf with his freshly restitched ankle, and that’s a beautiful thing. (A remarkable one, anyway.)

I only wish Torie Snelgrove was around to see it.

The most surprising thing to me about Game 1 was how the Faithful booed Dale Sveum during the pregame introductions. I suppose it’s a delayed (or should I say sustained?) reaction to Johnny being thrown out at home in the first inning of Game 7 of the ALCS. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.

And despite the win, I don’t like the way Kevin Millar played, leaving ten men on, making essentially two errors on the same play (double-clutching that cutoff, then throwing the ball into the dugout), and later not getting anywhere near a ball hit down the line that both Mientkiewicz and McCarty handle easily.

By contrast, the Cards’ Larry Walker took to the big stage in a big way, making two great catches in right (a Manny liner down into the corner with men on, and a windblown pop he had to run a long way and then lunge for at the last second), and hitting a double, a homer, a single and another double. This is Walker’s first World Series, after a long and brilliant career in the hinterlands of Montreal and Colorado, and it was heartening to see him show the world his A game. If Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds had done anything to help him out, we’d be down 0-1.

Mark Bellhorn, meanwhile, seems determined to enforce the curse of the ex-Cubs (that is, the team with more ex-Cubs is bound to lose the Series—the Cards have five while we only have two, Marky Mark and Billy Mueller). Before his home run off Julian Tavarez, he was 2 for 3 against him lifetime, so his success didn’t surprise me, only the magnitude of it. It was no fluke. Tavarez didn’t fool him at all. Marky Mark ripped the pitch before his Pesky Pole shot high and deep down the line in right, but foul. All he had to do was reload and straighten it out, making him one of a very rarefied club—players who’ve homered in three straight postseason games.

On the street outside the players’ lot I run into Andrew on his way out to buy some salads for the guys. We’re surrounded by a crowd of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. Camera crews, cops. Andrew still can’t believe this is all happening—a common reaction among the Nation, even those deep inside it. I ask him about Schill’s ankle, and tell him about seeing Dr. Morgan yesterday. Yeah, he says, they had him on the table, but he tried to stay away from there.

“How’s he look?” I ask.

Andrew just shrugs. “We’ll have to see.”

Inside, I catch Tony Womack along the left-field wall, joking with an old friend in the stands about beating him at golf next week. When he gets a break, I ask him how his collarbone feels after taking that David Ortiz smash off it last night.

“I’m fine,” he says, and I tell him how much I’d been rooting for him in spring training.

“You ran great, bunted great, stole bases. I wish you could have played the field.”

“Man,” he says, shaking his head, “they didn’t want me.”

We shake hands, and a minute later he calls Larry Walker over.

Walker looks puzzled until he sees Tony’s friend.

“You know this guy?” Tony asks.

“Know this guy?” Walker says. “This guy owes me eight grand!”

It’s Sunday, and in the concourse crowds are gathered around the wall-mounted TVs watching the Patriots beat the Jets for their twenty-first consecutive win. If the Pats can win twenty-one straight, the logic goes, why can’t we win eight?

Our seats are down in the corner where I normally post up for BP—better seats than I’m used to. How good? Above us in the Monster seats is Jimmy Fallon, and two rows in front of us, so close I could lean forward and tap his shoulder, is Eagles QB Donovan McNabb. He played an outstanding game today in Cleveland, his long scramble setting up an overtime win. He must have showered and gotten right on the plane. He’s so tired that the only time he stands up during the game is to go to the restroom, but, like us, he stays for every drizzly, windswept pitch.

One summer night in the mid-1960s, right around the time the Beatles were ruling the American music charts, a young music producer named Ed Cobb happened to be walking with his girlfriend beside the Charles River in the quaint old city of Boston, Massachusetts…or so the story goes. Out of the shadows came a thief who tried to mug him out of his wallet (or maybe it was out of her purse; on that the story is not entirely clear). In any case, the musically inclined Mr. Cobb foiled the thief and got an idea for a song as a bonus. The song, “Dirty Water,” was eventually recorded by a group of Boston proto-punks called the Standells and released by Capitol, who wanted a record Cobb had produced for Ketty (“Anyone Who Had a Heart”) Lester. No one expected much from the raw and raunchy
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“Dirty Water,” but it went to #11 on the
Billboard
pop charts and has remained a standard on the Boston club scene ever since.

It was revived by the new Red Sox management and has become the good-time signature of Boston wins. For the Fenway Faithful, there’s nothing better than seeing the final out go up on the scoreboard and hearing that six-note intro with the familiar first-note slide leading into the verse:
Down by the riiiiver…
And so it seemed a particularly good omen to see the resurrected Standells in deep center field before the game last night, a lot grayer and a little thinner on top but still loud and proud, singing about that dirty water down by the banks of the River Charles.

A great many things about baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular are about the bridges between past and present—this was just one more provided by a current Yawkey Way administration that seems pleasantlyaware of tradition without becoming enslaved to it. And when the Red Sox had put this one away in the cold mists of a late Sunday evening, the sounds of “Dirty Water” rang out again, this time with the tempo a little faster and the tones a little truer. And why not? This was the one recorded when the Standells were young. This is the version that hit the charts four months before Curt Schilling was born.

He was awesome last night. The word is tired, clapped-out from overuse, but I’ve had a 170-mile drive to try and think of a better one, and I cannot. The crowd of just over thirty-five thousand in the old green Church of Baseball knew what it was seeing; many of them may have been in Fenway Park for the first time last night (these Series-only fans are what
Globe
writer Dan Shaughnessy so rightly calls the “Nouveau Nation”), but even they knew. The galaxy of flashbulbs that went off in the stadium, from the plum dugout seats to the skyviews to the distant bleachers to those now perched atop the Green Monster, was chilling in its cold and commemorative brilliance, declaring by silent light that the men and women who came to the ballpark last night had never seen anything quite like it for sheer guts and never expected to see anything quite like it again. Not, certainly, with their own eyes.

Edgar Renteria, the Cardinals’ leadoff hitter, battled Schilling fiercely—first six pitches, then ten, then a dozen, running the count full and then spilling off foul after foul.
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He might have been the game’s key batter, and not the ones Schilling had to face following more Boston miscues (another four) that allowed the Cardinals extra chances upon which they could not capitalize.

Before finally hitting sharply to shortstop (and the often-maligned Kevin Millar made a fine pick at first to complete the play), Renteria tried every trick in the book. Every trick, that is, save one. He never attempted to lay down a bunt. In three starts on his bad peg—two against the Yankees and now one against the Cardinals—no one has tried to make Curt Schilling field his position. I’m sure the Red Sox infielders have discussed this possibility and know exactly how they would handle it…but it has simply never come up. And when this thing is over, when the hurly-burly’s done, all the battles lost and won, someone needs to ask the Yankee andCardinal hitters
why
they did not bunt. Of course I can imagine the boos that would rain down on a successful bunter against Father Curt at Fenway, but is it beyond the scope of belief to think that even Yankee or Cardinal fans might find it hard to cheer such a ploy for reaching first (well…maybe not Yankee fans)?

Could it have been—don’t laugh—actual
sportsmanship
?

Whatever the reason, the Cards played him straight up last night—I salute them for it—and for the most part, Father Curt mowed them right down. Tony Womack and Mike Matheny had singles; Albert Pujols had a pair of doubles. And, as far as hits against Schilling went, that was it. He finished his night’s work by striking out the side in the sixth.

For the Red Sox, it was a continuing case of two-run, two-out thunder. Two runs scored after two were out in the first; two more after two were out in the fourth; two more in the sixth, the same way.
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By the end of the game (Mike Matheny, groundout), the deep green grass of the field and the bright white of the Red Sox home uniforms had grown slightly diffuse in the thickening mizzle. The departing fans, damp but hardly dampened, were all but delirious with joy. One held up a poster depicting a Christlike Johnny Damon walking on water with the words JOHNNY SAVES beneath his sandaled feet.

I heard one fan—surely part of Mr. Shaughnessy’s Nouveau Nation—actually saying he hoped the Red Sox would
lose
a couple in St. Louis, so the team could clinch back on its home soil (yes, Beavis, he actually said “home soil”). I had to restrain myself from laying hands on this fellow and asking him if he remembered 1986, when we
also
won the first two, only to lose four of the next five. And when a team is going this well (RED HOT RED SOX, trumpets this morning’s
USA Today
), one loss can lead to others. Winning two at home, within a sniff of the River Charles, may have been vital, considering the fact that the Cardinals have yet to lose a single postseason game in their own house.

Tomorrow night, Pedro Martinez will face the Cards near the dirty water of a much larger river, in a much larger stadium. It will be his first World Series start, and given that no team has ever climbed out of an 0-3 World Series hole (and surely that sort of thing can’t happen twice in the same postseason… can it?), I think it’s going to be the most important start by a Red Sox pitcher in a long, long time. Certainly since 1986.