Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, in a surprise news conference two days after the conclusion of the recent World Series, announced that Major League Baseball will undertake a radical change in scheduling next fall, when the Divisional and League Championship eliminations will come after the World Series, not before. “Tradition matters,” Selig said, “but the fans have made it clear that they much prefer the interest and drama of the earlier rounds of post-season play, and we’re going to oblige them. From now on, it’s the Fall Classic first and then heartbreak.” The commissioner confirmed reports that he had called in some top metaphysicians to tackle the contradictions implicit in such a plan. “They’re gung-ho for the plan, conceptwise,” Mr. Selig said. “Once we have this in hand, we’re looking to clear up the designated-hitter dilemma, as well. Ambiguity is tough, but so is Roger Clemens.”
Well, maybe not, but after the vibrant and confounding baseball scenes in the weeks just past, no possibility can be wholly excluded. Look what did happen:
· In the ceremonials before the third game of the American League Divisional playoffs between the Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics, a Red Sox relief pitcher named Byung-Hyun Kim heard prolonged boos from his home-team Fenway Park fans when his name was announced, and responded digitally.
· Another bird, the Yankee Stadium celebrity eagle Challenger, lost his way while performing his ceremonial flight from the center-field bleachers to a handler on the pitcher’s mound before the first game of the Red Sox-Yankees American League Championship Series, wobbled past Derek Jeter (who flinched away, snatching off his cap), and flumped to the ground near home plate. Fired on the spot, the famous fowl unexpectedly emerged from retirement prior to the third game of the World Series, but now with a Sun Belt employer, and made a safe journey home for the Florida Marlins during the anthem at Pro Player Stadium, in Miami. Redemption.
· At Wrigley Field, in Chicago, Cubs left fielder Moises Alou leaped and stretched for a fly ball descending in foul ground beside a steep bank of seats, and had the ball deflected from his glove by a lifelong Cubs fan, Steve Bartman, whose name, on the instant, became inextricably woven into the hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old history of the franchise. (As is perhaps not known to schoolchildren in Mukden or Petrozavodsk, the Cubs have not won a World Championship since 1908 and the Boston Red Sox since 1918.) The incident still left the good guys three runs ahead in the game and an easy inning and two-thirds away from a victory over the Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series and their first trip to the World Series in fifty-eight years, but the Cubs now swiftly yielded a base on balls, a single, a clanking error by their shortstop, and an eventual eight-run rally. They lost, lost again the next night, and were eliminated. The sight of Bartman being pelted with insults and threats and cups of beer, and taken away, hiding his face, by the cops for his own safety, has stuck in mind, however. Cubs players and coaches quickly came forward to say that his instinctive grab had nothing to do with the outcome, but Bartman was subjected to later vilifications on the Internet and in the papers, and felt forced to issue a lengthy apology. Baseball is the only sport that fingers individual spectators this way and remembers their names: Sal Durante, who caught Maris’s Ruth-breaking sixty-first home run in 1961; Jeffrey Maier, who reached for that short home run to right field in Yankee Stadium in a 1996 playoff against the Orioles; and Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi, the bleacher fans at Pac Bell Stadium who ended up in a scuffle for the ball and the court costs, after Barry Bonds’s seventy-third. Ask not for whom that ball falls.
· At the Boston games, fans saw separate interference plays by Red Sox infielders in the same inning nullified when two different Oakland Athletics base runners forgot to touch home plate; witnessed the seventy-two-year-old Yankee bench Kewpie Don Zimmer throw a punch at Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez (who deflected the attack in the manner of Belmonte dealing with a heifer) during a team brawl; and (by television from the Bronx) watched Sox manager Grady Little perform a gruesome public seppuku by failing to remove the selfsame Pedro from action in the eighth inning of the A.L.C.S. seventh-game finale, after successive hits by the Yankees. The Yanks tied the game on a bloop double by Jorge Posada, and won it—against a different pitcher—in the eleventh, on a lead-off, walk-off home run by Aaron Boone. Getting either or both of the Cubs and Red Sox into the World Series on their hallowed home fields had been a happy possibility nationally discussed and op-edded since July, and when the two teams were again dispatched winless into winter their fans were left with a last gnawing weirdness: both clubs had led by an identical three-run margin at a moment when they stood the same bare five outs away from a pennant, and both blew the chance.
Even as the World Series began, friends of mine were saying how much they mourned the absence of these famous losers in the finale. They’d yearned to see the sweet and accursed old teams have at each other in their grand old parks—a lore-off, so to speak. Part of me felt the same way, but when Juan Pierre, the speedy Marlins center fielder, touched off the first inning of the first Series game with an unplayable bunt, scooted to third on a single, and scored on a sacrifice fly, my mind began to clear. I didn’t know this team, but their anonymity and lack of history suddenly felt like a gift. Most of the Yankees and Red Sox we’d been watching carried an almost visible weight of expectation and precedent and prior exploit or failure with them whenever they stepped up to the plate or delivered a pitch, and looked wearied by it; as the Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy put it, the uniform had become too heavy. When Pierre came up to bat again in the fifth, with base runners on second and third, and rapped a little single to left, third baseman Aaron Boone cut off the peg to the plate, allowing the second run to score. Watching, you knew that Boone had glimpsed Pierre, or the idea of Pierre, whirling past first base, and wanted him stopped there. He’d given up the run—the winning run, as it turned out—because he was afraid of the next one, or a bunch more. Call it a forced mistake, and as I put the play into my scorecard I circled it, for elegance.
These wild-card Florida Marlins, who finished the regular season ten games behind the Atlanta Braves in the National League East, entered the post-season as an assemblage of attractive outsiders who’d posted the best record in their league since the beginning of June under a fresh manager, seventy-two-year-old Jack McKeon, called out of retirement to take the post early in May. With a lineup featuring the perpetual All-Star catcher Ivan Rodriguez; the leggy and engaging twenty-one-year-old flinger Dontrelle Willis, who could start and finish games with equal ardor; and a twenty-year-old Venezuelan, Miguel Cabrera, up from double-A ball, at cleanup, the Marlins appeared elated by the odds against them, even when they fell behind. They didn’t go away, in the parlance, but burned steadily and imperturbably through October, winning the last three games in a row in successive elimination series against the power of the Giants, the celebrated pitching of the Cubs, and now the Yankees—and with the last one, of course, the World Championship. Their closest call, you could say, came when the Giants’ J. T. Snow, representing the tying run, charged frantically down the line toward home with two out in the ninth of the final Divisional game, and slammed into Rodriguez at home. The throw in from left field beat him by yards, and Pudge held onto the ball.
This was the second crown for the Marlins in seven years, but the new champs fielded only one player, third baseman Jeff Conine, who played for them in 1997—a returnee signed aboard this summer after interim stints with the Royals and the Orioles. The current owner, Jeffrey Loria, was allowed to buy the franchise two years ago, after epochal sufferings with his prior fief, the Montreal Expos. By consensus, most of the credit for the Marlins’ sudden rise goes to some brilliant draft signings by the carryover general manager, Dave Dombrowski, who has since accepted the same post with the Tigers, and prior owner John Henry, who now owns the Red Sox, of all things. A uniting thread between these Marlins and the 1997 group—aside from chronic low attendance at steamy Pro Player Stadium, which was built for the N.F.L.’s Miami Dolphins—is that neither champion visited first place after April.
The upbeat Marlins will soon drop out of this account (we are following the Selig fantasy formula), but they leave behind a trail of bright images, including that of the expressionist lefty Dontrelle Willis—who appeared in five post-season relief turns and two starts—tilting and flailing like a reborn Goose Gossage, with his tongue stuck out and his excited eyes alight under that down-to-his-nose, flat-brim street-chic cap. In Game Three, another outsized pitcher, the goat-bearded, sulky-faced Josh Beckett, struck out ten Yankees in seven and a third innings, amid tropic Miami showers, but was beaten by Derek Jeter’s three hits for the night, the last a double up the right-field line, after a terrific mound duel against Mike Mussina. The win put the Yanks one up in the series, and when they rallied late the next night—this was Clemens’s career-closing start—to carry the game into extra innings, and loaded the bases with one out in the eleventh, a customary Yankee outcome appeared at hand. They didn’t deliver, and the winning Florida poke—a lead-off homer down the left-field line in the twelfth by shortstop Alex Gonzalez—bore such an uncanny resemblance to the Aaron Boone walk-off that had killed the Red Sox, days before, that it looked like a mistake in the screening room. Hey, hold it—wrong guys!
The Yankee offense, unreliable all season, was so creaky by now that Torre benched Jason Giambi and the wholly discombobulated Alfonso Soriano the next night—and shortly had to do without his starter, David Wells, who suffered back spasms after one inning’s work and could not return. (Jolly in the interview room the day before, Boomer had boasted that he had a rubber arm and could leave the rigors of conditioning to other pitchers forever.) The Marlins’ seven hits over the next four innings helped build the 6-4 win and the parvenus’ second lead in the series. The teams came back to the Stadium, where the Yankees win big games by force of habit, but they’d finished scoring for the year. The silencing 2-0 win delivered by Josh Beckett was the first Series-ending shutout suffered at home by the Yankees since Lew Burdette did it for the Milwaukee Braves, in 1957. The Marlins were outscored in the Series, and outhit, as well, but it had begun to be noticed by the irritated Yankee pitchers that most of those scores—nine of the latest twelve Florida runs, in fact—had come with two outs. Just when you thought you had them, you didn’t. And here it happened again, with two down in the sixth: a bloop against Andy Pettitte by Gonzalez, a drive up the middle from Pierre, and Castillo’s sliced mini-hit to right, to bring in the first run of the game—the only one required, it turned out. The peg from right had a chance, but the front runner, Gonzalez, came skidding past home on a slide that fell away from Posada’s swipe, and he caressed the plate with his outstretched left hand as he flew by. Marlin-style ball, and a recognizable marque by now.
Beckett’s opponent, Pettitte, was making his thirtieth post-season start here and his tenth in the World Series, but it was the younger man who looked suave and untroubled on this evening, jumping ahead in the counts and delivering ceaseless heat and late-moving curveballs in a thrilling, manner-free flow. He was in the mid-to-upper-ninety-m.p.h. range all night, and here and there edged higher. Beckett, who is twenty-three and six-five, has the contemptuous air of the overgifted athlete, but, having earned the sneer now—he’d added nine more strikeouts, and by the time he was done had surrendered but three runs in his last twenty-nine innings, along with two shutouts—he appeared to forgive us a little at the end. He holds an apprentice’s 17-17 record for his three years in the majors to date, with a 9-8 won-lost record and a 3.04 earned-run average this season, when he had to sit out seven weeks with an inflamed elbow. “He’s just starting to pitch,” said the Florida utility infielder Mike Mordecai, shaking his head in awe. He compared Beckett to a teammate of his from a decade ago, the left-handed Atlanta phenom Steve Avery, but I had a better model in mind: twenty-one-year-old Bret Saberhagen, who gave up a lone run to the Cardinals over eighteen innings during the 1985 Series, and effortlessly won the M.V.P., just as Beckett did here. Watching them both, you could see Cooperstown in the mists ahead—or else the waiting rooms of Dr. James Andrews, the celebrated Birmingham shoulder surgeon, et al., which was Saberhagen’s path, as it turned out. This is a tough trade.
Young players who win a championship are clueless about its rarity, but Jack McKeon, lighting a cigar in the corridor outside the champagne-damp Marlins clubhouse, knew what they’d accomplished. His fifty-five years in baseball include managerial tenures with four other major-league teams, and a decade as baseball-operations vice-president of the Padres, who made the World Series in 1984 but swiftly lost to the Tigers. Now he had that ring. McKeon grew up in South Amboy, New Jersey, but has acquired the skipperish, plainsman’s mien, behind rimless glasses, that comes to so many elder baseball guys. In conversation before the finale, he and I had discussed the way that “seventy-two-year-old” prefix had become welded to his name these past weeks. “You notice that, too, I bet,” he said, throwing an unexpected arm around my shoulder, “but, hell, this beats retirement. Never retire—right?” He’d been idle at home in Elon, North Carolina, when Marlins owner Loria came calling in May. McKeon said that he’d not minded the daylight hours at home, or the garden work, but hated what came afterward. “Sitting in the same damned chair till midnight, watching games,” he said scornfully. “That used to be my working day.”
I hope Jack McKeon saw the Post headline the day after he’d won, and is having it framed: “yankees sleep with the fish.”
This October, the closeness of the post-season games and the sight of so many celebrity teams—A’s, Yankees, Red Sox, Braves, Cubs, and Giants—suddenly fighting for their lives in the early rounds of play made these eliminations feel like a different sport altogether: baseball with a thirty-second clock. Counting the World Series, thirty-eight games were required to produce a champion, with eleven of them settled by one run, and six going into extra innings. The easy, almost endless run of summer ball was not just over but obsolete, and it requires effort to bring any part of it back, even the Mets. Place should be reserved, however, for the achievement of the switch-hitting Red Sox infielder Bill Mueller, who twice hit home runs from different sides of the plate in the same game. The second time he did this, against the home-team Texas Rangers, the dingers—first right-handed, then left—came in consecutive innings and were both grand slams. Never before—never nearly before.
For a single game, I will keep the drizzly, foggy evening of June 13th, at Yankee Stadium, when Roger Clemens, after failing in his three previous tries, at last nailed down his three-hundredth win. He was the twenty-first pitcher to enter this particular club, but on the same night also notched his four-thousandth lifetime strikeout, a level previously attained only by Nolan Ryan and and Steve Carlton. Clemens, who is forty-one, was retiring after this season, his twentieth, and he had wanted these certifications before the end. The landmark K was odd, because Roger had just given up a home run and a double to the previous Cardinal batters here in the second inning (it was an inter-league game) and because the cheers greeting the whiff, by shortstop Edgar Renteria, now began to blend with a welcome for the next batter, designated hitter Tino Martinez, an old Yankee hero making his first appearance at the Stadium since his departure two years ago. Tino, sensing the moment, stepped back to allow the Roger ovation to reach its full, 55,214-fan volume while the ball was being handed off to a ball boy like a Brinks package, and then at last got into the batter’s box for his own “TI-NO! TI-NO! TI-NO!” Nothing came easily on this night, in fact, in a game that repeatedly threatened to be delayed or wiped out by rain, or even won by the wrong team, until a two-run homer by Raul Mondesi in the seventh brought the score to 5-2 Yankees, and safety. Clemens had departed in the top of the same inning (he struck out ten batters) but came back onto the field after the final out, while the scoreboard played Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and the fans flashed their digital cameras and wept. Clemens hugged his catcher, Jorge Posada; hugged his other teammates and coaches; hugged the Yankee P.R. honcho, Rick Cerrone; hugged his wife, Debbie; hugged his sons, Koby, Kory, Kacy, and Kody; hugged the ballpark.
I am not big on lifetime records, but this three-hundredth win changed Clemens and changed the fans’ view of him as well. Almost from the beginning of his career, he has been an enigmatic presence in the clubhouse and in mid-action—a tree in the living room, a dangerous object left on the highway. There have been six Cy Young Awards and those two epochal twenty-strikeout games, ten years apart, and also the fugues: his early ejection from a league championship start in 1990 for muttered curses on the mound; his nailing Mike Piazza with a fastball on the side of the helmet in 2000; and its sequel, the flung-bat-stump mystery in the World Series that same fall. But now and for the rest of this season Clemens became calmer on the mound and less mumbly or Esperantoid with the media. Planet Roger had produced a sunset. “Since the three hundred he’s not so hard on himself all the time,” Joe Torre said. “It’s like he’s come through something and out the other side.” Clemens was not less of a pitcher, however, keeping a live fastball (and that Kilroy stare-in at the batter over the fence of his glove) and going 17-9 for the season, with a hundred and ninety (or 4,099) strikeouts, fifth best in the league. He also won two huge starts in the post-season—the third game against the Twins in the Divisionals, which put his team in command at last, and that roily Game Three in Boston, where he stood cool amid the schoolyard punchings and pushings. He wanted to stay useful, and did so, besting his duellist Pedro in every category in his six innings and coming off with the win.
The Sox fans taunted Clemens all that afternoon, but I believe they still remembered his last local appearance, at the end of August, his hundredth victory in this old park, when he’d come out of the game after seven, a winner once again, and received a substantial, echoing “O” from the width and breadth of the Fenway multitudes, who had loved him here in his celebrated thirteen-year tenure and foully vilified him ever since.
Some writers and television sports guys have been saying that Roger won’t stay retired—he’ll miss it all too much—and I just hope they’ll bring their money around, come spring. I think they’re the ones who don’t want to say goodbye. “I’m dead serious on what I’m doing,” Clemens said in Florida. “I’m pretty set on it.” This was about his departure, but it fits a career as well.
At two-thirty-seven in the morning, Steve Wulf, a Red Sox fan who is also the executive editor of ESPN: The Magazine, was alone in the living room of his house in Larchmont watching on television the first game of the Sox-Athletics American League divisional playoff from Oakland. The A’s had loaded the bases in the bottom of the twelfth inning when catcher Ramon Hernandez dropped down a killer bunt, to bring home the winning run. “Fuck,” Wulf said to himself, turning off the set—and heard the same summarizing blurt softly repeated from above by his wife, Bambi, who had long since gone to bed, and, still more faintly, by their seventeen-year-old son, Bo, on the top floor. Here was a harbinger, the first leaf of another hard Bosox autumn ahead—eleven more games of breathless and mindless, heroic and incomprehensible ball, ending in a fresh seismic shock to the Red Sox Nation, by consensus the worst one of all. I was at Fenway Park for most of the action, but cannot offer a reliable summary—certainly not of the Divisional third game, which featured a collective six errors and several base-running grotesqueries by the visitors.
Scrolling ahead, we alight in Game III, Scene 4 of the next series, the A.L.C.S., at Fenway Park, just as Pedro Martinez lets fly that fastball aimed behind Yankee batter Karim Garcia, grazing him high on the left shoulder as he flinches away. Vintage Pedro or something, but there’s no doubt about his intention. Handed a two-run first-inning lead against Roger Clemens, Martinez has given back a run in the second, then a solo homer to Jeter, and, just now, a walk and a single and an r.b.i. double to Hideki Matsui. The Yankees lead, and will hold on to win, despite chaotic distractions. When play resumes, Garcia bangs irritably into second baseman Todd Walker at the front of a double play, and in the ensuing pushing and grabbing, Martinez glares at Jorge Posada in the Yankee dugout and aims a finger at his own forehead: you’re next! After the teams change sides Manny Ramirez comes out at Clemens, bat upraised, in response to an eye-level pitch that was actually over the plate. (“If I’d wanted it near him he’d have known it,” Clemens said later.) Benches and bullpens empty, old Zimmer swings at Martinez and goes down—what was that?—and will be taken away tenderly as the players at last disperse and the umps confer. Later, there’s a mini-fracas in the Yankee bullpen, where reliever Jeff Nelson and right fielder Garcia (vaulting the fence to get there) get into a street scuffle with a Red Sox employee. This game had been billed as a classic between the best pitcher of his day and the best of his era, but turned into low farce.
The next day, a rainy Sunday, Zimmer wept and apologized, fines were assessed (fifty thousand to Martinez on down to five thousand for Zimmer), and the Red Sox management, defying a team-silence edict from the commissioner’s office, staged an embarrassing press conference while attempting to put a Sox spin on the debacle. “This is a band of brothers,” explained chief executive officer Larry Lucchino. Fra Pedro, whose team’s record had just gone to 9-15 in games he’d started against the Yankees, dismissed Zimmer’s apology but offered none of his own. “It’s not a good feeling to have to apologize,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize this.” With a 14-4 record and a 2.22 E.R.A. this year, Martinez is not exactly in decline, but after this weekend you had the sense that even in the stoniest New England precincts he will no longer be defined by his numbers. In his Globe column, Dan Shaughnessy wrote, “Pedro was an embarrassment and a disgrace to baseball Saturday. . . . And the Sox front office enables him, just as they do Manny Ramirez. Just as they did with Roger when he was here and Yaz when he was here and Ted when he was here.”
Don Zimmer, who has retired, deserves at least a footnote, here at the end of one of those “Glory of Their Times” baseball careers. His fifty-five years in the game included a marriage (it’s still going) at home plate at Elmira when he was a young infielder in the Eastern League; a dozen years in the majors, with five different teams; and a manager’s post with four more, including the Red Sox. Just this past season, he turned up in a dazzling new baseball trivia question, in good company. Q. Name four guys who were ejected from major-league games in six different decades. A. Casey Stengel. Leo Durocher. Frank Robinson. Zimm.
It comes to a seventh game—could anyone have doubted it? This will be the twenty-sixth time the Red Sox and Yankees have faced off this year—a record for any two teams in the annals—and while there have been stretches when the latest renewal held all the drama of a couple of cellmates laying out a hand of rummy, this is another killer dénouement. For all we know, it’s up there with the 1978 Bucky Dent playoff and the DiMaggio late return of 1949. There’s a wired, non-stop holiday din at the Stadium, which dies away only with the first intensely watched pitches. Everything matters now. Clemens is back and so is Pedro—but this Roger appears frail and thought-burdened. The No. 2 Boston batter, Todd Walker, raps a safe knock after a ten-pitch at-bat, and Nomar Garciaparra lines out hard to right. An inning later, Kevin Millar singles, and Trot Nixon, from his flat-footed left-handed stance, delivers a businesslike homer into the stands in right: his third two-run job in the post-season. With two out, the bearded, dad-like Jason Varitek doubles into the right-field corner. Johnny Damon’s grounder looks like the last out but—geez!—third baseman Enrique Wilson mishandles the ball and his throw pulls first baseman Nick Johnson off the bag, as Varitek turns the corner and scores. It’s 3-0, and when the teams change sides the Stadium has gone anxious and pissed-off conversational: fans up and down the stuffed tiers complaining to their seatmates or sending the bad news home on their cells, with gestures: . . . plus Wilson is in for defense, right? . . . our only chance was stay close to goddam Pedro.
Martinez, for his part, survives some first-inning wobbles and is soon in rhythm: the stare-in from behind his red glove, the velvety rock and turn, and the strikes arriving in clusters. After each out, he gloves the returning ball backhand, and gazes about with lidded hauteur. No one else in the world has eyes so far apart. The Yanks go down quickly again, and we’re at the top of the fourth—and the startling sound, it’s like a tree coming apart, of Kevin Millar’s solo shot up into the upper-deck left-field stands. Clemens, down 4-0 and almost helpless, gives up a walk and a hit-and-run single to Mueller and departs, maybe for the last time ever. A ten-year-old Yankee fan I know named Noah has by this time gone down on his knees on the concrete in front of his seat near first base, hiding his head.
There were Sox fans here, too, of course—you could see them in red-splashed knots and small parties around the Stadium, and pick up their cries. The Boston offense had been a constant for them all year, including the sixteen-hit outburst in the series-tying 9-6 win the night before. This year, the Sox set major-league records for extra bases, total bases, and slugging percentage. The Boston front office, headed by the twenty-nine-year-old G.M., Theo Epstein, had traded vigorously to build a batting order with no soft sectors or easy outs in it. Mueller, the double-grand-slam switch-hitter, was batting eighth today. For me, Kevin Millar, a free agent acquired for cash from the Marlins last winter, was the genius pick. On April 1st, the second day of the season, he contributed a sixteenth-inning game-winning home run in Tampa, and in June pinch-hit a grand slam that helped pull off a seven-run turnabout against the Brewers. With his blackened cheekbones and raunchy grin, he became the model for the Sox’ newfound grunginess—dirt-stained uniforms and pine-smudged helmets, and an early-October outburst of shaved heads that transformed sluggers and pitchers and old coaches into plebes or pledges. His “Let’s cowboy up!” rallying cry from the dugout and the on-deck circle caught on with d.j.s and schoolkids and Green Line subway riders, inundating Greater Boston in “Cowboy Up!” caps and T-shirts and fan towels and diapers and souvenir glassware. Somebody found a clip of eighteen-year-old Kevin mouthing the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in a Beaumont, Texas, karaoke solo, which became a staple on the Fenway message board. The unimaginable had happened: the Sox were loose.
Mike Mussina, called into the crisis with Boston runners at first and third, and no outs—Clemens had just gone—went into his ceremonial low-bowing stretch and struck out Varitek, the first batter, on three pitches. Three more brought a handy 6-6-3 double play at Damon’s expense. “MOOOOSE!” the bleacherites cried. It was Mussina’s first relief appearance after four hundred lifetime starts, but he understood the work. Jason Giambi, struggling at .190 in the series, hit a homer barely into the center-field seats, for a first dent in Pedro, and, liking the range, did it again to the same sector in the seventh, bringing us to 4-2, with the old house roaring and rocking. The press-box floor thrummed under my feet, as I had felt it do on an autumn late night or two before. Young Noah had lifted himself off the deck by this time and stood by his seat, yelling.
I had been looking about the familiar Stadium surround in valedictory fashion—the motel-landscape bullpens, the UTZ Potato Chip sign over in right—but from here to the end sat transfixed by the cascade of events, scarcely able to draw a full breath. No other sport does this, and even as we stare and cry “Can you believe this?” we forget how often it comes along, how it’s built into baseball.
Joe Torre, patching in relievers after Mussina’s three-inning stint, produced David Wells, whose first pitch was sailed deep into the bleachers by Sox d.h. David Ortiz. 5-2 now. Checking the video monitor, I saw Wells’s top teeth hit his bottom lip with the expletive. But Pedro had been long at his tasks, and when Jeter doubled to the right-field corner in the eighth and was singled home by Bernie Williams, the margin narrowed again to two, and here came manager Grady Little, out to hook his ace and pat him on the rump as he left. Little likes to stand below a pitcher, on the downslope of the mound, and here again, looking up at Pedro like a tourist at the Parthenon steps, he said a few words and walked away. This could not be. Martinez had thrown a hundred and fifteen pitches, and given up ringing hits to five of the last seven batters. A Sox-fan friend of mine, Ben, watching in his apartment on West Forty-fifth Street, had gone on his hands and knees, screaming. But Pedro stayed on: a ground-rule double by Matsui, then the dying bloopy double by Posada that landed untouched out beyond second base, for two runs and the tie. “There’s a lot of grass out there,” Posada explained later. Grady Little, in his own brief post-game, said, “Pedro Martinez has been our man all year long, and in situations like that he’s the one we want on the mound,” which was understandable but untrue. This had been only the fifth game in thirty-one starts in which Martinez was allowed to pitch into the eighth.
It was Mariano Rivera time—the waiting Boston bad dream—and Mo, defending the tie, poised and threw, poised and threw, whisking through the ninth. There was a scary double to left by Ortiz with two gone in the tenth, but Rivera, sighing, delivered the cutter to Millar, who lined gently to Jeter. Midnight had come and gone, but the Yankees could do no better against Embree and then Timlin, the tough Sox relievers Grady Little had slighted in extremis (the two surrendered no runs at all in this series, in sixteen-plus combined innings). The top of the eleventh went away, to noisy, exhausted accompaniments; the latest Boston pitcher was Tim Wakefield, the tall knuckleballer who had embarrassed the Yankees with his spinless stuff, twice beating Mussina in close, low-scoring games. Mo was done: the balance had swung the other way. I looked at my scorecard to confirm the next Yankee batter—Aaron Boone, who had come into the game as a pinch-runner in the eighth—looked back, and saw the ball and the ballgame fly away on his low, long first-pitch home run into the released and exulting and rebelieving Yankee crowds. I yelled, too, but thought, Poor Boston. My god.
News and reviews of this game poured in even while the World Series was cranking up. A woman I know, riding a late taxi downtown that night with a friend, was stopped at a light at Twenty-third Street and Seventh Avenue when she heard the earphoned, Urdu-speaking driver suddenly shouting “Aaron Boone! Aaron Boone!” A man in the Abbey Tavern, around the corner from the Piazza Navona in Rome, turned to say something consoling to a new Sox-fan acquaintance after the Boone homer—it was six-fifteen in the morning—and found the seat empty. In Gramercy Square, light from his home TV screen illuminated the patrician visage of eighty-six-year-old Gardner Botsford, a retired editor and writer who was wearing the first messaged garment of his life, a classic white cotton T-shirt, with “Yankees Suck” in 75-point blue capitals. Botsford is no Red Sox fan, but his shirt, the gift of a friend just back from Fenway Park, summed up his convictions: Voltaire could not have put it better. When Boone had done his deed, Botsford took off the shirt and went upstairs. “Didn’t work,” he said to the silent form across the bed. Eighteen-year-old Pat Sviokla had asked a bunch of friends and classmates over to watch the game at his house in Newton, outside Boston, but when Boone’s shot went out the party disappeared. “Nobody said a word,” Pat’s mother, Eileen, said later. “Six or seven of them going out the door, single file. They looked like P.O.W.s.” Bill Buckner letting the ground ball go through his legs at Shea Stadium had happened in 1986, when these young men were one-year-olds. Bucky Fucking Dent, Joe Morgan, Jim Willoughby taken out, and Throw the ball in, Johnny, was stuff their fathers and grandfathers talked about. Now they belonged.
Much of the buzz collected around Grady Little. “Grady Sutton is a better manager than Grady Little” was the gist and entire content of a note I had from an unknown correspondent—who’d somehow realized that I would recognize Grady Sutton as the moonfaced ninny in the old W. C. Fields flicks. “Grady Little is the George Bush of managers,” a friend across the hall from me in my office came by to announce. “Letting Pedro stay in is like George Bush staring into Putin’s soul.”
Now, a month later, a little of New England’s pain and anguish may have dispersed, helped along by the Yankees’ loss in the World Series and that late footage of Derek Jeter, still with his cap and spikes and wristbands on, sitting disconsolate in front of his Stadium locker a full hour after the Yanks’ elimination.
Grady Little has been let go, and the Red Sox have offered waivers on Manny Ramirez, hoping to trade him and his twenty-million-dollar-a-year contract for new pitching. If you want to tap into the Sox fans’ psyche now, you have to consult a new Web site, www.redsoxhaiku.com, where it comes in eloquent triplets:
Or:
And:
Joe Torre, who called the Red Sox the best team his Yankees had faced during his eight-year tenure as manager, was short of a haiku by a beat or two in the interview room just before that seventh game, but also on target: “This really is fun, but you don’t know it’s fun until it’s over.” ♦
