Faithful

not going to miss history.

I get into the Stadium a half hour before game time, and it’s oddly quiet. I expected a seething full house, but here and there are empy seats, and the Yankee fans—though decked out in some of the ugliest team gear I’ve ever seen—are muttering to each other. Where’s the crude, in-your-face stupidity? The 1918 banners? The guys with paint all over them? The crowd seems wary, tight. I see far more Sox hats and shirts than I did last month. It’s like we’re taking over.

David, the Yankee fan I sit beside, is incredibly polite and well-versed in the game—he’s a baseball fan first, and only then a Yankee fan (he began as a Giants fan, and still owes some allegiance to them). It’s an unexpected pleasure to sit with him and swap lore.

The Yanks call on Bucky “Fucking” Dent to throw out the first pitch, hoping to stir up old ghosts. Yogi Berra, who watched Maz’s homer go over the wall in Forbes Field, catches for him.

Maybe they should have let Bucky start, because Kevin Brown has nothing. In the first, after Johnny is thrown out at the plate on a Manny single—on the very next pitch!—Brown tries to sneak an 88 mph fastball past David Ortiz. Never happen. El Jefe lines it into the short porch (in Fenway it either falls for a single or Sheffield catches it racing in) for a 2–0 lead, and the Yanks never dig themselves out of that hole. With bases juiced in the second, Johnny Damon greets Javier Vazquez with a line-drive grand slam into the same short porch that has padded so many Yankees’ power stats over the years,[80] and the thousand or so Faithful drown out the rest of the Stadium.

And that’s basically it. Tonight Derek Lowe, who was supposed to be the best number three pitcher in the majors, is just that.[81] He gives up one hit in six innings. I’ll say that again: he gives up one hit in six innings. As in Game 4, D-Lowe rhymes with hero. Johnny hits a second dinger off Vazquez, just like he did on June 29th, and we’re up 8–1 and chanting “Reg-gie Da-mon!” The crowd is totally poleaxed, as if they’ve shown up on the wrong night. They revive only when Pedro comes on for a vanity appearance in the seventh and gives up two runs, one of which Mark Bellhorn (from now until eternity Mark “Fucking” Bellhorn to Yankee fans) immediately gets back with a towering blast off the right-field foul pole. Another garbage run on a sac fly, and yes, finally, that is it.

I’m behind home with Steve as we nail down the last outs. We don’t even need our closer. It’s 10–3, and no one can hit a seven-run homer. Jeter looks sick. A-Rod and Sheffield have both gone 0-for—complete and total justice. It’s as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart. It’s quiet and the upper deck is half-empty. The Yankees are cooked, and their fans can’t believe it. In the biggest game ever played in this rivalry, the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees at home, by a touchdown, on Mickey Mantle’s birthday. At one minute after midnight, the start of a new day, when Sierra grounds weakly to Pokey Reese, and Pokey flips to Doug Mientkiewicz (so simple!), the most expensive baseball team in history is history.

And we’re sorry, George, but that’s more than half a billion dollars you’ve spent…for nothing.

Come on now: Who’s your Daddy?

Diamondbacks. Angels. Marlins. Red Sox.

It’s like Papa Jack says: ain’t nuthin’ for free. SOMEBODY got-ta pay. And, Yankee fans, the one you just bought has a lifetime guarantee.

October 21st

Last night, in a game that was never supposed to happen, the Boston Red Sox completed the greatest comeback in the history of American professional sports. In light of that accomplishment, an inning-by- inning postmortem would be pretty anticlimactic stuff, and not very helpful in understanding the magnitude of the event. You might as well try to describe a camel by describing a camel’s eyeball.

Is winning the American League pennant an event of magnitude? We are, after all, fighting some kind of screwed-up war in Iraq where over eleven hundred American soldiers have already died, not to mention at least two hundred American civilians. We are fighting (or trying to fight) a war on terrorism. We are electing a president in less than two weeks, and the dialogue between the candidates has never been hotter. In light of those things, does winning the pennant even matter?

My answer: you bet your sweet ass it does.

One of the eeriest things about this year’s just-concluded Boston–New York baseball tussle is the way it mimicked this year’s ongoing political contest. John Kerry, a Massachusetts resident, was nominated in Boston and threw out the first pitch at a crucial Red Sox–Yankees game. George Bush was nominated in New York City, and Dick Cheney attended a Yankee–Red Sox game, wearing a Yankees cap over the old solar sex-panel while snipers stood posted high above the fans. As with the Red Sox in the ALCS, Kerry started far behind, then pulled even in the polls. (Whether or not he can win his own Game 7 remains very much open to question, and even if he does, it probably won’t be by the electoral college equivalent of seven runs.)

The four playoff games in New York transcended mere sport for another reason. Except for the Irish tenor warbling his way through “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch—now a tradition at most or all parks, I think—there was little or no sign of 9/11 trauma at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks have had their trials and travails this year (poor pitching chief among them), but the need to provide therapy for their hurt and grieving city by winning the American League pennant was thankfully not one of them.

Yet a comfy tradition of winning leaves one—whether that one be an individual or a sociological overset combined of several million fans—unprepared for loss, especially when the loss is so shocking and unexpected. The headlines in this morning’s three New York papers express that shock better than any man- or woman-on-the-street interview ever could.

From the New York Times: RED SOX TO YANKEES: WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR and MONUMENTAL COLLAPSE.

From the Daily News: THE CHOKE’S ON US and (this is a classic, I think) HELL FREEZES OVER. Accompanying the latter is a picture of Pedro with his hands upraised and the caption: “Pedro Martinez celebrates in his daddy’s house.”

From the New York Post, sad and succinct: DAMNED YANKEES.

After the game, out by the gigantic bat in front of Gate 4, most Yankee fans were downcast but magnanimous, considering the fact that the Red Sox fans—there were plenty of them—were delirious with joy, pounding each other on the back, giving and receiving high fives, pogoing up and down. One large, hairy man grabbed me around the waist and whirled me around thrice, screaming, “Stephen! Stephen! We won, ya scary sonofabitch! I LOVE YA!”

“GO, RED SOX!” I screamed back. It seemed safe enough, and besides, it was what I felt.

“GO, RED SOX!” the large, hairy man screamed. “GO, JOHNNY DAMON! GO, MANNY! GO, YOU LONGHAIRED SONSABITCHES!” Then he was gone.

From behind me there came a dissenting note—three Yankee fans, teenagers by the sound (I did not turn around to see), who wanted me to know that “Red Sox suck, and you suck too, Steve.”

A mounted cop clopped by, leaned down, and said, “Tell ’em to blow it out their asses. Tell ’em you been waitin’ eighteen years.”

I might just have done that little thing, but he clopped on, magnificent on his steed and in his riot gear.

Such memories are like raisins in some fabulous dream cake. There are others—the churlish, childish failure of the Yankees to congratulate the Red Sox on their electronic scoreboard; the downcast Yankee fan who hugged me and said he hoped the Red Sox would go all the way this time;two crying children, a boy and a girl, slowly mounting the steps and draggingtheir big foam Number One fingers disconsolately behind them on the concrete, headed out of Yankee Stadium hand in hand—but mostly what I remember this morning are the lights, the noise, the sheer unreality of watching Johnny Damon’s grand slam going into the right-field stands, and being