Faithful

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.

October 25th

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[84] “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. [85] 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.[86] 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