Faithful

miss us. Derek Lowe was once more far from perfect, but the Sox bats stayed hot and in his start against Oakland, Lowe was just good enough to go six and eke out the win. The Red Sox rolled to their fifth straight, their seventh in their last eight games.

But I watch SportsDesk this morning musing on my Yankees essay—the one where I talked about how we hate what we fear—and looking at my new hat, which was sent to me from yankeeshater.com. Because the Yankees have also been winning, and while we’ve been doing it at home, they’ve been doing it on the road, which is a tougher proposition. They came from behind last night at Camden Yards not just once but twice, finally putting the Orioles away 12–9. So in spite of this nifty streak of ours, we’re still only a game and a half in front. Two Sox losses combined with just two Yankee wins, and we’re back in second place. This is what the Yankees do. They hang around.

Those suckers lurk.

10:30 P.M.: The summer’s disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, opens this weekend, but disaster struck tonight at Fenway Park, as Boston’s brave little five-game winning streak went bye-bye in a big way. Oakland beat the Red Sox like a drum, pounding out 17 hits on their way to a 15–2 win. Me, I knew it was going to happen. I went to the game with my nephew, Jon, who goes to school in Boston. He came over to my hotel room before the game and tossed my hat on the bed, which everyoneknows is just about the worst luck in the world—talk about bad mojo! But I don’t blame him; the kid just didn’t know.

Also, most (or maybe all) major league teams now insist on a five-man pitching rotation, and our fifth man, Bronson Arroyo, while promising, is still very much a work in progress. That fifth man in the rotation is about stre-et-ching the starting pitching…and that, of course, is all about the money. We’ve been there before in this book, and will undoubtedly be there again. But I can remember a time, children—I believe it was 1959—when the White Sox went to the World Series with what was essentially a three-man rotation. Of course, those were the days when a good pitcher still got paid in five figures and a man could take his whole family to the ballyard for twenty bucks, parking included (and smoke a White Owl in the grandstand, if he was so inclined). I’m not saying those were better baseball days…but I’m not saying they weren’t, either.

In the midst of all this, Kevin Youkilis drew a walk in his last at-bat. He still hasn’t played in a major league game where he’s failed to reach base.

A final note before I pack it in for the night: I took myself off this afternoon to see Still, We Believe, an entertaining documentary which chronicles the star-crossed Red Sox team of 2003, the one that voyaged so far only to tear out its hull (not to mention the hearts of its fans) on those cruel Yankee reefs in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series. This film is currently playing in theaters all over New England, plus a few New York venues (where it is attended largely by sadists in Yankee caps, one would suppose), and probably nowhere else. It’s a charming, funny, sweetly poignant film. Its token efforts to explore the Mind of Management—always supposing Management has a Mind, a hypothesis with little evidence to support it—aren’t very interesting, but when it focuses on the fortunes of four fans, it’s a lot more successful. One is a young man who is wheelchair-bound due to an accident; two are semidaffy (but very endearing) young women I kept thinking of as Laverne and Shirley; the fourth is Angry Bill.

Angry Bill is a piece of work: overweight, hypertensive (he suffers persistent nosebleeds during the ’03 postseason), full of nervous energy, bursting with cynical pronouncements that barely cover his bruised baseball fan’s heart. This guy has lived and died with the Sox for so long (mostly the latter), that he sums up an entire New England mind-set when hestates, in effect, that the Sox are always gonna lose, he knows they’re gonna pull an el foldo in August just as sure as he knows the sun’s gonna come up over Boston Haaabaaa in the east, and if they don’t pull an el foldo in August they’ll pull a tank job in September, just as sure as the sun’s gonna go down over Attleboro in the west.

And yet, with Boston ahead during the early going of that climactic Game 7 in October of 2003, Angry Bill briefly allows himself to become Hopeful Bill… because the Red Sox do this to us, too: every year at some point they turn into Lucy holding the football, and against all our best intentions (and our knowing that those who do not learn from history are condemned—fucking CONDEMNED!—to repeat it) we turn into Charlie Brown running once more to kick it, only to have it snatched away again at the last moment so we land flat on our backs, screaming “AUGGGH!” at the top of our lungs.

And when, after Grady Little leaves Pedro in long after even the most casual baseball fan knows he is toasty—fried, broiled, baked, cooked to a turn, stick a fork in ’im, he’s done—when the coup de grace is delivered by Aaron Boone long after Pedro has trudged to the shower, Angry Bill stares with a kind of wondering disbelief into the documentarian’s camera (at us in the audience, seven months later, seven weeks into a new season later, us with our tickets to tonight’s shellacking by the Oakland A’s in our pockets) and delivers what is for me the absolute capper, the jilted Red Sox fan’s Final Word: “Don’t let your kids grow up to be sports fans,” Angry Bill advises, and at this point the movie leaves him—mercifully—to contemplate the Patriots, who will undoubtedly improve matters for his battered psyche by winning the Super Bowl…but I’m sure Angry Bill would admit (if not right out loud then in his heart) that winning the Super Bowl isn’t the same as winning the World Series. Not even in the same universe as winning the World Series.

Meanwhile, the Yankees—the Evil Empire, our old nemesis—have come from behind to beat Baltimore once again, and our lead in the AL East is down to a mere half game. I’m off to bed knowing that the boogeyman has inched a little bit closer to the closet door.

May 28th

It’s the big holiday weekend. Once the kids get home from school, we’ve got to drive down to the Rhode Island shore and help my in-laws open up the beach house, so after lunch I run around town trying to fit in my last errands. I’m at the Stop ’n Shop when I remember the new Reverse the Curse ice cream, and there it is in the freezer section. The carton is boring and generic. I’d hoped for more interesting packaging, maybe a nod to the Monster that I could use for a penny bank. Still, the ice cream should be good.

We poke along I-95 with all the other Memorial Day traffic. Trudy and her parents have been lifting and cleaning all day, and don’t feel like cooking, so we go out for dinner. By the time we make it back, the Sox are down 4–1 to Seattle in the fifth. Ichiro’s just driven in a run, and steals third on Pedro, who has that dull, long-suffering look he gets when things aren’t going right. There’s only one out, and Edgar Martinez is up. Pedro gets him swinging, then gets the next guy to pop up.

In our fifth, Millar and Youkilis tag Joel (pronounced Joe-El, as if he’s from Krypton) Pineiro for back-to-back doubles, making it 4–2. See, all the Sox needed was us watching. Pokey Ks, but with two gone Pineiro walks Johnny and Mark Bellhorn to load them for Big David. On the first pitch, Ortiz lofts a long fly to right. Ichiro goes back sideways, and keeps going, all the way to the wall, where he leaps. He hangs there, folded over the low wall, only his legs showing. We can’t see the ball, but the fans behind the bullpen fence are jumping up and down—it’s gone, a grand slam, and we’re up 6–4.

In St. Pete, the Yanks have beaten the D-Rays, so we need to hold on to stay in first. Pedro settles down. In the eighth he gives way to Embree, who throws a scoreless inning. J. J. Putz comes on for the M’s and gives up a smoked single through the middle to Manny (it makes Putz riverdance) and then, after a long at-bat, a double to Dauber off the bullpen wall. Bob Melvin decides to walk Tek to set up the double play, which Kapler foils by popping up. Putz goes 2-0 on Youkilis and has to come in with a strike; Youkilis slaps it down the right-field line for a double and two more insurance runs, and the PA plays the corny old Hartford Whalers theme, “Brass Bonanza.”

Foulke closes, but it’s a battle. He throws 30 pitches and leaves runners on second and third for an 8–4 final. A tougher game than expected from the last-place M’s, but El Jefe (Big Papi, D.O., David as Goliath) brought us back.

May 29th

It’s Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve had all of Boston and Fenway Park I can take for a