of looking at the Yankees’ collective pin-striped butt in the standings each and every day, so sick of realizing that we’ll still be in second place even if we sweep them when we see them later this month.
There’s nothing better than waking up to find your team won and the other guys lost. Conversely, there’s no worse way to start the day than finding out your team lost and the other guys won. It’s like taking a big swig of the orange juice straight from the carton and discovering that it’s gone over.
June 17th
The Red Sox are now back to full strength, or almost (Pokey Reese is day-to-day with a jammed toe, as a result of that spectacular catch on the thirteenth). Trot Nixon returned to the lineup with a bang last night, stroking a home run to what’s almost the deepest part of Coors Field. So all’s right with the world, right?
Wrong. The Sox got behind early again and couldn’t quite come back, Schilling lost (television viewers were treated to the less than lovely sight of Father Curt, the staff’s supposed anchor, pounding the shit out of a defenseless Gatorade cooler after giving up a key two-out hit), and the Yankees won for the 730th time in their last 732 games. Consequently, we’ve fallen five and a half games out of first place. These will be hard games to make up, assuming they can be made up at all (probably they can), and what hurts the most is that the last two losses have come at the hands of the Rockies, currently major league baseball’s worst team. But the Red Sox have a talent for making bad teams look good, I sometimes think; we have done some almighty awful franchises the favor of making themlook terrific for their fans, especially during the two or three weeks after Memorial Day.
For this is almost certainly the beginning of that yearly Red Sox rite known as the June Swoon. Longtime fans know it so well they can set their calendars by it, if not their watches; it begins when the NBA finals end. During this year’s Lakers-Pistons finals,[22] the Sox were busy taking two out of three from both the Padres and the Dodgers, who are vying for the top spot in the NL West. Now that the finals are over, they are busy getting their shit handed to them by the lowly Rockies and their lead in the wild-card race—yes, even that—has melted away to a mere single game.
If it
Usually always.
I take the Fenway tour in the morning, hoping to catch BK working out. He’s not. The grounds crew is doing something to the track in left; they’ve dug up the corner and pulled some padded panels off the wall. We can’t go down to field level—a drag, since I wanted to walk the track and peek in the scoreboard. We hit the press box, then the .406 Club. While we’re listening to the guide’s spiel, I notice two members of our tour being escorted to the mound far below. A man and a woman. The man goes to one knee. KELLI, WILL YOU MARRY ME? the scoreboard flashes. She kisses him, and the tour applauds.
We cross the Monster for the big view. I’m surprised by how many tours are running at once, and how much activity there is. There are several school groups circling the top of the park the opposite way. Under the bleachers, a crew is setting up a catered job fair; in the right-field grandstand, workmen are replacing old wooden seats.
The last stop is the right-field roof tables, an anticlimax, and we walk back down the ramp to Gate D, looking down on the players’ lot. The guard there says BK should be in any minute.
Back home, the schedule makers sneak today’s game by me. It’s a 3:05 start, 1:05 mountain time, and when I tune in to NESN at nine o’clock they’re showing Canadian football, complete with the 55-yard line and Labatt’s ads painted on the astroturf. I check the website: 11–0 Sox. Lowe threw seven strong, getting 17 ground-ball outs. Ortiz put it out of reach in the sixth with a three-run shot. It figures—the one game I miss.
June 18th
ESPN notes that Lowe’s shutout was only the second of the Rockies at Coors in their last four hundred games. And the Yanks lost to the D-backs, so we gained ground.
Francona kept Wake out of the Colorado series, citing knuckleballers’ poor history there, so Wake opens against the Giants at Pac Bell (SBC, if you want to be a stickler). As in his start against the Dodgers last Saturday, he’s got nothing. The Giants run on him at will, and Marquis Grissom takes him deep twice for a 7–2 lead in the fourth.
I’m at the beach, watching with my nephew Charlie.
“Why don’t they take him out?” Charlie asks.
“Because we don’t have anyone else.” And there’s Malaska warming.
With the 10:05 start and all the offense, it’s late, and we don’t want to keep the rest of the cottage up.
My father-in-law, stumping to the bathroom in his skivvies, asks how we’re doing.
“Ah, we’re getting crushed,” I say.
June 19th
The local edition of the
“They won,” Charlie says, shrugging. “The score was something like eleven to eight.”
No one can verify it, so I get on my father-in-law’s laptop and hit the website. 14-9 was the final. Ortiz and Manny went back-to-back and Millar had a pinch-hit three-run shot over Barry Bonds—all in the top of the fifth. Son of a bitch. All we had to do was stay up another ten minutes.
“Fair-weather fans,” Trudy says.
“No,” I say. “It’s the opposite. When I watch them, they lose. I turn it off and they win.”
June 20th
7:45 A.M.: Today’s game against the San Francisco Giants will mark the end of interleague play for the nonce, and I’m glad. I don’t like it because I think it’s a marketing stunt, but that’s secondary. A New England team has no business on the West Coast, that’s what I really think.
Still, it should be an interesting contest—the rubber game in a three-game series the Red Sox would dearly love to win. For one thing, it would send them home with a .500 record for the trip. For another, they’d go back to Boston four and a half behind the Yankees, only three and a half if the Dodgers can beat the Yankees again today. And Sox pitching has pretty well muzzled Barry Bonds, who strikes me—admittedly an outsider, but sometimes outsiders see with clearer eyes—as one of the game’s more arrogant and conceited players. His fans in left field hang rubber chickens when Bonds is intentionally walked, but they haven’t hung many in this series.
Oh, and by the Ray—the
