At 45-54, the Orioles are sleepwalking through another disapponting season. You wouldn’t know it by the way they’ve played against the Red Sox, though. Behind Pedro, and still pumped up from beating the Yankees two out of three, we shellacked them two nights ago, but the O’s batters had touched Tim Wakefield for four quick runs last night before the game was washed out. Tonight they got four more against Curt Schilling, and sorry, no rain.
We are 4-7 so far against Baltimore this year, and I’d love to be able to comfort myself by saying we just play lousy against the Birds, but it ain’t so, Joe. The fact of the matter is that the Birds play lousy against the rest of the league and like World Champions against us. Schilling (12-4) against Dave Borkowski (1-2) was a mismatch on paper, but for the last time, baseball games aren’t played on paper and tonight Borkowski—who we’d already beaten once this year—pitched like Steve Carlton in his prime, setting down the first thirteen Red Sox batters to face him before giving up a single to Nomar in the fifth. He pitched seven strong and left the game with a two-hit shutout. The only Boston run came on an Ortiz dinger with two out in the ninth, and Javy Lopez—a Red Sox nemesis from his Atlanta Braves days—hit a pair off Schilling, getting three of the four Baltimore RBIs.
So we’re a game behind Oakland in the wild-card race, and we have the unpleasing prospect of three games against the red-hot Minnesota Twins in the immediate future and
July 29th
Now the papers say Theo might try to piggyback that Twins-Pirates deal, shipping Youkilis to Pittsburgh for Mientkiewicz. Just the idea makes me queasy. Trading Lowe or Nomar would be bad enough, even if we have no intention of signing them, but Youk’s the future. After what happened with Freddy Sanchez (though he’s been hurt the last year or so), they ought to know better.
The Sox have a travel day, so to get my daily dose I take Steph and the boys over to Norwich for a doubleheader against the Trenton Thunder. Like New Britain, Norwich has a pretty little park that holds around six thousand, but the food is better here. I get a ball during warm-ups and have former Sox closer and current Norwich pitching coach Bob “The Steamer” Stanley and his former batterymate and current first-base coach Roger LaFrancois sign it.
The Thunder are the Yanks’ double-A club. They used to be ours before we acquired Portland from the Marlins, and the Navigators used to be the Yankees’, so for long-term fans there are some mixed (if not to say confused) feelings. But it’s Camp Day, so most of the fans are too young to care. It’s a brilliant blue afternoon, everyone receives a coupon for free ice cream, and as we leave, the ushers hand out flyers telling us Willie Mays is coming next week. Makes me wish I could be here for it.
July 30th
It’s the big party for Trudy’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary, a real production, and I can’t get away with the sneaky Pirates radio and earphone. A good half of the guests are New Englanders and diehard Sox fans—the men mostly, with memories of the ’46 club, and the old Braves. To a man, they think Francona’s just another patsy. “The last manager we had with any spine was Dick Williams. You saw, everywhere he went he was a winner.” The women roll their eyes.
After the band’s packed up, we have a nightcap downstairs in the bar. The TV’s silently playing
They also list a pair of big trades. The Mets have won the Benson sweepstakes. Not only that, but in a five- team deal, somehow they also picked up Tampa Bay ace Victor Zambrano and put themselves in a position to win the wimpy NL East. The other trade is an eight-player swap between the Marlins and Dodgers, the principals being Brad Penny and Charles Johnson, Guillermo Mota and Paul Lo Duca.
No news from Theo.
July 31st
The Yankees have reversed themselves on Giambi’s intestinal parasite and are now saying he has a benign tumor and may be out for the season. Also, during Fox’s Yankee Game of the Week, an announcer says that Trot will miss the rest of the year (instead of the week or two the Sox originally reported). If that’s true, we’re screwed.
All the friends who came to last night’s party are here for a day at the beach, and there’s a revolving audience for the Yankees-O’s game. A-Rod takes home on the back end of a double steal that the Orioles fall for, and for the rest of the day the announcers crow about how A-Rod stole home as if he’s Jackie Robinson.
I’m just watching the game for any late trade news, since the deadline’s almost upon us. Soon it’s past four—no news—and the Yanks are winning, so I go pack my things to drive Steph home for a friend’s birthday party.
I get the news from my daughter-in-law, a once-upon-a-time Yankee fan (like once-upon-a-time Protestants who convert to Catholicism, lapsed Yankee fans who become Red Sox partisans are the ones who REALLY MEAN BUSINESS), and she sounds the way I feel: shocked but somehow not all that surprised.
The player most commonly identified with the Boston Red Sox, the one whose number most fans probably expected to see someday up on the wall along with Williams’s, Pesky’s, and Yaz’s, is no longer with the Red Sox. Number Five has been traded, and probably the only consolation to be taken by fans who place tradition and heart above salary and statistics is that he’s been traded to the one other team in baseball whose long World Series drought has become not just the stuff of history but that of myth. That’s right folks; at game time tomorrow, Nomar Garciaparra—Boston’s surviving marquee player from the days of Dan Duquette—will take the field as a Cubbie.
Does the deal make sense? I don’t think so; I think that two years from now it will look like a panic move made by a young GM who saw his high-priced (and supposedly high-powered) baseball team treading water eight or nine games behind the monolithic Yankees in the AL East and a game or two behind the Oakland A’s in the wild card (but still more advantageouslyplaced than their closest competition). In other words, I think that Theo Epstein probably pulled the pin on a big deal at the trading deadline mostly because everyone in Boston’s howling oh-God-my-ass-hole’s-on-fire sports community was yelling for it to happen
What exactly did we get for our usually dependable, sometimes brilliant, and (I admit it) at times erratic shortstop, who was batting .321 at the time of the trade? We got two Gold Glove infielders, one with a name that can be both pronounced and spelled—that would be Orlando Cabrera—and the other with a name that can at least be pronounced: Doug Mientkiewicz
According to Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, the fact that Cabrera and Mientkiewicz currently have batting averages seventy points below Garciaparra’s doesn’t matter. As a disciple of Billy Beane and
