Faithful

August 5th

Still, we almost got the sweep. Leading 4–1 in the seventh—and cruising—Bronson Arroyo gave up a single and a walk. A Kevin Youkilis error loaded the bases for Tampa Bay with no outs. Then catcher Toby Hall, 0 for his last 18, parked one. Make that score 5–4 Rays, and it stood up. In the Boston half of the ninth, newly acquired Sox speed merchant Dave Roberts, running for Kevin Millar and egged on by third-base coach Dale Sveum, tried to tie the score from second on a Doug Mientkiewicz single.[32] The all-or-nothing dash for home is always a thrilling play, but this time it went Tampa Bay’s way. Center fielder Rocco Baldelli threw a bullet to catcher (and home-run hitter) Toby Hall, who made it easy for the umpire, not letting the willowy Roberts anywhere near the dish. Mientkiewicz got as far as third, then died there when Johnny Damon poppedup to end the game. It was another tooth-rattling loss (especially since both the Yankees and the Rangers, our current wild-card competition, won their games), but Tampa Bay hasn’t been swept at home all year, so all you can do is tip your cap to them and move on. In this case to Motown, where the Tigers wait.

We’re 2-1 in the current twelve-game stretch, and I’m still hoping to take six of the next nine. I know that sounds steep, but at some point this team just has to start setting some steep goals. And meeting them.

SK: I couldn’t tell from the paper (or the game) if Sveum sent him. I guess he did. (My son Owen sez the same.)

SO: Sveum sent him, then said afterward that Rocco Baldelli hasn’t made a lot of good throws. Only enough to lead the league in outfield assists last year, Dale.

SK: It was a move reminiscent of Wendell “Send ’Em In” Kim. A moment of desperation? A brain cramp? I mean, we could have had guys on first and third with none out! By the way, how many games has this team lost by one run this year? What we have here is a team that’s so agonizingly close to being good enough…but not quite. You heard it here first: I don’t think we’re going anywhere but home come October. How I hope they prove me wrong.

SO: I think he blanked—entirely spaced on the situation. And it wasn’t like he was sending Ortiz or the Dauber. Even Roberts’s wheels couldn’t make up for it.

We’re pretty much where we were last year. Just hope the bats come alive, the teams out West knock each other off, and the ChiSox pull their usual swoon.

August 6th

SO: What the hell happened with John Olerud? Seattle was in the cellar and figured they’d dump him and go with a youth movement, I understand that, but I thought they dropped him so they could dangle him in front of teams like the Yanks, hoping George or some other nut would pick up his big salary. Then I read in the paper that the Yanks grabbed him and are paying him the minimum 300K while the M’s are eating 7 mil. Wha’? Huh?

And Theo—in his Defense Is Good mode—has been crowing over Mientkiewicz’s old Gold Gloves. Olerud’s got a closetful of ’em, plus he’s one of the purest hitters to ever play the game. So, if we had to have a fourth first baseman (Dauber being condemned to the fifth circle, called Pawtucket), instead of the crummy Nomar deal we swung, we could have had Olerud for 300K and the time it took to sign him, and then could have maybe gotten a middle reliever/setup guy to spell Embree and Timlin, who look tired and beaten out there.

SK: Ah, but Olerud wouldn’t have looked as good to the cannibal Boston press, which will never speak to me again after they read the August portion of my diary. AND I DON’T CARE. I mean, do you doubt a bit that Mientkiewicz and Cabrera were, to some extent, PR gestures?

SO: But—and this is where my forehead starts to pulse like Scanners—didn’t we already have a great defensive first baseman in McCarty? And doesn’t getting Mientkiewicz now make him totally expendable? I just don’t get it. Unless we’re putting together some weird MGM production number where every utility shortstop on the team fields a grounder and throws to a matching first baseman for a grand, ceremonial 6-3.

SK: Amen, brother. I’ve been thinking this for two weeks. When we get Varitek playing first, it’ll be the fooking hat-trick. Orlando Cabrera is actually Cesar Crespo by way of Stepford. Yours ever, Ira Levin.

Ted Williams disliked and distrusted the Boston sportswriters. His appellation for them—“The Knights of the Keyboard”—was sarcastic and contemptuous. This doesn’t make the Splendid Splinter an aberration but rather the first in a tradition. In the current era, Carl Everett was sent hence from Boston with his ass on fire and the tag Jurassic Carl hanging from his neck. Manager Butch Hobson (never one of my faves, believe me) became known—sarcastically—as Daddy Butch. Pedro Martinez, a proud and emotional man as well as a wildly talented pitcher, has felt so disrespected by Boston’s Knights of the Keyboard that he has on at least two occasions vowed never to speak to the media again (luckily for fans, his natural gregariousness has overcome these resolutions). Dozens of Red Sox players, past and present, could tell horror stories about how they’ve been treated by Boston’s sportswriters, who now serve just two papers (if you exclude such peripheral rags as the Phoenix and Diehard, that is): the Globe and the Herald. The Globe is the more influential, and by far the more vitriolic. Its most recent acid-bath victim has been Nomar Garciaparra.

The story being disseminated by the writers—Dan Shaughnessy leading the pack—goes something like this: Nomar was never a team player; Nomar was a downer even at the best of times; Nomar had a line in front of his locker to keep the media from getting too close; Nomar told multiple stories about his conversations with Red Sox management before the trade that sent him to the Cubs; Nomar expressed doubts about how much of the regular season he’d be able to play because of the injury to his Achilles tendon. (This last is supposed to help we poor benighted fans understand how Theo Epstein could have traded one of baseball’s five premier infielders for what boils down to a pair of journeymen with good defensive skills.)

And yesterday, more dirt: According to the Globe, Nomar may have lied about how he came by that sore foot in the first place. In spring training we were told—by Nomar—that the injury was the result of a batted ball. Now, according to the Globe, Nomar is supposed to have told somebody or other that the injury cropped up on its own. If so, yesterday’s story went on to speculate, he may have confabulated the whole batted-ball story in order to keep his market value from going down in his walk year. Because you can heal from an injury, right? But if your body starts to give out on you…that’s a different deal altogether. And the source or sources of this story? Do you even have to ask? Not named. Little more than back- fence gossip, in other words, just one more yap of the fox who wants to believe that, oh yeah, those grapes were sour anyway…and by the way, that big-deal shortstop all the kids love? What a hoser! What a busher!

And if Nomar Garciaparra tells his Chicago teammates not to okay a trade to Boston if they can possibly prevent it, no way, under no circumstances, because in Boston the sportswriters eat the local heroes in print and then shit out the bones on cable TV, who could blame them? I’ll bet right now Mr. Garciaparra is feeling especially well-chewed.

And why are the Boston sportswriters this way during baseball season—so angry, so downright cat-dirt mean—when they are, by and large, pretty normal during the other three seasons