Faithful

It’s strange, this high from winning—a straight drug, uncut. Faithful as the Faithful are, we tend to nitpick, even after a win. Not today. Everything’s clicking, and, sure, it’s only Detroit, but we’ve won 20 games this month. The underachieving Red Sox have become overachievers, and no one is happier than the Faithful.

SO: It was good and breezy and Wake had his knuckler dancing. Just like yesterday, the Tigers hung in till the fifth, when their starter faltered, and then their reliever totally imploded. Yanks were losing last I heard. Could we be only four and a half back?

SK: Indeed we could! And 1.5 ahead in the wild card!

SO: Supersweet. Now, I don’t want to throw cold water on the party, but the Yanks have a cake schedule the rest of the way. They’re home 20 of their last 32, and we’re the only winning team they face (okay, and three against the Twins, but by then Minnesota will be resting starters for the playoffs). In any case, it’s time to square off with the Angels. Some very large games.

August 30th

The last time Tim Wakefield pitched against the Tigers, he gave up six home runs and still got the win, a feat only accomplished once since the days when most big-league teams rode to their away contests on trains.[42] Yesterday, though, on a day so hot the pitchers in the bullpen used a groundskeeper’s hose to spray the fans in the lower right-field bleachers to keep them cool, Wakefield beat the Tigers again, this time more tidily, going eight strong innings and giving up only three hits. No one was any happier than me. I hate to sound like Annie Wilkes here, but I’ve got to be one of Wake’s biggest fans.[43]

And why not? Look at all we have in common. Wakefield stands 6?2?; I stand 6?3?. Wakefield weighs 210; I weigh 195 (and used to weigh 210). Wakefield’s middle name is Stephen; my first name is Stephen. Wakefield got hit by a car while jogging in 1997; I got hit by a van while walking in 1999. When Wakefield started against the Braves in the 1992 National League Championship Series, he was the first rookie to do so in nine years. When I started for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 ALCS, I was the first rookie to do so in ten years.[44]

More importantly, Wakefield is the sort of player George Will was talking about in his overidealized book-length essay Men at Work, one who really is a man at work. There is… well, I was going to write there’s little star-time ego about him, but in fact there seems to be no star-time ego at all about him. He comes to the ballpark not full of prime-time flash like Jose Canseco did, not wearing the ostentatious earring like Barry Bonds does, or with the panhandle-sized chip on his shoulder as Roger Clemens still seems to do (the Rocket still wants everyone to know they climb when he walks, by God).

Tim Wakefield comes almost the way a man would come to a factory, not plodding but not strutting, just walking steady, with his shirt tucked in all the way around, his belt buckled neatly in front, his hair (what’s left of it) trimmed close, his time card in his hand. You almost expect to see him deposit his lunch pail on the bench before going out to the mound.

He is the egoless workhorse[45] who signed with Boston in 1995, after being let go by the Pirates, and promptly won sixteen straight for the Sox. He gave them innings, innings, innings… including one harrowing stint as the club’s closer. (He was successful in the role— as he has been in almost all of his roles—but he was also almost impossible to watch.) He became a free agent in November of 2000 and re-signed with Boston a month later, taking a $1.5 million pay cut to stay with the big club (following his heroics in the 2003 postseason, when he came within five outs of being named the League Championship Series MVP, his salary went back to where it had been in 2002). Since then he has again given the big club innings and more innings, keeping his mouth shut while he does it.

Now, after various stints in long relief and that one scary two- or three-week turn as the closer a couple of years ago, Wake is back where he belongs, starting games for the team of which he is the longest- standing member. He’s run his ’04 record to a respectable 11-7, seems to be rounding into stretch-drive form, and if he doesn’t garner the sort of fan adulation the Pedro Martinezes and Curt Schillings receive (not too many people come to the ballpark with 49 WAKEFIELD on their backs), that’s probably to be expected. Working joes—guys who keep their heads down and their mouths shut, guys who just do the job—rarely do. In fact, some guy once quipped, “No great thing was ever done by a man named Tim.” Our Tim could prove himself the exception to that rule.

August 31st

My wife’s gone to see her parents for the night and she even took the dog ’cause I’m going to Boston, so I feel it’s perfectly okay to give a yell of triumph when the Sox close out the month at 10:07 P.M. with their twenty-first win and their seventh straight, beating the Angels 10–7. The end of this one wasn’t pretty, with Sox reliever Mike Myers giving up four straight hits—the last a grand slam by a late-game sub—but in the end we prevail (tonight the Sox can be we), and even if Anaheim should get up off the mat and take the next two, they’d still leave trailing in the wild-card race.

And what puts the icing on the cake, the absolute perfect cherry on the banana split? The Yankees lost. Oh, wait—did I say lost? With a final score of 22–0, I think it would be fair to say that Cleveland administered a pants-down butt-whuppin’. Pricey midseason acquisition Esteban Loaiza gave up not one but two three-run homers in the ninth inning. The question, of course, is where the Yankees go from here. When the Houston Astros no-hit them by committee a year ago, it served as a wake-up call… but that was earlier in the season, before their bullpen had taken such a severe pounding (Yankee starters have recorded just one win in the team’s last sixteen victories). Baseball has seen plenty of amazing late-season chokes; this could be the beginning of yet another.

But the Red Sox players would undoubtedly say they can do nothing about the Yankees. They have thirty-two more games of their own to play, and the next eight are going to be very tough. I hope to be at Fenway for as many of them as I can.

September/October HANGIN’ TOUGH

September 1st

SK: “The Yanks have a cake schedule the rest of the way…” And they start off by getting beat by Cleveland, 22–0. That’s some cake.

SO: There ain’t no steroids in humble pie (and that was a BIG pie).

I haven’t been to Fenway since this terrific Red Sox run began (eight in a row now; 21-7 for the month of August), and I’m astonished by how radically the atmosphere of the old park has changed. The glums and