his wingspan, might snag that errant toss by Mr. Schill). Is Curt’s ankle okay? When he grabbed for it after that play, I thought, “Oh man, there’s our season.”
SK: Schilling will bull through. He’s the kind of guy who’s gonna think, “I got all winter to heal this ankle up.” And now… with any luck… we won’t need him until the ALCS. I knocked wood when I said it, and the Twins are just three outs away. Accourse against the Yankees that means nada.
SO: That’s a final: Twins 2–0 over the Yanks. Looks like the Santana gambit’s working… so far.
SK: Hopefully the trend of the last few years, where the eventual winners lose the first (or first and second) game, will be reversed. God knows it’s time for a statistical correction in that matter.
SO: I hear the Yanks will start Kevin Brown in Game 3. So they had better win tomorrow night.
October 6th
They do, though it’s as fishy as Jonah’s old clothes—to my nose. The Twins are leading by one in the bottom of the twelfth with one out and closer Joe Nathan toiling through his unheard-of third inning of work. Nathan throws ten straight balls to put men on first and second, then grooves one to A-Rod. It’s hit deep to the left-center gap, and the whole Yankee dugout leaps up—except A-Rod’s missed it, and the ball barely makes the track (so why leap up when you’ve seen hundreds of flies to the track there and never moved an inch before?). Left fielder Shannon Stewart, playing back so nothing can get through, should have a bead on it but is uncharacteristically slow getting over and then doesn’t even make an attempt. It hits the track, and should win the game anyway, but bounces over the wall for a ground rule double, meaning the trail runner, Jeter, has to go back to third. So with a tie game and one out, Matsui steps in. He’s not patient, and ends up hitting a soft liner to right. Jacque Jones is playing in to cut down the run at the plate, and right field in Yankee Stadium is the smallest in all of baseball. Jones, with a decent if not spectacular arm, should have an excellent shot at getting Jeter. It’s a situation an outfielder dreams of: there’s no other play, no contingency. It can’t be more than 180 feet, and he’s got time to make sure he gets it there in the air so his catcher doesn’t have to deal with a hop. As long as he’s not way off-line to the first-base side, he should have Jeter by five steps, easy.
Instead, he
SO: Man,
SK: Say it ain’t so, Stew! Next you’ll be telling me Jacque Jones was on the grassy knoll.
October 7th
The stuff between my ears feels more like peanut butter than brains this morning, and with good reason; the Red Sox–Angels contest that started last night at 10 P.M. East Coast time didn’t go final until five to two in the morning. That’s just shy of a four-hour baseball game. A
Part of the reason is national TV coverage—the breaks between half-innings are longer to allow for a few more of those all-important beer commercials—but in truth that isn’t the largest part. I’ll bet you could count the number of postseason games under three hours during the last seven years on the fingers of your hands, not because of the extra ads but because the style of baseball changes radically once the regular season is over. It becomes more about the pitching, because most managers believe the aphorism which states that in seven games out of every ten, good pitching will beat good hitting.[67] Games about the pitching become games about the defense. And games about defense and pitching in the field often become, for the offense, games about what is now called by the needlessly deprecating name of “smallball.” Few twenty-first century baseball teams are good at smallball, and their efforts to bunt the runner over are often painful to watch (although Doug Mientkiewicz of the Soxput down a beauty in Game 1, and it resulted in a run), but smallball certainly does burn up the hours. I bet they sold a sea of beer in Anaheim last night, and the hopeful fans had plenty of time to twirl their Rally Monkeys and beat their annoying Thunder Sticks, but in the end neither the monkeys or the sticks did any good. The Angels must now come to our park down 0-2, and their fans have only this consolation: for them, the game was over before 11 P.M., and they won’t have to spend much of this lovely fall day feeling like what Ed Sanders of the Fugs so memorably called “homemade shit.”
Pedro Martinez got the win in last night’s/this morning’s game, leaving with a 4–3 lead after seven innings, mostly thanks to a two-run Jason Varitek dinger and a scratch run provided by Johnny Damon. The invaluable Damon stole second after reaching on a fielder’s choice, took third when loser Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez (who bears a weird resemblance to movieland’s Napoleon Dynamite) uncorked a wild pitch, then scored on a Manny Ramirez sac fly. It turned out to be the winning run, because a relay of Boston relievers—Timlin to Myers, Myers to Foulke—were lights-out.
My reward for staying up long past my usual bedtime was watching Orlando Cabrera make the Angels pay for disrespecting him. With two on and two out in the top of the ninth, Brendan Donnelly, the final Angels pitcher of the night, walked Jason Varitek, loading the bases in order to get to Cabrera, who came to the Red Sox touted not only as a Gold Glove but as a “doubles machine.” He cranked one of those to left-center in the wee hours of the morning, taking third on a throw home that didn’t come close to nailing Varitek.
And essentially, that was your ball game. Foulke ended it by striking out Curtis Pride approximately one hour after the Yankees came up off the mat to put Minnesota away in the twelfth, and now the Red Sox come back to Fenway, hoping to hear “Dirty Water” tomorrow night.
And finally, from our Department of the Late Night Surreal, we have Angels manager Mike Scioscia, on the umpiring in last night’s game (by Jerry “I Ain’t Missed Many” Meals):
“I think as far as the strike zone, you know, if you are a good team, if you are a good team, you, is that my throat or is it a thing, I know I am hoarse, but you know, when you go through a…if you are ateam and you are a good team, then you absorb things like maybe a break bad, a line drive and doesn’t fall in or an umpire strike zone.”
Thus spake Zarathustra.
SO: You said exactly what I’m feeling today. I’m getting too old to be staying up that late. Let’s hope that’s the last time we’ll have to (barring a Dodger resurgence, which I’d accept).
October 8th
It’s a brilliant day and the leaves are turning along the Mass Pike, a New England idyll worthy of a coffee- table book. It doesn’t hurt that we’re up two games to none and I’ve got tickets to Game 3. It would be our first playoff clincher at home since ’86 against these same Angels, and our first sweep since taking the A’s in the ’75 ALCS. Both years are good omens, and the fact that we have Bronson Arroyo going is even more comforting. In his last nine starts we’re 9-0.
