Faithful

October 15th/ALCS Game 3

Stewart and I meet for dinner before the game, and although he agrees to split a BLT pizza on honey wheat crust, he expresses strong doubts about a pizza that comes with a topping of mayonnaise-dressed lettuce. Still, he eats his share. I guess that after some fifty games at Fenway between us, we’ve had our fill of hot dogs. As we munch, we talk about—what else?—baseball. Of that we have not had our fill. Specifically we discuss which team will be most apt to benefit from a rainout, which seems likely; the Massachusetts weather on this October evening is pretty awful.

We agree, reluctantly, that the Yankees would probably be better served by an extra day of rest, because they could bring Mussina back sooner. The stars seem to be aligning themselves, and the horoscope doesn’t look favorable if you happen to be a Sox fan.

When we walk into California Pizza at 5:45 P.M., a light mist is hanging in the air. When we walk back out again at 6:45, the mist has thickened to a drizzle. By the time we’ve raised our arms to be frisked and have given our game bags over for examination outside Fenway Park’s Gate D (it’s just how things are done in twenty-first-century America, where the citizenry now live on Osama Mean Time), the drizzle has become a light rain.

Before clearing around midnight, the forecast calls for heavy downpours accompanied by strong winds. During the regular season, the fate of the game would be in the hands of the Red Sox up until the instant play started, and with the umps thereafter. In postseason, however, these contests are in the hands of Major League Baseball, an organization that seems to care a great deal more about TV revenue (witness the 8 P.M. starts, which ace out millions of little kids who have to get up for school on weekdays) than they do the fans, the players or the game itself. Last night, in the Houston–St. Louis game, play went on through a steady downpour. Base hits spun up wheels of water as they rolled into the outfield. I don’t mind getting wet, but I really don’t want to see Manny Ramirez, Trot Nixon or Bernie Williams leave his career on the outfield grass of Fenway Park.

I don’t have to worry about that for long. An usher I know is leaning nonchalantly against the counter of the Legal Seafood kiosk, chattering away into his walkie-talkie, as Stew and I walk by. He drops it into the pocket of his yellow rain-slicker and waves us over. “Go on home, you guys,” he says. “Game’s gonna be called at seven thirty.”

I ask him if he’s sure. He says he is.

We hang in a little while, anyway—long enough to soak up the rainy atmosphere of Fenway Park (soak it up, geddit?), where the game still hasn’t been officially called. The tarp remains on the infield at 7:58 P.M., however, and that pretty much tells the tale. The news and TV guys arehuddled under canvas mini-pavilions, reduced to taking pictures of and doing interviews with each other. Peter Gammons comes bopping busily along, looking like some strange but amiable human crow in his black trousers and long black raincoat. Stewart and I pass a few words with him, mostly about the possibility of Father Curt pitching again this year (unlikely but not impossible, given Schilling’s fierce competitive drive), and then we leave. I am actually back in my hotel room, drying my hair, before Major League Baseball can finally bring itself to unloose its clenched and rain-puckered fingers enough to let this one go.

October 16th

I open the curtains at 8 A.M. on cloudless blue skies. Tonight the Yankees and Red Sox will play baseball.

I’m bringing the whole famn damily to this one, so I have to buy tickets from a broker, and end up paying through the nose so we can watch what turns out to be the worst game of the year, maybe of my life—worse even than Mr. Lowe’s rainy debacle at Yankee Stadium. It’s fifty degrees, but the wind is gusting up to 40 mph, and we’re sitting in the very last row of the grandstand. Gales blow through the wire fence, around the mercifully insulating standing-room crowds at our backs and into our collars. Caitlin’s shivering, so I break down and sign up for a credit card just to get a free MLB blanket.

Bronson’s got nothing, but Kevin Brown’s equally ineffective. “Kev-in,” we chant. Jeter makes an error that leads to a run, and it’s “Jeeeee-ter, Jeeeee-ter.” (He’s been terrible in the field, just as distracted as last year, fodder for critics who say A-Rod should play short; but Jeter doesn’t have the reactions or the gun for third, and probably won’t accept a demotion to second.) After Bronson we throw the dregs of our pen, as if the Coma is conceding the game—as if he’s okay with being down 0-3. Weird.

Matsui drives in five. After Sheffield powers out a steroid shot, the standing-room crowd disperses and the wind cuts through us. In Little League, there’s a ten-run mercy rule, but not here, and to save our real pen, Wake volunteers to soak up some innings, meaning Lowe will be starting tomorrow (far better, I think, considering how Wake has thrown this season). But instead of holding the Yanks so we can get back in the game, Wake lets a runner inherited from Leskanic score, then gives up five runs of his own, putting the game way out of reach. Embree looks bad, and then Francona leaves poor Mike Myers out there to face righties in the ninth, something that should never happen. Myers sucks it up and ultimately gets it done, but by then it’s 19–8.

It’s ugly, and humbling, but the worst thing that happens is that the Faithful (if these really are the Faithful) turn on Mark Bellhorn, booing him mercilessly when he makes an error that leads to a run, and then with each successive strikeout. It’s as if they don’t remember the Marky Mark who stepped up and kept us in first place through April and May. It’s wrong, and it pisses me off even more than the Yankees taking walks late in the game, or Matsui swinging for the fences with a ten-run lead.

October 17th

The Yankees played. The Sox got shelled.

I slouched into my hotel room well after midnight and jotted only a brief game-related note in my journal (Red Sox lost. Horrible) before falling into bed, where I got roughly six hours of shallow, dream-infested sleep.[74] I got up at 7 A.M. this morning, pulled on a pair of exercise shorts and my new Kevin Youkilis shirt (a gift from Stewart O’Nan, bless him) and went around to Au Bon Pain for orange juice and a croissant. I did not buy a Boston Globe in the hotel newsstand, and I certainly did not turn on SportsDesk when I got back to my room. I turned on the headline news program with the ticker across the bottom of the screen instead, and only long enough to confirm the final score of last night’s abortion. Then I shut the damned thing off and did my morning exercises for once without the benefit of media: no scores, no polls, no reports of suicide bombings in Baghdad.

19–8. That was the final score. Replace the hyphen with a 1 and you have the last year the Red Sox won the World Series. Maybe there’s a curse after all. Or a Curse, if you prefer. Until the third inning of this train wreck, there was actually some semblance of a game. After that, the Yankees simply piled it on. Jason Varitek had a good offensive night for the Red Sox; Hideki Matsui, unfortunately, had a sublime night for the Yankees, the kind of night baseball players dream about and have maybe once, and only then if they’re lucky.

19–8, and I’m sure that Dan Shaughnessy, Boston’s Number One Cursemonger, will make hay of that in today’s unread newspaper, but the fault, dear Brutus, has lain not in our stars but our stats—especially those of our mediocre relief corps, which this series against the Yankees has mercilessly exposed. Arroyo didn’t have much, but Arroyo can only be held responsible for the first half dozen runs or so (ow, it hurts to write that).