Faithful

“I’ll see you for the Series,” I say.

“I hope so,” he says.

“I know so,” I say, full of false bravado. “Right here, baby.”

October 19th/ALCS Game 5

It probably wasn’t the greatest game in postseason history—I’d still pick Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, the one where Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk waved his extra-inning walk-off home run fair, for that honor— but it was almost certainly the greatest game to be played since the major leagues went to the League Championship format. At five hours forty-nine minutes it was the longest, and the teams who engaged in the struggle were surely the most evenly matched. When it ended, the Red Sox had scored one more run (five to the Yankees’ four) and managed one more hit (thirteen to the Yankees’ twelve). Each team used seven pitchers, and each committed a single error. The game, which began in broad daylight at 5:20 in the afternoon, ended just an hour shy of midnight, in the bottom of the fourteenth. I have never been so simultaneously drained and exalted at the conclusion of a sporting event; would have believed, prior to last night, the two states of emotional being were mutually exclusive.

According to this morning’s box score, there were 35,120 in attendance, but if the Red Sox pull off the ultimate miracle of St. Fenway and go on to the World Series—unlikely, especially with the ALCS now returning to Yankee Stadium,[77] but no longer wildly improbable—ten years from now there’ll be a million New Englanders, most of them from Massachusetts, telling their children, grandchildren, bar buddies and anyone else who will listen that they were there on the night the Sox beat the Yanks in fourteen.

Both managers used up almost every damned reliever they had once the starters (Martinez for Boston, Mussina for New York) were gone. Boston finished up with Tim Wakefield, the goat in last year’s ALCS Game 7 (the Boone home run), the hero last night… in spite of Jason Varitek’s miseries with the knuckleball behind the plate. The Yankees finished with Esteban Loaiza, who barely made the New York playoff roster. Loaiza, nothing short of horrible for the Yankees during the regular season, was terrific last night until the fourteenth… and even then he did not beat himself. David Ortiz, who has pretty much carried the Red Sox offensively this postseason, beat Loaiza and necessitated Game 6; if the Yankees win the ALCS and then lose the World Series, it may be Ortiz who they will blame.

Mark Bellhorn led the bottom of the fourteenth doing what he has, unfortunately, done best offensively for his team in the postseason: he struck out. Then Johnny Damon, who had a good ALDS and is having a hideous ALCS (in his previous at-bat, he popped out weakly to Jorge Posada while trying to bunt, effectively killing what might have been a game-winning rally in the eleventh), worked Loaiza for a walk. Cabrera struck out. Manny Ramirez coaxed a second walk from Loaiza, and that set the stage for Papi.

Ortiz, who won Game 3 against the Angels with a walk-off home run and beat the Yankees in the twelfth the same way two nights ago, has been little short of Jacksonian this October (that would be Reggie, not Andrew). All he did last night was get the first RBI of the game, scoring Cabrera with a single, and then plated the second run himself (bases-loaded walk to Varitek). In the eighth, he struck a solo home run to left-center, meaning that of the four runs Boston scored in the first nine innings, Ortiz was involved in three.

What I remember most clearly about his last at-bat are the fans to the right of the backstop as I looked toward home plate. They were leaning over the low railing and pounding on the padded face of the backstop, screaming for a hit. Everyone in the park was on their feet. The kids in front of me were wearing their hats on backwards, and turned inside-out for good measure. For the first time since I’ve known him, Stewart O’Nan turned his hat around backwards and inside-out. I don’t do that; for me, the rally-cap thing has never worked. I took mine off instead and held it with the bowl up to the sky, shaking it in that ancient rainmaking gesture. Two guys in the row behind me started doing the same thing.

Ortiz put on an incredible ten-pitch at-bat. Loaiza must have made a couple of bad pitches in there, because the count eventually ran to 2-2, but I barely remember them. What I remember are those people to the right of the backstop, leaning over and pounding, pounding, pounding on the green. What I remember is Stew in his rally cap, looking weirdly like someLe Mans race-car driver from 1937. What I remember is thirty-five thousand people screaming and screaming under the lights as Big Papi fouled off pitch after pitch, one to the backstop, one to the glass of the .406 Club, one up the left-field foul line, one screaming down the right-field line, just on the wrong side of the Pesky Pole.

Finally, on the tenth pitch of the at-bat, he hit one fair. The sound of the bat was spongy rather than sharp, not the authoritative crack of good wood, but Ortiz still got all of his broad back into it. The ball flew between Derek Jeter and Miguel Cairo, and well out of reach of either man. Damon was off and running at contact, and the mob was waiting for him at home plate.

“I thought I was gonna be the first one to get to [Ortiz],” Doug Mientkiewicz is quoted as saying in today’s paper, “but Johnny Damon’s hair was already in my face.”

So tonight Father Curt Schilling will get what he probably never thought he would: a second chance to shut up those fifty thousand Yankee fans. He’s got a special boot, they tell us, and several million faithful Red Sox fans—in New England and scattered all across the country—will be praying for that boot. Not to mention the ankle inside it.

The big chant last night was Gary Sheffield’s “Who’s your deal-er?”

The big pitch was Pedro going up and in and putting Matsui—who’s been lunging across the plate all series and hitting .500—on his big Ultra-man ass.

The big run—besides the game-winner—was pinch runner Dave Roberts (once again) scoring on a sac fly to tie the game in the eighth.

The big hit could have easily been Tony Clark’s. In the ninth, with the score tied at 4, two out, and Ruben Sierra on first, he fought off Keith Foulke with two strikes and laced a ball down the right-field line. It hopped off the track, struck the top of the low wall along the corner and popped almost straight up, into the very first row of the stands, for a ground rule double. Sierra, who would have scored easily, had to go back to third, giving Foulke one more chance to work out of the jam, which he did, getting number nine hitter Miguel Cairo on a pop-up. So the Yanks lost this one, literally, by an inch. It’s the kind of break—like El Jefe’s humpback single—we never get, and the kind of break the Yankees always seem to, and I gotta say, it feels good.

And the big stats: our pen threw eight scoreless, and the Yanks left 18 on base. So don’t feel too bad for them, they had every chance to win.

Driving home late this rainy morning, I flash on a usually blank Mass Pike message board on an overpass just before the tollbooths at Newton. There, for every westbound traveler to appreciate, including the several hundred New York fans who’d hoped to drink champagne in our ballpark, instead of a construction or accident report, is a simple message, easily decipherable by our would-be alien invaders:

RED SOX 5

YANKEES 4

No team in major league history has ever come back from an 0-3 hole to win a postseason series (no team in an 0-3 hole has even forced a Game 7), but it’s been done twice in the NHL. The last time it was done, it was done to my team. I was a Pittsburgh Penguins fan in 1975 (I’m still a Penguins fan, dammit) when the New York Islanders came roaring back from 0-3 to shame us, winning by the slimmest of margins game after game, several of those in overtime. I was at Game 6 at the Civic Arena, and there was a dispiriting sense in the crowd that we were doomed to lose even though we had a 3-2 lead in games and were playing the last two on home ice. It was like a nightmare, knowing the horrible thing was going to happen but being powerless to stop it. Once we’d lost Game 6, there was hardly any point in playing Game 7, and everyone knew it. We were cooked, broken, useless. We barely showed up, and the Isles push-broomed us into the dustbin of history. Now, granted, the New York Yankees aren’t the Pittsburgh Penguins, but I must say that these Red Sox are as hungry as those young Islanders—a team, you might remember, that matured and went on to win four straight