Faithful (28 page)

Let the juggling begin. Cabrera reports; to make room we send down Andy Dominique. Since we’ll see four lefties over the next five games, David Ortiz drops his appeal and begins serving his suspension for the bat-throwing incident in Anaheim. Millar’s at DH, McCarty at first and Kapler in right—or would be, except Johnny tells Francona during BP that he’s having trouble picking up the ball because of the afternoon sun further lightening the Metrodome’s translucent white roof. So Johnny is the least DH-like DH in Sox history, Kapler’s in center and Millar’s in right.

Cabrera’s batting third, which I think is a mistake, but in the first, in his first at-bat as a Red Sock, he takes Johan Santana deep. Then in the bottom of the inning he can’t handle a chop over Pedro’s head.

It’s a tight game, like last night’s. Kapler guns Corey Koskie at home, but Tek bobbles the throw and Koskie steamrolls him. Torii Hunter goes back to the wall and casually robs McCarty of a home run. The next inning, McCarty makes a diving stab of a Hunter shot down the line. Manny hits a solo blast to give us the lead again, but the Twins use smallball to scratch back even.

To lead off the seventh, Santana hits Tek. To get more pop in their lineup, Matthew LeCroy is catching instead of Blanco, and Tek steals on him. LeCroy wings the ball into center—Tek to third. Millar then hits a high, medium fly to right. Center fielder Torii Hunter races over to take it from Jones, since he’s got the better arm. He’s in position behind him, but somehow they don’t communicate, because Jones never yields. He takes it flatfooted and his throw is up the first-base line, and Tek scores standing up.

Pedro’s brilliant through seven, striking out 11. Santana goes eight, ringing up 12.

Though Pedro’s thrown only 101 pitches, Francona goes by the book, bringing in Timlin to set up. Timlin gives up back-to-back singles and doesn’t record an out. On Embree’s first batter, the young slugger Justin Morneau, the Twins pull a double steal. Morneau then skies one to deep right-center. It’ll tie the game, no doubt. Kapler has to go a long way to make the catch, then fires a no-look throw back toward the infield. It sails over the cutoff man, Bellhorn, and Cabrera runs over from second to corral it. He must look up to check the runner, or maybe he nonchalants it, figuring the play’s over, because the ball knocks off his glove, and he kicks it—literally kicks it—toward first base. On a real field, the grass stops the ball, but since we’re in the Homerdome, it rolls away across the carpet, and by the time Cabrera chases it down and throws home, Lew Ford’s sliding in safely, and we’re down 4–3. Welcome to the Red Sox.

Joe Nathan gives us an opening in the ninth, hitting Bellhorn, but we don’t bother to bunt him over (hey, why change now). Cabrera strikes out, lunging. Manny hits into an easy 6-4-3 turf job, and we lose a carbon copy of last night’s game, wasting another quality start.

On
The Simpsons
, Comic Book Guy—a true loser—has a Red Sox pennant hanging in his shop. I channel him now: worst weekend ever.

When I entered in this diary on July 2nd, we’d just been swept out of the Bronx and had fallen eight and a half games back in the AL East. Now, a month later, we’re nine and a half behind the Yankees, who continue on cruise control. The Yanks don’t have much in the way of pitching, but it doesn’t seem to matter; they simply whale the tar out of almost every team they go against. The Red Sox are one of the rare exceptions, but they can afford to ignore us, at least for the time being. Who knows, they may not have to worry about us even in October. For the first time this season one team—it’s the Oakland Athletics—seems to have a solid hold on the wild card.
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We’ve lost both of the games we’ve played since the big Garciaparra trade, but I actually don’t feel too badly about that, even though both were of the tooth-rattling one-run variety. For one thing, both of our new players contributed to the offensive effort (okay, okay, so Cabrera—who hit a home run in his first Red Sox at-bat—also cost us yesterday’s game with an error in the bottom of the eighth). For another, the Twins are very good this year, and I’d expect them to take two out of three in their house, just as I’d expect us to take two out of three from them in ours.

But now we finish the year’s longest road-trip playing teams that are either sub-.500 or close to .500, and here I agree with the conventional wisdom: this is probably the season’s last decisive turning-point, and I’ll be watching these games very, very closely. For the next two weeks it’s not going to do to just play .500 baseball on the road. I’m hoping we can win eight of the next dozen, and from now until the middle of the month, I suspect this diary will be hearing from me often.

Mark Bellhorn goes on the DL with a thumb fracture after taking that pitch on the hand, joining Pokey, meaning Francona has more platooning to do. The press is on him about the logjam at first. How is he going to keep all of his players happy? I may not have much confidence in Francona, but at least he has the right answer: “That’s not what we’re here to do.”

Last night Wake won on his birthday, a quiet indoor affair with less than 10,000 guests. For tonight’s game with the D-Rays Francona pencils in the most alien infield yet: Youk at third, Cabrera at short, Bill Mueller at second and Mientkiewicz at first. Dave Roberts starts in right for only the fourth time in his life, and leads off, followed by Cabrera and Johnny. The new speed lineup does nothing, but Tek hits a two-run shot and Bill Mueller knocks in three more from the six-spot. Schilling (a new guy himself, not so long ago) goes the distance, but the post-trade face of the Sox is just weird.

I didn’t know how brave I was, asking the Red Sox to win eight of their next twelve, until Jayme Parker (looking cool and beautiful this morning in off-the-shoulder black) tells me that the Sox haven’t won back-to-back road games since June. But they managed the trick last night, and now, instead of needing to win eight out of twelve, they only (
only!
) need to win six out of their next ten. That means playing .600 ball instead of .666, if you’re of a statistical bent.

Although I haven’t kept an exact count (“You could look it up,” I hear Ole Case whispering), I’d guess we’ve got in the neighborhood of fifty-five games left to play.
Eleven
of them are with the formerly hapless Devil Rays, and this makes me happy, because the D-Rays, after running off a gaudy string of wins (almost entirely against National League teams) before the All-Star break, seem to be subsiding into their former state of haplessness, and fast. Manager Lou Piniella rode his horses hard during the streak (“ran their dung to water,” my wife would say), and now they seem punchless and reeling. Tampa Bay management has done its part to destroy team morale by trading D-Rays’ ace and chief workhorse Victor Zambrano to the contending Mets. All of which makes me sorry for them, but not too sorry to take pleasure in Tim Wakefield’s win two nights ago and Curt Schilling’s complete-game victory last night. Not too sorry to hope that Bronson Arroyo can complete the sweep tonight, either, although I doubt the Rays will let that happen. They ain’t quite
that
hapless.

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.
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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.

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 of the sports year (football, basketball, hockey)? I think it goes back to the basic subtext of this book, that the Red Sox—like the Cubs—are the derelicts of major league baseball, ghost ships adrift and winless in the mythic horse latitudes of sports legend. That may sound sweet to the poets and to writers like John “lyric little bandbox” Updike,
[33]
but sportswriters want
winners,
sportswriters want their bylines under headlines like
SOX TAKE SERIES IN 6,
and this eighty-six-year dry spell just…makes…them…
FURIOUS
. They won’t admit it, not hardheaded Damon Runyon archetypes such as they, but underneath it all they’re hurt little boys who have been eating loserdust for much of their professional lives and they just…fucking…
HATE IT
. Can they take it out on management? On Theo Epstein and mild-mannered, bespectacled John Henry? They cannot. Those fellows do not put on uniforms and swing the lumber. Also—and more importantly—those fellows are responsible for who gets press-box credentials, field credentials, and who gets to belly up to the postgame buffet. So, by and large, management gets a pass.
[34]
Except, of course, for the poor unfortunate middle-management schmucks who fill out the lineup cards, guys like Terry Francona, Grady Little, Jimy (family so poor they could only afford a single ‘m’ in his first name) Williams, “Daddy” Butch Hobson, and “Tollway” Joe Morgan.

And Nomar. Him, too.

That selfish guy.

That downer.

That
liar
.

That guy who took the money, ran off to Chicago, and left the kids crying.

It’s all bullshit, of course, and in their ink-smudged hearts, the Knights of the Keyboard know it. But Boston sportswriters are for the most part mangy, distempered, sunstruck dogs that can do nothing but bite and bite and bite. In a way you can’t even blame them. They are as much at the mercy of the long losing streak as the fans who buy their tickets at the window or pony up for NESN on cable TV. Sooner or later—maybe even this year, I haven’t given up hope, even yet I am still faithful—the Sox will win it all, and this infected boil will burst. I think all of us will be happier when it does. Certainly we will be more rational.

Later, after a quiet 4–3 loss to the Tigers: