Faithful (44 page)

The Sox are up 4–0 as the game rolls into the ninth, and I find I can’t sit down. As Foulke comes in, I’m muttering the lyrics to his Fenway entrance music, Danzig’s “Mother” (“And if you want to find Hell with me, I can show you what it’s like”). He gets Edgar Renteria, then has Larry Walker 0-2 when he just lays a fastball in there, and Walker golfs it out. I watch Johnny turn and watch it, then I’m out of the room, swearing and pacing through the house. It’s okay, we’ve got a three-run lead and there’s no one on. Foulkie just has to go after hitters and not walk anybody. Pujols gets behind and jaws at the ump after a borderline call, then skies one deep to left (oh crap) that Manny settles under (whew)—that’s two. Scott Rolen, 0 for the series, is taking, gets behind, then inexplicably takes the 1-2 pitch, which, while slightly in, is clearly a strike, and the ump punches him out to end the game. We’re up 3–0 and I’m jumping around the room.

Petey came through so big, and Manny, and Billy Mueller hitting with two down. We’re a game away. I’ve been a strike away before, so I’m already trying to play it down, but, damn, I didn’t expect us to ever be up 3–0 on the Cards. The idea of winning it all sends me romping through the house, bellowing the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie,” even though I don’t know all the words: “Up from third base to Hun-ting-ton, they’d sing another vic-t’ry sooooooong—two, three, four!”

Boston has now won seven in a row (tying a postseason record), pushing the Cards to the brink where the Red Sox themselves stood only a week ago. The most amazing thing about the World Series part of the Red Sox run is that the Cardinals have yet to lead in a single game. Their manager, Tony La Russa, certainly knows this, and while his part of the postgame news conference seemed long to me, it must have seemed interminable to him. He looked more like a middle-level racketeer being questioned in front of a grand jury than a successful baseball manager. Part of the reason for La Russa’s long face may have had to do with the game’s key play, which came in the third inning, when Cardinals base runner (and starting pitcher) Jeff Suppan was thrown out at third.

Suppan led off the inning with a slow roller to third. Mueller handled it cleanly, but not in time to get Suppan at first. Edgar Renteria followed with a double to right that had Trot Nixon falling on his ass because of the wet conditions in the outfield.
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Suppan probably could have scored right there, tying the game, but perhaps he was held up by the third-base coach. (We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, anyway.) So with runners at second and third and nobody out, up came Larry Walker, a gent who is absolutely no slouch with the stick. He hit a ground ball to Mark Bellhorn.

At that point the Boston infield was playing back, conceding Suppan’s run, which would have tied the score, 1–1. But Suppan didn’t score when Walker made contact, nor did he when Bellhorn threw Walker out.Instead he broke toward home, broke back toward third base, then broke toward home a
second
time. Meanwhile, Boston’s new kid on the block at first base, David Ortiz, in the lineup because the designated hitter doesn’t exist in National League parks, was observing all this. From Ortiz’s side of the diamond, Suppan must have looked as frantic and disoriented as a bird trapped in a garage. He fired across the diamond to Bill Mueller just as Suppan darted back toward third base a second time. Suppan dove for the bag, but Mueller was able to put the tag on him easily.

The result of this beer-league baserunning was that instead of tying the score against one of the American League’s craftiest power pitchers with only one out, the Cardinals found themselves with two outs and no runs scored. Albert Pujols followed Walker, grounding out harmlessly to end the inning. The Cards would not score until the bottom of the ninth, and by then it was too late. The irony (La Russa’s long postgame face suggested he did not need this pointed out to him) was that the National League team had been screwed by the very rules that were supposed to tip the scales in their favor. It was
their
pitcher who made the baserunning blunder, and
our
erstwhile designated hitter who saw it happening and gunned him down.

Although Boston got a pair of insurance runs in the fifth, more two-out thunder from Manny Ramirez in the first
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and Bill Mueller (batted home by Trot Nixon) in the fourth were all the run support Pedro Martinez needed; he, Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke spun a gem. Following Edgar Renteria’s double in the third inning, Red Sox pitching retired eighteen Cards in a row. Larry Walker broke up the string with one out in the ninth, turning around a Keith Foulke fastball to deep left center for a home run.

So now the St. Louis deficit is 0-3. One would like to say that lightning cannot strike twice on the same patch of ground, and certainly not so soon, but in truth, one
cannot
say that. Especially not if one happens to have been a Red Sox fan for the last fifty years and has had the cup snatched away from his lips so many times just before that first deep and satisfying drink.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of the limitations of this narrative’s necessary diary form until today. You sitting there with the finished book in your hand are like an astronaut who can see the entire shape of the earth: where every sea ends and every coastline begins again. I just go sailing along from day to day, hoping to avoid the storms and writing in this log when seas are calm. And now I think I can smell land up ahead. I hope I’m not jinxing things by saying that, but I really think I can. Not just any land, either, but the sweet Promised Land I’ve been dreaming of ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap and stuck it on my head in the summer of 1954. “There, Stevie,” he said, blowing the scent of Narragansett beer into the face of the big-eyed seven-year-old looking up at him. “They ain’t much, but they’re the best we got.”

Now, fifty long years later, they’re on the verge of being the best of all. One more game and we can put all this curse stuff, all this Babe stuff, all this 1918 stuff, behind us.

Please, baseball gods, just one more game.

It’s Trudy’s and my twentieth anniversary today. We were supposed to be in Chicago last weekend, eating at Charlie Trotter’s and the Billy Goat Tavern (the honest-to-God home of the Cubs’ curse as well as the chee-burger, chee-burger skit from
SNL
), but those plans dissolved in the face of Games 1 and 2. Tonight, at Trudy’s insistence, I call and cancel our long-standing dinner reservations at the best restaurant in town. I don’t tell the maitre d’ why. “Enjoy the game,” he says.

Signs and portents everywhere. Tonight’s the eighteenth anniversary of our last World Series loss—Game 7 to the ’86 Mets. Not only is there a full moon, but right around game time there’s a total lunar eclipse. By the time I go outside to see the lip of the earth’s shadow cross the Sea of Tranquility, Johnny has us up 1–0 with a leadoff home run. Later, when Trot doubles on a bases-juiced 3-0 green light to give us a 3–0 lead, the eclipse is well under way, casting a decidedly red stain—blood on the moon, or is it a cosmic nod to the Sox?

For the third game in a row, Lowe pitches brilliantly, giving up just three hits in seven innings. Arroyo looks shaky in the eighth, but Embree relieves him and is perfect for the second straight outing. As Foulke closes, I’m standing behind the couch, shifting with every pitch as if I’m guarding the line. At this point, for no other reason it seems than to torture us, Fox decides to show a montage combining all the horrible moments in Red Sox postseason history, beginning with Enos Slaughter, moving through Bucky Dent and Buckner, and finishing with Aaron Boone. I hold a hand up to block it out (to eclipse it!). At this moment in Red Sox history, I do
not
want to see that shit. It’s not bad luck, it’s bad
taste,
and whoever thought it was appropriate is a jerk.

With one down, Pujols singles through Foulke’s legs, right through the five-hole, a ball Foulke, a diehard hockey fan, should have at least gotten a pad on. We’re nervous—another runner and they’ll bring the tying run to the plate—but Foulke’s cool. He’s got that bitter disdain—that nastiness, really—of a great closer. He easily strikes out Edmonds (now 1 for 15), then snags Edgar Renteria’s comebacker and flips to Mientkiewicz, and that’s it, it’s that simple: the Red Sox have won the World Series!

While we’re still hugging and pounding each other (Trudy’s crying, she can’t help it; Steph’s laughing; I’m just going: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”) Caitlin calls from Boston. In the background, girls are shrieking. She’s at Nickerson Field, formerly Braves Field, where B.U. is showing the game on a big screen. I can barely hear her for the noise. “They did it!” she yells. “They did!” I yell back. There’s no analysis, just a visceral appreciation of the win. I tell her to stay out of the riots, meaning keep away from Fenway, and she assures me she will. It’s not until I get off the phone with her that I realize the weird parallel: when I was a freshman there, my team won the World Series too.

It’s more than just a win; it’s a statement. By winning tonight, we broke the record for consecutive playoff wins, with eight straight. Another stat that every commentator unpacks is that we’re one of only four championship teams to have never trailed in the Series.
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Thanks to Johnny, O.C., Manny and Papi, we scored in the first inning of every game, and our starters, with the exception of Wake, shut down St. Louis’s big sticks. Schill, Petey and D-Lowe combined for 20 shutout innings. Much respect to pitching coach Dave Wallace and his scouts for coming up with a game plan to stop the Cards. As a team, they batted .190, well below the Mendoza Line. Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds went 1 for 30, that one hit being a gimme bunt single by Edmonds against a shifted infield. Albert Pujols had zero RBIs. Reggie Sanders went 0 for 9. It’s not that we crushed the ball. We scored only four runs in Game 3 and three in Game 4. Essentially, after the Game 1 slugfest, we played NL ball, beating them with pitching, and in the last two games our defense was flawless. In finally putting the supposed Curse to rest, we dotted every
i
and crossed every
t
. And to make it all even sweeter, the last out was made by Edgar Renteria, who wears—as a couple of folks noted—the Babe’s famous #3.

It came down to this: with two outs in the St. Louis half of the ninth and Keith Foulke on the mound—Foulke, the nearly sublime Red Sox closer this postseason—only Edgar Renteria stood between Boston and the end of its World Series drought. Renteria hit a comebacker to the mound. “Stabbed by Foulke!” crowed longtime Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione. “He underhands to first! The Red Sox are World Champions!
Can you believe it?
”

I hardly could, and I wasn’t the only one. A hundred miles away, my son woke up
his
five-year-old son to see the end. When it was over and the RedSox were mobbing each other on the infield, Ethan asked his father, “Is this a dream or are we living real life?”

The answer, it seems to me this morning, is both. The only newspaper available at the general store was the local one (the others were held up because of the lateness of the game), and the
Sun-Journal
’s huge front-page headline, of a size usually reserved only for the outbreak of war or the sudden death of a president, was only two words and an exclamation mark:

AT LAST!

When the other New England papers finally do arrive in my sleepy little pocket of New England, I’m confident they will bear similar happy headlines of a similar size on their front pages.

A game summary would be thin stuff indeed compared to this out-pouring of joy on a beautiful blue and gold New England morning in late October.
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Usually when I go to get the papers and my 8 A.M. doughnut, the little store up the road is almost empty. This morning it was jammed, mostly with people waiting for those newspapers to come in. The majority were wearing Red Sox hats, and the latest political news was the last thing on their minds. They wanted to talk about last night’s game. They wanted to talk about the Series as a whole. They wanted to talk about the guts of Curt Schilling, pitching on his hurt ankle, and the grit of Mr. Lowe, who was supposed to spend the postseason in the bullpen and ended up securing a magickal and historickal place for himself in the record books instead, as the winner in all three postseason clinchers: Game 3 of the Division Series, Game 7 of the League Championship Series, and now Game 4 of the World Series. And while none of those waiting for the big-time morning papers—the Boston
Globe, USA Today,
and the
New York Times
—came right out and asked my grandson’s question, I could see it in their eyes, and I know they could see it in mine:
Is this a dream, or are we living real life?

It’s real life. If there was a curse (other than a sportswriter’s brilliant MacGuffin for selling books, amplified in the media echo chamber until even otherwise rational people started to half-believe it), it was the undeniable fact that the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918, and all the baggage that fact brought with it for the team’s long-suffering fans.

The Yankees and
their
fans have always been the heaviest of that baggage, of course. Yankee rooters were never shy about reminding Red Sox partisans that they were supporting lifetime losers. There was also the undeniable fact that in recent years the Yankee ownership—comfy and complacent in their much bigger ballpark and camped just downstream from a waterfall of fan cash—had been able to outspend the Red Sox ownership, sometimes at a rate of two dollars to one. There was the constant patronization of the New York press (the
Times,
for instance, chuckling in its indulgently intelligent way over the A-Rod deal, and concluding that the Yankees were still showing the Red Sox how to win, even in the off-season), the jokes and the gibes.

The ball through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986 was horrible, of course, but now Buckner can be forgiven.

What’s better is that now the Bucky Dent home run, the Aaron Boone home run and the monotonous chants of
Who’s your Daddy?
can be forgotten. Laughed off, even. On the whole, I would have to say that while to forgive is human, to forget is freakin’
divine
.

And winning is better than losing. That’s easy to lose sight of, if you’ve never done it. I can remember my younger son saying—and there was some truth in this—that when the Philadelphia Phillies finally won their World Championship after years of trying, they became “just another baseball team.” When I asked Owen if he could live with that as a Red Sox fan, he didn’t even hesitate. “Sure,” he said.

I feel the same way. No one likes to root for a loser, year after year; being faithful does not save one from feeling, after a while, like a fool, the butt of everyone’s joke. At last I don’t feel that way. This morning’s sense of splendid unreality will surely rub away, but the feeling of lightness that comes with finally shedding a burden that has been carried far too long will linger for months or maybe even years. Cubs fans now must bear the loser legacy all by themselves. They have their Curse of the Billy Goat, and although I am sure it is equally bogus,
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they are welcome to it.

Bottom of the ninth, two out, Albert Pujols on second, Red Sox Nation holding its breath. Foulke pitches. Renteria hits an easy comebacker to the mound. Foulke fields it and tosses it to Mientkiewicz, playing first. Mientkiewicz jumps in the air, holding up the index finger of his right hand, signaling
We’re number one.
Red Sox players mob the field while stunned and disappointed Cardinal fans look on. Some of the little kids are crying, and I feel bad about that, but back in New England little kids of all ages are jumping for joy.

“Can you believe it?”
Joe Castiglione exults, and eighty-six years of disappointment fall away in the length of time it takes the first-base ump to hoist his thumb in the
out
sign.

This is not a dream.

We are living real life.

While the Babe may be resting easier, I barely sleep, and wake exhausted, only to watch the same highlights again and again, seeing things I missed while we were celebrating. As the Sox mob each other, in the background Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore are kissing, shooting their fairy-tale ending to
Fever Pitch
(nice timing, Farrellys!).
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In short center, right behind second base, Curtis Leskanic lies down and makes the natural grass equivalent of a Patriots snow angel. The crawl says RED SOX WIN WORLD SERIES, and I think, yes, yes they did.

It did happen. It was no dream. We’re the World Champions, finally, and there’s that freeing sense of redemption and fulfillment I expected—the same cleansing feeling I had after the Pats’ first Super Bowl win. The day is bright and blue, the leaves are brilliant and blowing. It’s a beautiful day in the Nation, maybe the best ever.

And yet, the season’s over, too. There will be no more baseball this year, and while I’ve said I wouldn’t mind eating my tickets to Games 6 and 7, it feels wrong that I won’t be back in Fenway again until April.

Just for fun, I go to the website (choked with new World Champions merchandise) and poke around, looking for spring training information. There’s a number for City of Palms Park, but when I call it, it’s busy. It’s going to be crazy there next year. If I want to get in, I’d better start working on it now. I flip the pages of our 2005 calendar to February and March and wonder when Trudy’s school has its break. I wonder if there’s a nicer hotel closer to City of Palms Park, and whether they’d have any rooms left at this point.

I have to stop myself. Okay, calm down. There’s no need to hustle now, the very morning after. I can take a day off and appreciate what we’ve done—what they’ve done, the players, because as much as we support them, they’re the ones out there who have to field shots we’d never get to, and hit pitches that would make us look silly, and beat throws that would have us by miles. And the coaches and the manager, the owners and the general manager, who have to make decisions we’ll never take any heat for. They did it, all of them together, our Red Sox.

Congratulations, guys. And thank you. You believed in yourselves even more than we did. That’s why you’re World Champions, and why we’ll never forget you or this season. Wherever you go, any of you, you’ll always have a home here, in the heart of the Nation.

Go Sox!