Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (37 page)

“Instead of marching around the block trying to restore order I put my flashlight down and clapped. My applause joined the ruckus they were making and for five minutes it didn’t stop. I applauded until my hands hurt. I was applauding the possibilities for the future.”

Dear Red Sox:

Any player who speaks Latin.

—REQUEST FOR A RED SOX PLAYER TO VISIT THE LATIN CLASS AT A MIDDLE SCHOOL IN NEWTON, MASS.

ON THE day after Christmas 2003, Gregory Miller, 38, of Foxboro, Mass., an enthusiastic sports fan, especially when it came to the Sox, dropped dead of an aneurysm. He left behind a wife, Sharon, six-year-old twin boys and an 18-month-old daughter. Sharon fell into unspeakable sadness and loneliness.

And then came October and the Red Sox.

Sharon, not much more than a casual fan before then, grew enthralled with the team’s playoff run. She called her mother, Carolyn Bailey, in Walpole, as many as 15 times during the course of a game to complain, exult, worry, commiserate and celebrate. She even made jokes.

“My eyes need toothpicks to stay open,” Sharon would say during the run of late games. “More Visine. I need more Visine.”

Carolyn laughed, and her heart leaped to see her daughter joyful again. She had not seen or heard her like this since Gregory died.

“It was the first time she started to smile and laugh again,” Carolyn says. “The Red Sox gave her something to look forward to every day. They became like part of the family.”

The day after the Red Sox won the World Series, Carolyn wrote a letter to the team. In it she said of her daughter, “The Red Sox became her medicine on the road back from this tragedy. On behalf of my entire family—thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

Leah Storey of Tilton, N.H., composed her own letter of thanks to the Red Sox. Her father had died exactly one year before the Red Sox won the World Series. Then her 26-year-old brother, Ethan, died of an accidental drug overdose only hours after enthusiastically watching the Red Sox win ALCS Game 5. When the Red Sox won the World Series, Ethan’s friends and family rushed outside the Storey house, yelled for joy, popped open a bottle of Dom Perignon and gazed up in wonder at a lunar eclipse, and beyond.

“To us, with the memory of Ethan’s happy night fresh in our minds, those games took on new meaning,” Leah wrote of Boston’s run to the championship. “Almost as if they were being played in his honor. Thank you for not letting him down. I can’t express enough the comfort we derived from watching you play night after night. It didn’t erase the pain, but it helped.”

Dear Red Sox:

I would even volunteer my time to clean up, do the dishes, whatever
.

—FAN ASKING THAT THE SOX HOST AN EVENT WHERE PLAYERS GREET FANS 80 AND OLDER

ON OCT. 25 the Sox were two victories away from winning the World Series when doctors sent George Sumner home to his Waltham house to die. There was nothing more they could do for him. At home, though, George’s stomach began to fill with fluid, and he was rushed back to the hospital. The doctors did what they could. They said he was in such bad shape that they were uncertain if he could survive the ride back home.

Suddenly, his eyes still closed, George pointed to a corner of the room, as if someone was there, and said, “Nope, not yet.”

And then George went back home to Waltham. Leah knew that every day and every game were precious. She prayed hard for a sweep.

On the morning of Game 4, which stood to be the highlight of Jaime Andrews’s life as a “pathetic,” obsessed Red Sox fan, his wife, Alice, went into labor. Here it was: the conflict Jaime had feared all summer. At 2:30 p.m. he took her into South Shore Hospital, where they were greeted by nurses wearing Red Sox jerseys over their scrubs.

At 8:25 p.m., Alice was in the delivery room. There was a TV in the room. The game in St. Louis was about to begin.

“Turn on the game.”

It was Alice who wanted the TV on. Damon, the leadoff hitter, stepped into the batter’s box.

“Johnny Damon!” Alice exclaimed. “He’ll hit a home run.”

And Damon, his long brown locks flowing out the back of his batting helmet, did just that.

The Red Sox led, 3–0, in the bottom of the fifth inning when the Cardinals put a runner on third base with one out. Jaime could not stand the anxiety. His head hurt. He was having difficulty breathing. He broke out in hives. It was too much to take. He asked Alice to turn off the television. Alice insisted they watch until the end of the inning. They saw Lowe pitch out of the jam. Jaime nervously clicked off the TV.

At home in Waltham, George Sumner slipped in and out of sleep. His eyes were alert when the game was on, but when an inning ended he would say in a whisper, which was all he could muster, “Wake me up when the game comes back on.” Each time no one could be certain if he would open his eyes again.

The Red Sox held their 3–0 lead, and the TV remained off in the delivery room of South Shore Hospital. At 11:27 p.m. Alice gave birth to a beautiful boy. Jaime noticed that the baby had unusually long hair down the back of his neck. The nurses cleaned and measured the boy. Jaime was still nervous.

“Can I check the TV for the final score?” he asked Alice.

“Sure,” she said.

It was 11:40 p.m. The Red Sox were jumping upon one another in the middle of the diamond. They were world champions.

George Sumner had waited a lifetime to see this—79 years, to be exact, the last three while fighting cancer. He drew upon whatever strength was left in his body and in the loudest whisper that was possible he said, “Yippee!”

And then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

“It was probably the last real conscious moment he ever had,” Leah says.

George opened his eyes one last time the next day. When he did he saw that he was surrounded by his extended family. He said, “Hi,” and went back to sleep for the final time.

George Sumner, avid Red Sox fan, passed away at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 29. He was laid to rest with full military honors on Nov. 2.

On the day that George Sumner died, Alice and Jaime Andrews took home a healthy baby boy. They named him Damon.

Dear Red Sox:

Thank you, 2004 World Series Champs, Boston Red Sox. It was worth the wait.

—CLOSING LINES OF THE OBITUARY FOR CYNTHIA MARIE RILEY-RUBINO IN A HAMDEN, CONN., NEWSPAPER, SENT TO THE TEAM BY ANOTHER FAN

BALLPLAYERS ARE not social scientists or cultural historians. Quite to the contrary, they create an insular fortress in which all considerations beyond the game itself are feared to carry the poison of what are known generically as “distractions.”

The Red Sox are not from Boston; they come from all corners of the U.S. and Latin America, and flew to their real homes immediately after a huge, cathartic parade on Oct. 30, during which normal life in New England was basically TiVoed for three hours. (“Three and a half million people there
and
a 33 rating on TV!” marveled Steinberg.)

There is an awful imbalance to our relationship with athletes, as if we are looking through a one-way mirror. We know them, love them, dress like them and somehow believe our actions, however trivial, alter the outcome of theirs, all while they know only that we are there but cannot really see us.

Howard Frank Mosher of Vermont was in northern Maine in the summer of ’03 for a book-signing, during which he discussed his upcoming novel,
Waiting for Teddy Williams
, a fanciful tale in which the Red Sox (can you imagine?) win the Series; he heard a small group of people singing in the back of the bookstore. It sounded like,
Johnny Angel, how I love him
….

As Mosher drew closer he realized they were singing,
Johnny Damon, how I love him
…. What was going on? he wondered.

“We’re performing an incantation,” one of the men said. “Damon has been in a slump. We think it’s working. He was 4 for 5 last night.”

Crazy. How could Damon know this? How could any Boston player know that the Reverend William Bourke, an avid Sox fan who died in his native Rhode Island before Game 2 of the World Series, was buried the day after Boston won it all, with a commemorative Sox baseball and that morning’s paper tucked into his casket?

How could Pedro Martinez know that on the morning of World Series Game 2, Dianne Connolly, her three-year-old son, Patrick, and the rest of the congregation of St. Francis of Assisi parish in Litchfield, N.H., heard the choir sing a prayer for the Red Sox after the recessional? “Our Father, who art in Fenway,” the singers began. They continued, “Give us this day our perfect Pedro; and forgive those, like Bill Buckner; and lead us not into depression….”

How could Curt Schilling know that Laura Deforge, 84, of Winooski, Vt., who watched every Red Sox game on TV—many of them
twice
—turned the ALCS around when she found a lucky, 30-year-old Red Sox hat in her closet after Game 3? Laura wore it everywhere for the next 11 days, including to bingo. (And she’s still wearing it.)

“I’ve only been here a year,” Schilling says, “and it’s humbling to be a part of the relationship between Red Sox Nation and this team. I can’t understand it all. I can’t. All I can do is thank God that He blessed me with the skills that can have an impact on people’s lives in some positive way.”

The lives of these players are forever changed as professionals. Backup catcher Doug Mirabelli, for instance, will be a celebrity 30 years from now if he shows up anywhere from Woonsocket to Winooski. The ’04 Red Sox have a sheen that never will fade or be surpassed.

The real resonance to this championship, however, is that it changed so many of the people on the other side of the one-way glass, poets and convicts, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the dying and the newborn.

The dawn that broke over New England on Oct. 28, the first in the life of little Damon Andrews, was unlike any other seen in three generations. Here began the birth of a new Red Sox Nation, sons no longer bearing the scars and dread of their fathers and grandfathers. It felt as clean and fresh as New Year’s Day.

Damon’s first dawn also was the last in the fully lived life of George Sumner.

“I walked into work that day,” Leah Sumner says, “and I had tears in my eyes. People were saying, ‘Did he see it? Did he see it? Please tell me your dad saw it.’ You don’t understand how much comfort it gave my brothers and sisters. It would have been that much sadder if he didn’t get to see it.

“It was like a blessing. One lady told me he lived and died by the hand of God. I’m not religious, but he was blessed. If he was sitting here, he would agree there was something stronger there.

“It was the best year, and it was the worst year. It was an unbelievable year. I will tell my children and make sure they tell their children.”

The story they will tell is not just the story of George Sumner. It is not just the story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox. It is the story of the bond between a nation of fans and its beloved team.

“It’s not even relief,” Leah says. “No, it’s like we were a part of it. It’s not like they did it for themselves or for money or for fame, but like they did it for us.

“It’s bigger than money. It’s bigger than fame. It’s who we are. It’s like I tell people. There are three things you must know about me. I love my family. I love blues music. And I love baseball.”

Postscript: I had written a great deal about the Red Sox that October, so when the editors picked them as the Sportsmen of the Year and assigned the story to me, I wondered what could I possibly say about this team that would be fresh. I decided that what really made this championship special was its profound meaning to generations of fans, and was convinced that they could tell this extraordinary tale much better than the players. I’ll never forget their voices. While I listened to some of these people tell me their stories, I found myself taking notes through my tears.

MARCH 14, 2005