Faithful (32 page)

The last time Tim Wakefield pitched against the Tigers, he gave up six home runs and still got the win, a feat only accomplished once since the days when most big-league teams rode to their away contests on trains.
[42]
Yesterday, though, on a day so hot the pitchers in the bullpen used a groundskeeper’s hose to spray the fans in the lower right-field bleachers to keep them cool, Wakefield beat the Tigers again, this time more tidily, going eight strong innings and giving up only three hits. No one was any happier than me. I hate to sound like Annie Wilkes here, but I’ve got to be one of Wake’s biggest fans.
[43]

And why not? Look at all we have in common. Wakefield stands 6′2″; I stand 6′3″. Wakefield weighs 210; I weigh 195 (and used to weigh 210). Wakefield’s middle name is Stephen; my first name is Stephen. Wakefield got hit by a car while jogging in 1997; I got hit by a van while walking in 1999. When Wakefield started against the Braves in the 1992 National League Championship Series, he was the first rookie to do so in nine years. When I started for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 ALCS, I was the first rookie to do so in
ten
years.
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More importantly, Wakefield is the sort of player George Will was talking about in his overidealized book-length essay
Men at Work
, one who really
is
a man at work. There is… well, I was going to write there’s
little
star-time ego about him, but in fact there seems to be
no
star-time ego at all about him. He comes to the ballpark not full of prime-time flash like Jose Canseco did, not wearing the ostentatious earring like Barry Bonds does, or with the panhandle-sized chip on his shoulder as Roger Clemens still seems to do (the Rocket still wants everyone to know they climb when he walks, by God).

Tim Wakefield comes almost the way a man would come to a factory, not plodding but not strutting, just walking steady, with his shirt tucked in all the way around, his belt buckled neatly in front, his hair (what’s left of it) trimmed close, his time card in his hand. You almost expect to see him deposit his lunch pail on the bench before going out to the mound.

He is the egoless workhorse
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who signed with Boston in 1995, after being let go by the Pirates, and promptly won sixteen straight for the Sox. He gave them innings, innings, innings… including one harrowing stint as the club’s closer. (He was successful in the role—as he has been in almost all of his roles—but he was also almost impossible to watch.) He became a free agent in November of 2000 and re-signed with Boston a month later, taking a $1.5 million pay cut to stay with the big club (following his heroics in the 2003 postseason, when he came within five outs of being named the League Championship Series MVP, his salary went back to where it had been in 2002). Since then he has again given the big club innings and more innings, keeping his mouth shut while he does it.

Now, after various stints in long relief and that one scary two- or three-week turn as the closer a couple of years ago, Wake is back where he belongs, starting games for the team of which he is the longest-standing member. He’s run his ’04 record to a respectable 11-7, seems to be rounding into stretch-drive form, and if he doesn’t garner the sort of fan adulation the Pedro Martinezes and Curt Schillings receive (not too many people come to the ballpark with
49 WAKEFIELD
on their backs), that’s probably to be expected. Working joes—guys who keep their heads down and their mouths shut, guys who just do the job—rarely do. In fact, some guy once quipped, “No great thing was ever done by a man named Tim.”
Our
Tim could prove himself the exception to that rule.

My wife’s gone to see her parents for the night and she even took the dog ’cause I’m going to Boston, so I feel it’s perfectly okay to give a yell of triumph when the Sox close out the month at 10:07 P.M. with their twenty-first win and their seventh straight, beating the Angels 10–7. The end of this one wasn’t pretty, with Sox reliever Mike Myers giving up four straight hits—the last a grand slam by a late-game sub—but in the end we prevail (tonight the Sox can be
we
), and even if Anaheim should get up off the mat and take the next two, they’d still leave trailing in the wild-card race.

And what puts the icing on the cake, the absolute perfect cherry on the banana split? The Yankees lost. Oh, wait—did I say
lost
? With a final score of 22–0, I think it would be fair to say that Cleveland administered a pants-down butt-whuppin’. Pricey midseason acquisition Esteban Loaiza gave up not one but two three-run homers in the ninth inning. The question, of course, is where the Yankees go from here. When the Houston Astros no-hit them by committee a year ago, it served as a wake-up call… but that was earlier in the season, before their bullpen had taken such a severe pounding (Yankee starters have recorded just one win in the team’s last sixteen victories). Baseball has seen plenty of amazing late-season chokes; this could be the beginning of yet another.

But the Red Sox players would undoubtedly say they can do nothing about the Yankees. They have thirty-two more games of their own to play, and the next eight are going to be very tough. I hope to be at Fenway for as many of them as I can.

I haven’t been to Fenway since this terrific Red Sox run began (eight in a row now; 21-7 for the month of August), and I’m astonished by how radically the atmosphere of the old park has changed. The glums and glooms of July are gone, replaced by a giddy nervousness that’s not quite a playoff atmosphere. Seconds before Bronson Arroyo throws his first pitch, the PA announcer informs the sellout crowd that it’s seventy-seven degrees—the exact temperature of perfect childhood summer evenings, if I remember correctly. New England’s First Church of the Baseball Unfulfilled is once more ready to rock, my son and three-year-old grandson are with me (the latter more fascinated by the Hood blimp cruising overhead than anything happening on the field), and the Yankees are now almost close enough to touch.

For the second night in a row I wait for Anaheim’s pitching, which has been largely responsible for taking them to eighteen games over .500 in the fiercely competitive AL West, to show up, and for the second night in a row it never does. For the second night in a row Boston puts a four-spot on the board in its half of the first. The difference is that we’ve got Bronson Arroyo going instead of Curt Schilling, and Arroyo is still years away from Curt Schilling’s craftiness. Also, for some reason the kid just doesn’t pitch well in Fenway. Tonight the Angels come back from what sportscasters like to call “the early deficit” and briefly make a game of it; after three innings the score is tied 5–5 and Arroyo is gone. In the end, it makes no difference; the final score is 12–7 Boston, and my scorecard suggests there are going to be some very tired Anaheim outfielders tomorrow. I see fourteen fly-ball outs and five strikeouts through eight innings. Add in the sixteen or eighteen hits that had to be chased down, and that’s an awful lot of running for the, ahem, Angels in the outfield.

Anaheim came into Fenway on fire. After two consecutive poundings, I’d have to guess that the fire is out, and that when Bartolo Colon takes the mound tomorrow, he’d better have his best stuff working if he wants to help his team avoid a clean sweep. As for the Red Sox, it’s now a nice balance: the team is three and a half back in the division and three and a half ahead in the wild card. The stretch drive has begun, and right now it looks as if we could go either way. Of course, I know what I’d like to see: the Yankees scrambling madly for that wild-card berth. And losing it on the last day of the season. I
am
a Red Sox fan, after all.

Tonight we’re on the Monster, switching between two single seats and two standing rooms. The matchup of Arroyo versus former Sock Aaron Sele seems to be in the Angels’ favor, but Sele comes out shaky and slow. Our guys are hacking at every pitch, and banjo hitters like Bellhorn are swinging for the fences. We score four in the first. The ump is squeezing Arroyo, and he gives two back in the second. We add another in our second, but the Angels tie it at five in the third, and Arroyo’s history. Francona calls on Mike Myers to get lefty Darin Erstad. The crowd groans; the PA plays the theme from
Halloween
. Myers comes in…and gets it done.

Mike Scioscia gives Sele an extra inning to find his bearings. Instead, he gives up three straight hits and we take the lead.

Like Mike Myers, Terry Adams has had his problems, but, like Myers, he comes in with two down and gets his man, then settles in for two scoreless innings of work (one, I must say, belongs to Tek, who throws out
two
runners in the fifth).

Scot Shields is their crummy middle reliever. We beat him like a rock, Millar sealing the win with a three-run Coke-bottle shot. And to cap it, after Johnny catches the last out on the warning track directly beneath us, he throws the ball up to me. The game’s on ESPN, and when we get home I’ve got e-mails from people who saw it. There I was, filling the screen, pointing and hollering thank-you, letting Johnny know—once more—that he is still The Man.

Improbable or not, the Sox Express keeps rolling along—this makes nine in a row and we are rapidly leaving the land of the unusual and entering that of the out-and-out, please-pass-the-happy-gas unreal. No question tonight’s game is the toughest of the lot, with Bartolo Colon throwing in the mid-nineties and the Angels offense struggling hard to salvage at least one game of the three. It is important that they do, of course, because of “the swing” that comes into play when the clubs in first and second play each other;
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there’s a hell of a big difference between leaving Fenway two and a half games out and leaving it four and a half out. The Halos end up leaving it four and a half out mostly because baseball is also a game of luck and Boston’s still running. It would have to be, wouldn’t you say, for the Sox to go 2 for 14 with runners in scoring position…and still manage to eke out the win?

The tragickal Mr. Lowe, who has been snakebit most of the year (there have been innings when he’s been forced to get not just four outs but sometimes even six), only has to endure a couple of miscues tonight, and Adam Kennedy is the beneficiary of both. One is an error by right fielder Dave Roberts; the other is a triple that center fielder Johnny Damon should have caught, and in neither case does the speedy Kennedy end up scoring.

Lowe settles down after giving up single runs in each of the first three. The Red Sox are only able to touch up Colon for four, also in the first three (tonight the Angel bullpen is superb), but four is enough. Between the first of April and the end of July the Red Sox made losing one-run games an art, but now they have turned that around. By the time Keith Foulke faces the last Anaheim batter of the series, thirty-five thousand or so of the Fenway Faithful—Stewart O’Nan and myself among them—are on their feet, screaming,
“SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP!”

Foulke induces a harmless fly ball to Orlando Cabrera at shortstop and the Standells launch into “Dirty Water.” Stewart and I (not to mentionthe rest of the Faithful) have what we came for. It’s unbelievable, but we have swept the Angels. Bring on Texas.

And
can
I say
we
? I think I can, and in a wider context than just my Fenway friends on this clear and slightly fallish-feeling Boston night. According to the New England Sports Network (NESN), the first of the three-game series against the Angels drew the biggest ratings of any regular-season baseball game in the network’s history. Seen in 18.5 million homes from Canada to Connecticut, it blew away all the big-network competition. Said color commentator Jerry Remy, “I don’t even know how to think about numbers like that.” (Only Remy, a Massachusetts native, cannot seem to say
numbers
; he says
numbizz
.)
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In any case, the
numbizz
only underline the meaning of the ninth-inning Fenway Thunder I’ve now heard at the ballpark two nights in a row. This team has caught the imagination of New England. This year it took a while to happen, but it finally did.

And the team has caught mine, as well. This time they—and
we
—could go all the way. Not saying they will; the odds are still against it. But
some
team will become the 2004 World Champions, and yes, this
could
be that team. They certainly have the tools.

Christ, I hope I haven’t jinxed them, saying that.

We’ve won eight in a row and tonight we’re going for the sweep against the Angels, a very good club, yet when Derek Lowe stumbles out of the gate, the Faithful grumble. Not this Lowe, not again. The Lowe who just misses his location and gets frustrated, puts runners on and gets distracted, gets ahead of batters and then throws too nice of a strike. The Lowe who kicks absently at the air like a bummed Little Leaguer after an RBI single.

Colon is having an even worse night. It seems we have two on or bases loaded every inning, but he slows the pace of the game (doing a whole lot of yardwork on the mound), and manages to weasel out of what should be big innings. After three, it’s 4–3 Sox, and at the rate the game’s going, we’ll be here till midnight.

With one down in the Angels’ fourth, Adam Kennedy flies one to Dave Roberts in right. Roberts isn’t a right fielder by trade, and he tracks this one awkwardly, as if he doesn’t quite see it, freezing and then waving at the ball as if it’s suddenly reappeared out of the lights. It hits his glove, then his leg, then the grass.
Booooooooo!

It’s tough to hear, since Roberts is an eloquent and genuinely nice guy and a recent addition, and he’s playing out of position, but it’s an important game, and the ball should have been caught. Still, I can’t help reflecting that, even in the best of times, the Faithful are a hanging jury.

Lowe walks the next guy. He’s struggling, and in even more trouble when Chone Figgins pokes a shallow liner to right-center that should drop. The one real tool Roberts has is speed. He reads this ball perfectly, flashing in and diving, picking it cleanly with a nifty backhand. The runner on second is halfway home, and Roberts doubles him up easily to end the threat. A huge, deafening standing O, and gratifying as hell to see a good guy go from goat to hero in a matter of a few pitches.

Lowe seems to take the lesson to heart, and battles into the eighth, when he leaves to a standing O from the same folks (including me) who were shaking their heads a couple hours ago. We hang on for the sweep, knocking the Angels to four and a half back. The turnaround’s complete. Like Dave Roberts and Derek Lowe, with the August it’s had, this team has redeemed itself, and the Faithful are more than grateful, we’re wild with hope.

Tonight’s starter for Texas once pitched for Boston. Red Sox fans remember him well, and not with affection; because of all the home runs he gave up, mostly in a relief role, he became known as John “Way Back” Wasdin. Since then he’s been around, and he’s improved. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to return to the show after a stint in triple-A and land a starting gig with the Rangers, who have performed above expectations all season long and are only now beginning to fade a little in the wild-card race.

We have Pedro Martinez on the mound, and on paper this game looks like a ridiculous mismatch, but I enter Fenway feeling really nervous for the first time since getting here for the second game of the Angels series. Yes, Wasdin is only 2-2, and yes, his current ERA is an unremarkable 7.01, but he remembers perfectly well what the fans here used to call him and he’d really like to be the guy who ends the Red Sox streak. Also, Texas has a formidable hitting lineup. Guys like Michael Young, Kevin Mench, Hank Blalock, and Alfonso Soriano (who came to Texas in the A-Rod trade and has lit it up at Arlington) seem made for Fenway.

All my worries about “Way Back” Wasdin turn out to be justified, and it doesn’t help that two
more
Red Sox players are sitting wounded on the bench: David Ortiz (shoulder) and Johnny Damon (ankle). Wasdin is throwing some kind of heavy shit
[48]
that has our makeshift lineup popping up all night, and when Wasdin finally departs, he has given up less than a handful of hits. Luckily for us, one is a home run to Manny and another is a home run to Bill Mueller.

Pedro strikes out nine, and faces only one serious threat, in the seventh. With runners on first and third and two out, Gary Matthews Jr. tests Jason Varitek’s arm by trying to steal second. Varitek passes the test. Orlando Cabrera slaps the tag on Matthews, and that takes care of that. Timlin and Embree tag-team-pitch the eighth and Foulke closes out the ninth. The Standells are singing “Dirty Water” no later than ten past ten and the crowd goes insane. The Sox have won their tenth straight, and I find myself doing the Funky Chicken in the aisle with a seventysomething woman I don’t know from the Lady Eve. She’s wearing a Curt Schilling T-shirt, and that’s good enough for me.

Did I say the crowd
goes
insane? That’s wrong. They already went. It happened at approximately 9:50 P.M., when the scoreboard showed the Orioles beat the Yankees in the Bronx by a score of 3–1, reducing the Yankees’ lead in the AL East to a mere two and a half games. We’ve gained eight in the East since the middle of August, a stretch of less than three weeks. Later, in my hotel room, I learn that Kevin Brown, who started that game for the Yankees, broke his hand after being pulled. He punched the clubhouse wall in frustration. As so often happens in such battles, he fought the wall and the wall won. At least it was his nonpitching hand, and he’s vowed not to miss a start, but I wonder. For one thing, how’s he gonna wear a glove on that baby?

I never expected to see John Wasdin starting again in Fenway, but with the expanded roster, he gets another chance. And as the Sox complete their fifteenth shutout of the season, and their tenth straight win, Adam Hyzdu, the twenty-sixth man, the last one cut in spring training, makes his 2004 debut as a replacement right fielder. Like Wasdin, he’s made his way back to the show, and if it’s only for a short stay, still, he’s here, playing under the bright lights.

Sarah McKenna, a Red Sox media rep, calls me while I’m still doing my morning workout and flummoxes me by asking if I’ll throw out the first pitch before this afternoon’s game. The Farrelly brothers, she says, creators of such amusing (if not quite family-friendly) movies as
Dumb and Dumber
and
There’s Something About Mary
, are making a romantic comedy called
Fever Pitch
with a Red Sox background, and they want to re-create Opening Day, complete with sellout crowd and giant flag unfurling across the Green Monster.
[49]
I guess neither Ben Affleck nor Matt Damon is in town, and of course native son John Kerry is otherwise occupied this Labor Day weekend.

I want to do it—hell
yes
—but I’m still slow about agreeing. Some of my reasons are purely superstitious. Some, although pragmatic, are
about
superstition. The purely superstitious reasons stem from having thrown out the first pitch at Fenway once before, around the time I published a book called
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
. That was a work of fiction, but in 1998, the year before it was published, Gordon was brilliant—that was a fact.

We lost the game at which I threw out that ceremonial first pitch, and not long after (my memory wants me to believe it was
at that very game
, but surely that can’t be right), we lost Gordon to an arm injury for the rest of the season. When the 2004 version of Tom Gordon shows up in these pages, he is, of course, wearing the uniform of the hated New York Yankees. And, only a month later, I was struck by a van while walking at the side of the road and badly hurt. Certainly if I had been a baseball player instead of a writer, my career would have been over.

So the last time I threw out a first pitch, bad things happened—for the team, for my favorite player on the team, and for me. Those are the superstitious reasons I’m slow about agreeing to Sarah McKenna’s proposal. The pragmatic reasons
about
superstition? Well, look. I know how superstitious the ballplayers themselves are, and the fans put them to shame. I mean, some guy actually risked his life to change that Storrow Drive overpass sign from REVERSE CURVE to REVERSE THE CURSE. And the press only eggs them on. Lately there’s been a story on several TV stations about a local Massachusetts teenager who got two of his front teeth knocked out by a foul line drive off the bat of Manny Ramirez. Because this kid just
happens
to live in the house where Babe Ruth once lived, the curse is now supposed to be broken. Broken teeth, broken curse. Geddit? This is the sort of numbnuts story you kind of expect from the local “If it bleeds it leads” TV in the doldrums of summer…but then, holy shit, the local papers pick it up too. So of course some people actually believe it. Why not? There are still people out there who think Fidel Castro had JFK shot and that cell phones cause brain cancer.

So one thing I know: if I throw out the first pitch and the Red Sox
lose
, if their ten-game streak ends this afternoon, I will get some of the blame. Because I’m not only a Red Sox fan, I’m (creepy music here)
NEW ENGLAND’S HORRORMEISTER!!!
And worse—what if someone gets hurt (someone
else
to go along with Trot, Pokey, and Johnny Damon), or the game ends with a bum call, or—God forbid—there’s some sort of accident in the stands? Or what if the Red Sox go on to
lose
ten straight, end up nine back of the Yankees again, and four behind Anaheim in the wild card? Nor is this an entirely unbelievable scenario, with three coming up against Oakland (on their turf) and then three more in Seattle, who has suddenly gotten hot.
I’LL GET BLAMED FOR THAT TOO! THEY’LL SAY IT ALL STARTED WHEN THAT BASTARD KING THREW OUT THE FIRST PITCH ON SEPTEMBER 4TH!

So of course I say yes.

1 P.M.: It’s stifling hot behind the gigantic American flag, and I’m scared out of my mind. I can’t believe I’ve agreed to do this. On my previous pitching adventure, I only had to walk from the Red Sox dugout to the mound, a matter of twenty-five or thirty steps. Now I’ll be walking in from the deepest part of the park. I am, in fact, positioned just beneath CLE in the out-of-town section of the left-field scoreboard.

My introduction finishes. Marty, my Red Sox minder, lifts the flag forme. I step out into brilliant sunshine and off the warning track, onto green grass. The crowd roars, and I have to remind myself that the PA announcer has cued them to go batshit, has told them that the cameras are rolling, and that they should make as much noise as possible. Still, that forty-second walk is a remarkable period of time for me, every second crystal clear, and as I approach the rusty red dirt of the infield, the exact color of old bricks in a factory wall (I cross at shortstop, where Orlando Cabrera will soon be standing and where Nomar Garciaparra stood for so many years before him), I remember that I promised my daughter-in-law that I’d give the crowd the Manny Salute. I do so without delay, cocking my free hand and glove hand like guns, and the crowd roars louder, laughing and delighted, giving me a verbal high five. It’s probably the best moment, even better than toeing the blinding white strip of the pitcher’s rubber and looking in at Jason Varitek, squatting behind home plate.

Except maybe the moment before I throw is the best moment, because I can see him so clearly (there’s no batter, of course, and he’s not wearing the mask). His face is grave, as if he actually expects me to throw a sixty-foot strike in front of thirty-five thousand people—me, who does his best work in an empty room with a cup of lukewarm tea for company.

And I almost do. My pitch dips at the last second and hits that red-brick dirt just in front of home plate. Varitek catches the ball easily and trots out to give it to me (it’s beside me as I write this, a little red scuff on one curve) as the crowd roars its approval. Varitek is kind, calling it first a sinker, then a “Hideo Nomo strike three.” Too cool.

I try to shake his hand with my glove. That’s how dazed I am.

3:45 P.M.: The good times have rolled and now my darker fears are coming true. Tim Wakefield—my
current
favorite Red Sox player—is on the mound, and he’s getting lit up. When Terry Francona finally comes out and takes the ball, the score is 8–1, Texas.

4:25 P.M.: The Sox make a game of it, at least—Mark Bellhorn hits a grand slam, and David Ortiz follows with a bases-empty round-tripper—but in the end Boston falls two runs short. There is even that bum call I obsessed about, a phantom tag on Dave Roberts the second-base ump sees as one-half of the game-ending double play. Manny Ramirez is left in the on-deck circle, and the Sox streak ends at ten. I am 0-2 in games where I throw out the first pitch, and tomorrow the newspapers will blame me. I just know it.

SK:
I got a LARGE charge out of throwing the first pitch today. Broke off a slider that hit the dirt in front of home plate. Varitek, laughing, called it a “Nomo strike three.” And then we lost. Shit. But still a great game.

SO:
Saw you on the tube joking with Tek—v.v. cool. Taped it if you want it. Wake looked awful. What’s his record in day games? Because I’ve seen him at least twice get shelled on beautiful Saturday afternoons. I called the Bellhorn granny, and had a feeling Big Papi would solo right after that. If Bill Mill’s shot up the middle gets through in the eighth, Tek pinch-hits with one out, but that galoot made a skate save. Least the Yanks lost. One more and The Stand’s over. Be sweet to bury the Rangers right here right now. Mr. Schill on the hill.