Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (35 page)

“I remember feeling upset after the series. I was upset we lost. I wasn’t upset with myself. I wasn’t upset with Gonzo. He saved us runs all year. We just basically didn’t execute.”

After Game 7 of the ALCS, Martinez spent a few days sequestered in his Boston home, playing pool, watching television and reading. “Nothing to do with baseball,” he says. He finally decided to go out. He went to the Prudential Center mall in downtown Boston to begin his Christmas shopping. “As soon as I got in the Prudential, I was surrounded by people,” he says. “Everyone just came up to me and said, ‘We’re so proud of you. It doesn’t matter if we’re not going to the World Series. You did all you had to do.’ It really made me feel better.

“I was hoping we would make it and Chicago would make it. It would have been great for the fans.”

Little, as he predicted, was fired. In an odd bit of cross-pollination, the Cubs hired him as a scout and the Sox replaced him with a former Cub, Terry Francona. The Cubs also signed Sox second baseman Todd Walker and on July 31 traded for Garciaparra. The Cubs dealt Gonzalez to Montreal, by way of Boston. Bartman? Who knows? “Personally,” Baker says, “I’d like to win it all and put him at the front of the parade, to exonerate him for the rest of his life.”

In front of millions of slack-jawed, rubbernecking viewers, the Cubs and the Red Sox chose the same point in baseball time to reaffirm their raison d’être: five outs to go. But to those faithful to the Cubbies and the Sawx, what defines the ball clubs better than the catastrophes themselves is what follows. The franchises exist not to fail but to try and try again. They exist for that one time when it
is
meant to be.

In 1922, four years after the Sox had won the Series and 14 after his hometown Cubs had done so, Carl Sandburg wrote a poem entitled
For You
that included this inadvertent article of faith.

   
The peace of great changes be for you.

   
Whisper, Oh beginners in the hills.

   
Tumble, Oh cubs—tomorrow belongs to you.

And still they faithfully wait, Cubs and Sox alike, for tomorrow. They believe, God willing, in the life of the world to come. Amen.

Postscript: Baseball games are often decided on the unseen margins, and examining the details that made fraternal twins of these historic ballgames was one of the joys of this job. I spoke extensively with Prior and Martinez in spring training, when the wounds were fresh. The story ran in advance of the 2004 playoffs. Three weeks later, the Red Sox won the World Series.

DECEMBER 6, 2004

The 2004 Boston Red Sox staged the most improbable comeback in baseball
history and liberated their long-suffering fans

T
HE CANCER WOULD HAVE KILLED MOST MEN LONG AGO
, but not George Sumner. The Waltham, Mass., native had served three years aboard the USS
Arkansas
in World War II, raised six kids with a hell of a lot more love than the money that came from fixing oil burners, and watched from his favorite leather chair in front of the television—except for the handful of times he could afford to buy bleacher seats at Fenway—his Boston Red Sox, who had found a way not to win the World Series in every one of the 79 years of his life. George Sumner knew something about persistence.

The doctors and his family thought they had lost George last Christmas Day, more than two years after the diagnosis. Somehow George pulled through. And soon, though still sick and racked by the chemo, the radiation and the trips in and out of hospitals for weeks at a time, George was saying, “You know what? With Pedro and Schilling we’ve got a pretty good staff this year. Please let this be the year.”

On the night of Oct. 13, 2004, George Sumner knew he was running out of persistence. The TV in his room at Newton-Wellesley Hospital was showing Pedro Martinez and the Red Sox losing to the Yankees in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series—this after Boston had lost Game 1 behind Curt Schilling. During commercial breaks Sumner talked with his daughter Leah about what to do with his personal possessions. Only a few days earlier his wife, Jeanne, had told him, “If the pain is too much, George, it’s O.K. if you want to go.”

But Leah knew how much George loved the Red Sox, saw how closely he still watched their games and understood that her father, ever quick with a smile or a joke, was up to something.

“Dad, you’re waiting around to see if they go to the World Series, aren’t you?” she said. “You really want to see them win it, right?”

A sparkle flickered in the sick man’s eyes and a smile creased his lips.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he whispered.

At that moment, 30 miles away in Weymouth, Mass., Jaime Andrews stewed about the Red Sox’ losing again but found some relief in knowing that he might be spared the conflict he had feared for almost nine months. His wife, Alice, was due to give birth on Oct. 27. Game 4 of the World Series was scheduled for that night. Jaime was the kind of tortured fan who could not watch when the Red Sox were protecting a lead late in the game, because of a chronic, aching certainty that his team would blow it again.

Alice was not happy that Jaime worried at all about the possible conflict between the birth and the Sox. She threatened to bar him from the delivery room if Boston was playing that night. “Pathetic,” she called his obsession with his team.

“It’s not my fault,” Jaime would plead and fall on the DNA defense. “It was passed through generations, from my grandfather to my mother to me.”

Oh, well, Jaime thought as he watched the Red Sox lose Game 2, at least now I won’t have to worry about my team in the World Series when my baby is born.

Dear Red Sox:

My boyfriend is a lifelong Red Sox fan. He told me we’ll get married when the Red Sox win the World Series…. I watched every pitch of the playoffs.

—SIGNED BY A BRIDE-TO-BE

THE MOST emotionally powerful words in the English language are monosyllabic: love, hate, born, live, die, sex, kill, laugh, cry, want, need, give, take, Sawx.

The Boston Red Sox are, of course, a civic religion in New England. As grounds crew workers tended to the Fenway Park field last summer after a night game, one of them found a white plastic bottle of holy water in the outfield grass. There was a handwritten message on the side: GO SOX. The team’s 2003 highlight film, punctuated by the crescendo of the walk-off home run by the Yankees’ Aaron Boone in ALCS Game 7, was christened,
Still, We Believe
.

“We took the wording straight out of the Catholic canon,” club president Larry Lucchino says. “It’s not
We Still Believe
. Our working slogan for next year is
It’s More than Baseball. It’s the Red Sox
.”

Rooting for the Red Sox is, as evident daily in the obituary pages, a life’s definitive calling. Every day all over New England, and sometimes beyond, death notices include age, occupation, parish and allegiance to the Sox. Charles F. Brazeau, born in North Adams, Mass., and an Army vet who was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, lived his entire 85 years without seeing the Red Sox win a world championship, though barely so. When he passed on in Amarillo, Texas, just two days before Boston won the 2004 World Series, the
Amarillo Globe News
eulogized him as a man who “loved the Red Sox and cheap beer.”

Rest in peace.

What the Red Sox mean to their faithful—and larger still, what sport at its best means to American culture—never was more evident than at precisely 11:40 EDT on the night of Oct. 27. At that moment in St. Louis, Red Sox closer Keith Foulke, upon fielding a ground ball, threw to first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz for the final out of the World Series—and the first Red Sox world championship since 1918. And then all hell didn’t just break loose. It pretty much froze over.

All over New England, church bells clanged. Grown men wept. Poets whooped. Convicts cheered. Children rushed into the streets. Horns honked. Champagne corks popped. Strangers hugged.

Virginia Muise, 111, and Fred Hale, 113, smiled. Both Virginia, who kept a Red Sox cap beside her nightstand in New Hampshire, and Fred, who lived in Maine until moving to Syracuse, N.Y., at 109, were Red Sox fans who, curse be damned, were
born before Babe Ruth himself
. Virginia was the oldest person in New England. Fred was the oldest man in the world. Within three weeks after they had watched the Sox win the Series, both of them passed away.

They died happy.

Dear Red Sox:

Can you get married on the mound in, say, November at Fenway?

ON ITS most basic level, sport satisfies man’s urge to challenge his physical being. And sometimes, if performed well enough, it inspires others in their own pursuits. And then, very rarely, it changes the social and cultural history of America; it changes
lives
. The 2004 Boston Red Sox are such a perfect storm.

The Red Sox are SI’s Sportsmen of the Year, an honor they may have won even if the magnitude of their unprecedented athletic achievement was all that had been considered. Three outs from being swept in the ALCS, they won eight consecutive games, the last six without ever trailing. Their place in the sporting pantheon is fixed; the St. Jude of sports, patron saint of lost athletic causes, their spirit will be summoned at the bleakest of moments.

“It is the story of hope and faith rewarded,” says Red Sox executive vice president Charles Steinberg. “You really believe that this is the story they’re going to teach seven-year-olds 50 years from now. When they say, ‘Naw, I can’t do this,’ you can say, ‘Ah, yes you can. The obstacle was much greater for these 25 men, and they overcame. So can you.’”

What makes them undeniably, unforgettably Sportsmen, however, is that their achievement transcended the ballpark like that of no other professional sports team. The 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers were the coda to a sweet, special time and place in Americana. The 1968 Detroit Tigers gave needed joy to a city teeming with anger and strife. The 2001 Yankees provided a gathering place, even as a diversion, for a grieving, wounded city. The 2004 Red Sox made an even deeper impact because this championship was lifetimes in the making.

This Boston team connected generations, for the first time, with joy instead of disappointment as the emotional mortar. This team changed the way a people, raised to expect the worst, would think of themselves and the future. And the impact, like all things in that great, wide community called Red Sox Nation, resounded from cradle to grave.

On the morning after the Red Sox won the World Series, Sgt. Paul Barnicle, a detective with the Boston police and brother of
Boston Herald
columnist Mike Barnicle, left his shift at six, purchased a single red rose at the city’s flower market, drove 42 miles to a cemetery in Fitchburg, Mass., and placed the rose on the headstone of his mother and father, among the many who had not lived long enough to see it.

Five days later, Roger Altman, former deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration, who was born and raised in Brookline, Mass., flew from New York City to Boston carrying a laminated front page of the Oct. 28
New York Times
(headline: RED SOX ERASE 86 YEARS OF FUTILITY IN FOUR GAMES). He drove to the gravesite of his mother, who had died in November 2003 at age 95, dug a shallow trench and buried the front page there.

Such pilgrimages to the deceased, common after the Red Sox conquered the Yankees in the ALCS, were repeated throughout the graveyards of New England. The totems changed, but the sentiments remained the same. At Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, for instance, gravestones were decorated with Red Sox pennants, hats, jerseys, baseballs, license plates and a hand-painted pumpkin.

So widespread was the remembrance of the deceased that several people, including Neil Van Zile Jr. of Westmoreland, N.H., beseeched the ball club to issue a permanent, weatherproof official Red Sox grave marker for dearly departed fans, similar to the metal markers the federal government provides for veterans. (Team president Lucchino says he’s going to look into it.) Van Zile’s mother, Helen, a Sox fan who kept score during games and took her son to Game 2 of the 1967 World Series, died in 1995 at 72.