Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (36 page)

“There are thousands of people who would want it,” Van Zile says. “My mom didn’t get to see it. There isn’t anything else I can do for her.”

One day last year Van Zile was walking through a cemetery in Chesterfield, N.H., when the inscription on a grave stopped him. BLOUIN was the family name chiseled into the marble. Beneath that it said NAPOLEON A. 1926–1986. At the bottom, nearest to the ground, was the kicker of a lifetime.

DARN THOSE RED SOX.

Dear Red Sox:

Thanks for the motivation.

—JOSUE RODAS, MARINE, 6TH MOTOR TRANSPORT COMPANY, IRAQ

LIKE SNOWFLAKES in a blizzard came the e-mails. More than 10,000 of them flew into the Red Sox’ server in the first 10 days after Boston won the World Series. No two exactly alike. They came from New England, but they also came from Japan, Italy, Pakistan and at least 11 other countries. The New England town hall of the 21st century was electronic.

There were thank-you letters. There were love letters. The letters were worded as if they were written to family members, and indeed the Red Sox were, in their own unkempt, scruffy, irreverent way, a likable, familial bunch. How could the faithful not love a band of characters self-deprecatingly self-dubbed the “idiots”?

DH David Ortiz, who slammed three walk-off postseason hits, was the Big Papi of the lineup and the clubhouse, with his outsized grin as much a signature of this team as his bat. Leftfielder Manny Ramirez hit like a machine but played the game with a sandlot smile plastered on his mug, even when taking pratfalls in the outfield. Long-locked centerfielder Johnny Damon made women swoon and men cheer and, with his Nazarene look, prompted a T-shirt and bumper sticker bonanza (
WWJDD: WHAT WOULD JOHNNY DAMON DO?
and
HONK IF YOU LOVE JOHNNY
).

First baseman Kevin Millar, with his Honest Abe beard and goofball personality, had the discipline to draw the walk off Yankees closer Mariano Rivera that began Boston’s comeback in the ninth inning of ALCS Game 4. Righthander Derek Lowe, another shaggy eccentric, became the first pitcher to win the clinching game of three postseason series in one October. Foulke, third baseman Bill Mueller, catcher Jason Varitek and rightfielder Trot Nixon—the club’s longest-tenured player, known for his pine-tar-encrusted batting helmet—provided gritty ballast.

The love came in e-mails that brought word from soldiers in Iraq with Red Sox patches on their uniforms or Red Sox camouflage hats, the symbols of a nation within a nation. The cannon cockers of the 3rd Battalion 11th Marine Regiment built a mini Fenway Park at Camp Ramadi. Soldiers awoke at 3 a.m. to watch the Sox on a conference-room TV at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, the games ending just in time for the troops to fall in and receive their daily battle briefing.

A woman wrote of visiting an ancient temple in Tokyo and finding this message inscribed on a prayer block:
MAY THE RED SOX PLAY ALWAYS AT FENWAY PARK, AND MAY THEY WIN THE WORLD SERIES IN MY LIFETIME
.

Besides the e-mails there were boxes upon boxes of letters, photographs, postcards, school projects and drawings that continue to cover what little floor space is left in the Red Sox’ offices. Mostly the missives convey profound gratitude.

“Thank you,” wrote Maryam Farzeneh, a Boston University graduate student from Iran, “for being another reason for me and my boyfriend to connect and love each other. He is a Red Sox fan and moved to Ohio two years ago. There were countless nights that I kept the phone next to the radio so that we could listen to the game together.”

Maryam had never seen a baseball game before 1998. She knew how obsessed people back home were about soccer teams. “Although I should admit,” she wrote, “that is nothing like the relationship between the Red Sox and the fans in New England.”

Dear Red Sox:

Your first round of drinks is free.

—THE LOOSE MOOSE SALOON, GRAY, MAINE

NIGHTFALL, AND the little girl lies on her back in the rear seat of a sedan as it chugs homeward to Hartford. She watches the stars twinkle in between the wooden telephone poles that rhythmically interrupt her view of the summer sky. And there is the familiar company of a gravelly voice on the car radio providing play-by-play of Red Sox baseball. The great Ted Williams, her mother’s favorite, is batting.

Roberta Rogers closes her eyes, and she is that little girl again, and the world is just as perfect and as full of wonder and possibilities as it was on those warm summer nights growing up in postwar New England.

“I laugh when I think about it,” she says. “There is nothing wrong with the memory. Nothing.”

Once every summer her parents took her and her brother, Nathaniel, to Boston to stay at the Kenmore Hotel and watch the Red Sox at Fenway. Nathaniel liked to operate the safety gates of the hotel elevator, often letting on and off the visiting ballplayers who stayed at the Kenmore.

“Look,” Kathryn Stoddard, their mother, said quietly one day as a well-dressed gentleman stepped off the lift. “That’s Joe DiMaggio.”

Kathryn, of course, so despised the Yankees that she never called them just the
Yankees
. They were always the
Damnyankees
, as if it were one word.

“We didn’t have much money,” Roberta says. “We didn’t take vacations, didn’t go to the beach. That was it. We went to the Kenmore, and we watched the Red Sox at Fenway. I still have the images … the crowds, the stadium, the sounds, the feel of the cement under my feet, passing hot dogs down the row, the big green wall, the Citgo sign—it was green back then—coming into view as we drove into Boston, telling us we were almost there….”

Roberta now lives in New Market, Va., her mother nearby in a retirement facility. Kathryn is 95 years old and still takes the measure of people by their rooting interest in baseball.

“Acceptable if they root for the Sox, suspect if they don’t, and if a Damnyankee fan, hardly worth mentioning,” Roberta says.

On Oct. 27, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Boston winning 3–0, Roberta paced in her living room, her eyes turned away from the TV.

“Oh, Bill,” she said to her husband, “they can still be the Red Sox! They can still lose this game!”

It was not without good reason that her mother had called them the
Red Flops
all these years.

“And then I heard the roar,” Roberta says.

This time they really did it. They really won. She called her children and called “everybody I could think of.” It was too late to ring Kathryn, she figured. Kathryn’s eyesight and hearing are failing, and she was surely sleeping at such a late hour.

So Roberta went to see Kathryn first thing the next morning.

“Mom, guess what? I’ve got the best news!” Roberta said. “They won! The Red Sox won!”

Kathryn’s face lit up with a big smile, and she lifted both fists in triumph. And then the mother and daughter laughed and laughed. Just like little girls.

Dear Red Sox:

I really want to surprise my whole school and the principal.

—MAINE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, ASKING THAT THE ENTIRE TEAM VISIT HIS SCHOOL

“IS THAT what I think it is?”

The conductor on the 11:15 a.m. Acela out of Boston to New York, Larry Solomon, had recognized Charles Steinberg and noted the size of the case he was carrying.

“Yes,” the Red Sox VP replied. “Would you like to see it?”

Steinberg opened the case and revealed the gleaming gold Commissioner’s Trophy, the Red Sox’ world championship trophy. Solomon, who had survived leukemia and rooting for the Sox, fought back tears.

The Red Sox are taking the trophy on tour to their fans. On this day it was off to New York City and a convocation of the Benevolent Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Redsox Diehard Sufferers, a.k.a. the BLOHARDS.

“I’ve only cried twice in my life,” Richard Welch, 64 and a BLOHARD, said that night. “Once when the Vietnam War ended. And two weeks ago when the Red Sox won the World Series.”

Everywhere the trophy goes someone weeps at the sight of it. Everyone wants to touch it, like Thomas probing the wounds of the risen Jesus. Touching is encouraged.

“Their emotional buckets have filled all these years,” Steinberg says, “and the trophy overflows them. It’s an intense, cathartic experience.”

Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter’s box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father.

“We do have our tragic history,” says the poet Donald Hall, a Vermonter who lives in the house where his great-grandfather once lived.

The Sox specialized not, like the Chicago Cubs, in woebegone, hopeless baseball, but in an agonizing, painful kind. Indeed, hope was at the very breakable heart of their cruelty. From the 1967 Impossible Dream team until last season, the Red Sox had fielded 31 winning teams in 37 years, nine of which reached the postseason. They were good enough to make it hurt.

“It’s probably the desperately cruel winters we endure in New England,” Mike Barnicle offers as an explanation. “When the Red Sox reappear, that’s the season when the sun is back and warmth returns, and we associate them with that.

“Also, a lot has to do with how the area is more stable in terms of demographics than most places. People don’t move from New England. They stay here. And others come to college here and get infected with Red Sox fever. They get it at the age of 18 and carry it with them when they go out into the world.”

If you are born north of Hartford, there is no other big league baseball team for which to root, just as it has been since the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953. It is a birthright to which you quickly learn the oral history. The Babe, Denny Galehouse, Johnny Pesky, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner and Aaron Boone are beads on a string, an antirosary committed to memory by every son and daughter of the Nation.

“I’ve known nothing different in my life,” says David Nathan, 34, who, like his brother Marc, 37, learned at the hand of his father, Leslie, 68, who learned at the hand of his father, Morris, 96. “It’s so hard to put into words. I was 16 in 1986 sitting in the living room when the ball went through Buckner’s legs. We all had champagne ready, and you just sit back and watch it in disbelief.

“I was at Game 7 last year and brought my wife. I said, ‘You need to experience it.’ The Sox were up 5–2, and my wife said to me, ‘They’ve got this in the bag.’ I said, ‘No, they don’t. I’m telling you, they don’t until the last out.’

“I used to look at my dad and not understand why he cried when they lost or cried when they won. Now I understand.”

At 11:40 on the night of Oct. 27, David Nathan held a bottle of champagne in one hand and a telephone in the other, his father on the other end of the line. David screamed so loud that he woke up his four-year-old son, Jack, the fourth generation Nathan who, along with Marc’s four-year-old daughter, Jessica, will know a whole new world of Sox fandom. The string of beads is broken.

David’s wife recorded the moment with a video camera. Two weeks later David would sit and write it all down in a long e-mail, expressing his thanks to Red Sox owner John Henry.

“As my father said to me the next day,” David wrote, “he felt like a burden was finally lifted off of his shoulders after all of these years.”

He read the e-mail to his father over the telephone. It ended, “Thanks again and long live Red Sox Nation.” David could hear his father sobbing on the other end.

“It’s nice to know after all these years,” Leslie said, “something of mine has rubbed off on you.”

Dear Red Sox:

I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about.

—FAN APOLOGIZING FOR HIS MANY PREVIOUS E-MAILS, ESPECIALLY THE ONE AFTER GAME 3 OF THE ALCS, IN WHICH HE VERY COLORFULLY EXPRESSED HIS DISGUST FOR THE TEAM AND THE PEOPLE RUNNING IT

IT WAS one minute after midnight on Oct. 20, and Jared Dolphin, 30, had just assumed his guard post on the overnight shift at the Corrigan-Radgowski correctional facility in Montville, Conn., a Level IV security prison, one level below the maximum. The inmate in the cell nearest him was 10 years into a 180-year sentence for killing his girlfriend’s entire family, including the dog.

Some of the inmates wore makeshift Red Sox “caps”—a commissary bandanna or handkerchief festooned with a hand-drawn iconic “B.” Technically they were considered contraband, but the rules were bent when it came to rooting for the Red Sox in October. A few inmates watched ALCS Game 7 on 12-inch portable televisions they had purchased in the prison for $200. Most leaned their faces against the little window of their cell door to catch the game on the cell block television. Others saw only the reflection of the TV on the window of another cell door.

A Sox fan himself, Dolphin watched as Alan Embree retired the Yankees’ Ruben Sierra on a ground ball to end the greatest comeback in sports history. Dolphin started to cry.

“Suddenly the block erupted,” Dolphin wrote in an e-mail. “I bristled immediately and instinctively my hand reached for my flashlight. It was pandemonium—whistling, shouting, pounding on sinks, doors, bunks, anything cons could find. This was against every housing rule in the book, so I jumped up, ready to lay down the law.

“But as I stood there looking around the block I felt something else. I felt hope. Here I was, less than 10 feet away from guys that will never see the outside of prison ever again. The guy in the cell to my immediate left had 180 years. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But as I watched him scream, holler and pound on the door I realized he and I had something in common. That night hope beamed into his life as well. As Red Sox fans we had watched the impossible happen, and if that dream could come true why couldn’t others.