The Closer (16 page)

I am thinking we might pitch out, but the call never comes. On my first pitch to the next hitter, Bill Mueller, Roberts is off. He gets a good jump. The pitch is up and away and Jorge makes a strong throw to Derek, who slaps the tag on just an instant late. Roberts is in scoring position with nobody out. Mueller fakes bunt and takes a strike. I throw a cutter over the plate, not where I want it, and he
spanks it up the middle. I try to spear it as if I were a hockey goalie, even kick out my leg, but the ball goes into center and Dave Roberts goes home.

Mueller had hit a game-winning homer off me in July, a big emotional boost to the Red Sox in a game that featured a fight between Alex and Jason Varitek after Alex got hit with a pitch. Now he has gotten me again, and the fans in Fenway are loving it.

I get out of the inning, but the damage is done, and it becomes much worse, when Ortiz, the hottest hitter on earth all through the playoffs, blasts a two-run homer in the bottom of the twelfth.

The game lasts five hours and two minutes, and it not only gives the Red Sox a game, it gives them hope. In Game 5, we’re up, 4–2, in the eighth and lose in fourteen innings. We come back to the Bronx in Game 6, Schilling outpitches Lieber, and we lose, 4–2, and with each passing inning, we look tighter than spandex on a fat person.

It’s as tangible as the interlocking
N
and
Y
in our logo. We are waiting for something bad to happen, mired in negative thinking. It’s another round of evidence of how the makeup of our team has changed. The guys from the championship years wouldn’t have succumbed to it. They would’ve found a way. This team does not. The Red Sox complete the greatest comeback in postseason baseball history with a 10–3 drubbing. A year after Aaron Boone, the Red Sox have four games’ worth of epic moments of their own, and nobody feels worse about it than I do.

I am the one who left the door ajar, after all, blowing the save in the ninth inning of Game 4. That inning changes everything. But even as I leave Fenway Park and head back to our hotel that night, I have a very clear thought:

We have a 3–1 lead. If we can’t win one more game, we don’t deserve to go to the World Series.

And we didn’t.

I
T’S OPENING DAY IN
Boston, April 11, 2005, and I am more popular than Paul Revere. The Boston Red Sox—the world champion Boston Red Sox—are getting their World Series rings and hoisting their championship flag, and wouldn’t you know it, the New York Yankees are in town for the occasion. One by one, we are introduced. Everybody gets booed, some more than others, Alex Rodriguez most of all. After Randy Johnson, No. 41, gets his booing, it is my turn to be on the Back Bay griddle.

The public address announcer says:

Number 42, Mariano Rivera…

And the Fenway Park crowd goes nuts, people standing and cheering as I run onto the field, taking my spot next to Chien-Ming Wang and Randy. When I reach the baseline, I take off my cap and wave and bow. I laugh, and laugh some more, and the cheer keeps going, as if I were one of their own. Of course I know that I don’t rank with Ortiz or Damon in their hearts. Of course I know the cheer is derisive—that I am being saluted for my contributions to the Red Sox’s first world championship title in eighty-six years.

And that is okay. I am willing to play along. My reaction is not phony in the least, and I’m not brimming with private rage. The fans are happy, and it is as great a day of celebration as Boston has
had in a long time, and I can appreciate that. Their team won after making a historic comeback against their fiercest rivals.

Why wouldn’t they want to celebrate? What would be the point of taking this as a personal affront? Let them rejoice. I will be doing all I can to get them out the next time, and perhaps to make me a bit less popular around town. In a way I actually enjoy watching the depth of the Sox fans’ Fenway celebration, its intensity fueled by passion and decades upon decades of perseverance. So it is easy to tip my cap and smile to thirty-three thousand people who are cheering at my expense, because this is not about me.

There is Scripture, after all, that is setting me on the right path. In James 1:12, it says:

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love Him.

I have bigger matters to be concerned about than ovations in enemy ballparks as the 2005 season begins. The main one is getting booed in my own ballpark. I blow back-to-back saves against, yes, the Red Sox, during our opening home stand, and in the second of them, I am so ineffective (three walks, three singles, and five runs, one earned) that Mr. T comes and gets me, earning me a resounding Bronx cheer on my trip to the dugout. Some of my teammates are appalled that I got booed, but I don’t expect to get bouquets tossed my way when I don’t do my job. Why would I? Nor do I expect a lifetime pass because I’ve had a lot of saves. If people want to boo, they should go right ahead. It really doesn’t bother me at all.

Much more than fan reaction, I turn my attention to improving the performance that triggers it. In other words, stop messing up. My whole issue is not having my usual command—a result, I’m sure, of the elbow tenderness that cost me time during the spring. I count on hitting spots, especially against the Red Sox, a patient
team that sees me so much that it’s hard to surprise them with anything. In the outing that gets me booed, I throw thirty-eight pitches and only eighteen are strikes. If that’s not the worst ball-strike ratio of my career, I’d be surprised. The fans may be alarmed, but I am not. I know it’s a question of fine-tuning things. I throw more, tighten up my delivery, and I know the results will be there.

I convert my next thirty-one save opportunities—a stretch of more than four months. One of the appearances comes in Detroit in early July, in a game that does my heart good. Bernie Williams is thirty-six now and is gradually being phased out as the regular center fielder. In a recent series against the Mets, we lose two of three at the Stadium, and Bernie drops a fly ball in right center in one game, lets a runner advance on another, and gets run on repeatedly. Mr. T says he wants to give Bernie a couple of days off to clear his head. Bernie doesn’t want time off but gets it anyway.

You can’t call Bernie an unsung hero, not when he is a guy who to this day has more postseason RBIs (80) than anybody; when he has won a batting title and driven in a hundred runs five times; when he’s hit .435 in an ALCS, as he did against the Mariners in 2000. Lost in all the spilled ink about our ALCS collapse against the Red Sox in 2004 is that Bernie had ten runs batted in, two homers, and a .306 batting average in the seven games, all pretty much without a peep. This is one of the things I admire about him: He’s much more eager to play his guitar than sing his own praises.

Bernie has never changed from the time I met him in 1990. There’s this innocence, almost an artist’s fragility, about him, not something you often see in star athletes. Ten minutes before first pitch, he’d be strumming chords on his guitar, as if it were going to be his main activity for the night.

Like Derek, Jorge, Andy, and me, he comes through the farm system and does his work, and becomes one of the rarest commodities you can find—a switch-hitting All-Star center fielder who can
hit for power and average, run, and field. I know he’s not the most gifted natural base runner, but I still love to see him in full stride, knees coming up high, almost prancing, a beautiful athlete flying gracefully around the bags.

But the season has not been an easy time for Bernie. The Yankees are about to bring up Melky Cabrera to play center field, and more and more, Bernie is either a DH or nothing. Age happens to every athlete, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch when a player has been such a champion and brought so much honor and grace to the team.

We’re only a .500 team (39–39) when we head into Comerica Park that afternoon, Mussina going against Sean Douglass, a six-foot-six right-hander.

Bernie’s in and he singles in the fourth, the 2,154th hit of his career, moving him past Don Mattingly on the Yankee hits list, trailing only Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio. Then he belts a line-drive single to bring home two runs in the sixth. He hits another line-drive single off of Kyle Farnsworth in the eighth, and in the ninth, he breaks open a one-run game with a three-run home run off of Troy Percival.

Bernie is the star of the game. And when the press comes in the clubhouse to talk to him, he is already gone. He has been a special teammate, and a big-time player for the Yankees for a long time. I am happy to see him have such a huge day.

With the way the season started, getting hailed as a hero in Boston and botching those first two save chances against the Red Sox, I can’t imagine a better way to finish it off than being back in Fenway Park—to clinch another AL East title. I decide it’s time for another dugout appearance, a little impromptu motivation from a bullpen interloper. Let’s finish the job right now, I say. This is our division. Let’s leave it all out there today.

The guys always seem amused when I go into cheerleader mode. I have no problem amusing them if it produces the desired result.

On the final Saturday of the regular season, Alex, Gary Sheffield, and Matsui all launch homers off of Tim Wakefield, and Randy Johnson pitches into the eighth. For Alex, it’s home run No. 48 in another monstrous season, an MVP season. When Johnny Damon swings and hits a ball back to me with two out in the ninth, we are AL East champions for the ninth straight season (the Red Sox finish with the same 95–67 record as we do, but we win the division because we won the season series against them).

We draw the Angels in the division series and fly to Anaheim for the first two games. We take the first, knocking Bartolo Colon around early, mostly thanks to a three-run double by our rookie second baseman, Robinson Cano, in the top of the first. We kick away a prime chance to take a two-game lead by making three errors in Game 2. Still, we’re even as we head back to New York, and we have Randy Johnson matched up against Paul Byrd, and you have to like your chances with a future Hall of Famer on the mound.

Byrd isn’t good at all that night, but Randy is much worse. He gives up nine hits and five runs in three innings. We climb out of a five-run hole and take a 6–5 lead, but the bullpen gets strafed and we lose, 11–7, and now we’re down, 2–1. We fight back to win Game 4, 3–2. I get the final six outs with two strikeouts and four groundouts, but the best part may have been the outpouring for Bernie, who gets four standing ovations and has his name chanted over and over again, the same way Paulie did four years earlier. It’s not clear if Bernie will be back next year, and if this is goodbye, Yankee fans want to do it properly.

As we prepare for the decisive game, it’s impossible for me not to conjure up my enduring image of Bernie: falling to one knee
after catching Mike Piazza’s fly ball in Game 5 of the Subway Series to give us our fourth World Series in five years. It was a perfect ending—a humble act and a respectful celebration. It was the essence of Bernie.

We fall behind, 5–2, in Game 5 against the Angels, but Derek leads off the seventh with a home run to cut the lead to two. We still have nine outs to go. We’ve come back when things have looked bleak before. I pray that we will summon such strength and resolve again. Think about Game 7 against Pedro, just two years ago, down three in the eighth. Why can’t we do it again?

Alex grounds out, and after Giambi doubles, Sheffield flies out and Matsui pops out. We don’t do anything in the eighth, either.

In the ninth Derek leads off with a single, but Alex hits into an around-the-horn double play. Giambi and Sheffield single, and then Matsui hits a shot wide of first that Darin Erstad makes a great play on, throwing to Francisco Rodriguez covering for the final out.

It’s my least favorite kind of game… the kind we lose and the kind I do not get in. It’s a helpless, hollow feeling, getting ready to compete and wanting to compete, and then never getting the chance. We shower and change in a somber clubhouse and head for the airport. Red Bible in hand, I pray my way through another cross-country flight in Row 29, taking comfort in knowing that I am in the Lord’s hands, and that the frustration and disappointment I am going through will ultimately make me a stronger man and a better person. I listen to the comforting Christian songs of Jesus Adrian Romero. I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. Sleep beckons.