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| Baseball, Beanballs and Perspective |
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Robert Sullivan on Yanks-Sox, and why where you stand in this series depends on where you sit |
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By Robert Sullivan |
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Posted Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003
Friday night, my kitchen in a suburb of New York: I realized my friend Stan and I did not share perspective as I watched our conversation about the series devolve.
"Pedro, doesn't win, I figure you're done," Stan said.
"Wait a second, Mussina pitches again in this series, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"Well, correct me, but he's pretty soft, right? Fine regular season, but soft, Oriole type guy in the post. That about right?"
As I say and as you see, there was a perspective gap developing that was impacting all, even down to the most basic communication. And my perspective, since it was Boston, needed to be from Boston.
I took the kids to Caroline's soccer game on Saturday morning while Lucille finished packing, then we pointed the mini-van north. Mary Grace, one of our three-year-old twins, got sick just west of Hartford, and I figured this was due to the sudden passage from Yankee territory to Bosox. The incident did not delay us crucially, and we were ensconced at my sister's house in Wellesley, a half hour outside of Beantown, by 3 p.m. My friend Jane, who you might have met in part one of this diary, is a Wellesley native and was, like me, credentialed for the third game of this series, a contest also known by the shorthand "Pedro-Roger." Jane arrived at her parents' home ten minutes after we landed, and her father, Bob Bachman, graciously offered to drive Jane and I to Kenmore. "Parking'll be nuts," he said, which was what much of Boston was saying about the whole day: parking'll be nuts, the game'll be nuts, the city'll go nuts.
Mr. Bachman, a lifelong resident of Boston and environs, took the back route to town — of course he did. As we traveled up over the hill and past the Chapel at Boston College I began conjuring the memories: of Jane's marriage to Steve in that country club over there, of climbing this hill during the marathon when I ran as a bandit, of trips like this to see the Sox, those hundreds of times. By the time we were nearing Kenmore, I shared these thoughts with Jane and her dad: "Lot of rich memories." I fully anticipated adding one, this day.
The scene around the ballpark was much, much different than I remembered it from 1975, '78, '86 or even '99. It used to be the Cask and Flagon, the Ark and precious little else. Now there were scores of bars, each with a line a block long to get in. Evidently, the "young adults"—some of the car turner-overs among them, no doubt — go to Kenmore as if to Mecca on Big Game Day, whether they have a ticket or not. They want to be near the fire, and I found this a little disturbing. But, hey, we would be inside.
And now we were, in the auxiliary press box in right field. There were televisions out here that helped us interpret, via replay, what we had just seen happen — and still it was difficult to sort out the madness of that game. Certainly Pedro threw at Garcia's head; he was pitching lousy and first base was open. Certainly Clemens, who might well have thrown at Manny under these circumstances, did not do so, and certainly Manny overreacted. Certainly Zimmer lost his mind, whether because of his personal history with beanballs or because he hates the Red Sox to an insane degree. Certainly Clemens pitched wonderfully, and Jeter came up big (remember, he should've had two, had Trot not robbed him). And we lost. Certainly, we lost. Under Stan's reckoning, the series was over.
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