Getting It Done

(2 of 3)
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P> As I say, we did not win. Worse, the reason we did not win was that Curt Schilling, the ne plus ultra cog in a team that was purpose-built for the post-season, lasted only three innings. Why was Schilling shelled so? Because a persistent ankle injury that had been exacerbated in Game One versus California was re-tweaked when he was walking up the dugout steps to the field. Yes, correct: As he was about to take the mound and stay nose-to-nose with Mussina until the Mussina Inning, something caused the tendon to fray further.

Something.

The Bambino. Surely it was the Bambino.

The Times headline on the morning after read “Here We Go Again,” and when I saw it I realized: Yeah, it was a helluva game. The untouchable Mussina, the roaring comeback, the dramatic appearance of Rivera. Would Chapter Two measure up? Well, it arrived fraught with possibility. Central to this was Pedro Martinez, great pitcher, headhunter, Yankees' punching bag. After his second straight drubbing by the Yanks near season’s end, Pedro had issued what was (we Sox fans know) a characteristically cryptic and, well, crazy declaration. He suggested that the big fellows in pinstripes were, just possibly, “my daddy.” Hmmm. So: Might the customary Stadium chant — “Nine-teen, eigh-teen; Nine-teen, eigh-teen!” — be joined by, or even supplanted by, something new tonight?

“Who’s your daddy?!”

“Who’s your daddy?!”

“Who’s your daddy!?!?!”

Thunderous is the only word to describe it. And, clearly, there was only one way to silence it: Pitch well. Pedro took the mound, walked a guy, hit a guy, looked awful, jammed the bases, gave up a run — then twirled like a magician, and got out of the inning without further damage. How? I can’t remember. The whole thing was a mess, but there it was.

Second inning, Pedro crafty. Third, Pedro stronger. Fourth, Pedro in charge. “That’s it,” I said silently, being a proponent of the current wisdom vis-a-vis Pedro. “Ride this horse to Pitch Number 100, then go straight to the pen.” I was sure that Francona, in the first Year of the Bosox AGL (After Grady Little), shared this philosophy and would do as directed.

He did not, and that was why it wasn’t a 1-1 game going into the ninth, but 3-1 Yanks. John Olerud, whose power was yesteryear, hit a two-run homer off Pedro on Pitch 105, and what was a very good game (especially for New York hurler Jon Lieber) was not a great one.

What else do I recall from Game Two? Not much. There was this guy beneath the stands whose face had been pummeled and who was catching his dripping blood in a beer cup. The usual. Mariano got another save, and that was okay with me. We were heading back to Fenway. We’ll kill ’em in Game Three.

Kill or be killed. We got killed, as you know. We got trounced in historic fashion. All of the statistics, from hits to time-elapsed to pitchers-used, was the most this, the biggest that, the longest this, the worst that — ever. One fact should suffice: Nineteen was the most runs ever scored in a post-season game by the Yankees, who’ve played a few post-season games through the years. Every Red Sox pitcher was Timlin tonight, including Timlin himself and the starter, young Bronson, who had recently dazzled against the Angels. The Yankees aren’t the Angels, Master Arroyo, and welcome to the true playoffs.

Other thoughts about Game Three? None. I don’t want to talk about it. That Cowsills performance before the game was ridiculous. The Cowsills? They’ll sure get the juices flowing, eh? I don’t want to talk about it. Can’t believe they’re still alive — the Cowsills.

In looking, now, for any good news at all, I do remember that, when Mendoza balked home a run, I said to myself, “Well, at least I’m not watching FOX. As least I don’t have to hear Professor McCarver explain to me the history of the balk and why, generally, it’s not a good idea to balk in baseball with a man on third.”

I’ll go personal for a minute here, to take my mind off the game.

“Took me all these years to pay you back!” So said Jake, my college buddy, who had put me in this particular $90 seat on this particular night. Apparently I had done him a similar if less-costly favor in some bygone post-season series, and the fact had sat there in his Red Sox brain until he could reciprocate, which he was finally able to do in the ’04 ALCS.

The whole evening reeked of reminiscence for me. I met Jake behind the left-field foul pole, as was our tradition in the late 1970s when he and I, both post-grad students in Boston, routinely cut night classes to follow several very good Red Sox teams from a center-field vantage. We compared notes during the long 19-run debacle about those long-ago games — “Remember the twin 4-0 twi-night wins over (was it?) Minnesota, Tiant and (was it?) Cleveland winning, fog so thick, couldn’t see home?” We renewed a friendship that, despite the separation enforced by distance and family, needed no renewing.

“Did you eat?” Jake asked as he went for beers and whatever else.

“I did.” Did I ever.

I had dined, at Clio’s, with my sister and her husband, who also had tickets for the game. We’d sat at the bar and enjoyed the most extraordinary sushi I had ever eaten, New York sushi included. Gail said that Boston magazine had recently tried to pin the frou-frouing of Beantown cuisine — smaller portions, preciousness of presentation — on Clio’s, but then had given up the effort, as Clio’s was simply and dauntingly excellent. Scott sipped his Beefeater’s martini (he’s adopted our dad’s brand), and tried a piece of the Kobe beef with salt. Gail and I talked about Dad and all those Sox games, and she apologized for not taking me to a more appropriately “baseball” restaurant before the game.

“Gail,” I said. “We’re in the Eliot Hotel. This space used to be the Eliot Lounge. Spaceman Bill Lee came here after almost every game. That bar was Marathon headquarters. Tommy Leonard — he poured me more pints than . . . Well, I can’t tell you what good bones this place has!” And then I tried the raw tuna thingie in the coconut juice.

Between Clio’s and a nightcap of Maker’s Mark in Jake’s living room in Andover at 2:05 a.m., there was that awful game. Even the next morning, the taste of it — and, well, maybe of Clio’s and the bourbon, too — was in my mouth. I asked Jake and his wife, Annie, if there was a nice jogging route nearby, where a Sox fan might clear his head and sweat away some sins.

The run, it turned out, furthered the resonant reverie I had sunk into. I trotted down Chestnut Street and hung a right into the bird sanctuary owned by Phillips Andover Academy, the famous prep school (and let’s leave W out of this). Large maples and pines shaded the needled pathway. These were the woods of my youth, which Luci and I are trying to approximate for our kids by choosing Westchester County — about as New Englandy as you can get while remaining in the Apple’s orbit. The foliage in Andover was just about peak. It reflected on the pond down there, through that grove.

I exited the sanctuary and beheld the campus. I ran up and into it. It was so very Phinneas, so John Knowles. (Do kids still read that? Will mine?) Near the main road, which yet had no cars stirring, I loped past the Andover Inn. My family, before my father’s death, had a tradition of going to New England inns for a pre-Christmas Christmas dinner. One year, on the 22nd or 23rd of December, we had come here. Dad had really enjoyed that one, and I thought it was because, as a product of mill city Lowell and its Lowell High School, he was aspirational about things like Andover. Now here he was, in his seniority, able to dine with his wife and children at the Andover Inn, on the grounds of Phillips Andover Academy. I’ll bet he felt positively patriarchal, that evening. As I jogged out over the playing fields, I was thinking about how I wish I could tell Dad about Clio’s — “Remember the Eliot Lounge? Bill Lee usta go there?” — and that Gail and I had enjoyed a fine meal there, before a Sox-Yanks game. He would have thought: Wow. Then he might have felt pretty good about himself and Mom.

Red Sox Nation is not a democratic country (I mused as my running shoes got wet with the morning dew). Our players are black and white and Hispanic, but we’re not. We’re far too white, and we can somehow scrape together the outrageous sum of ninety dollars for a post-season seat.

The only things we are that might be termed “good” are devoted and fraternal. Some of us are Stephen-King rich, and some of us are still from Lowell — and probably should be saving the ninety clams for groceries. Some of us went to Phillips Andover, and some of us — me, my wife — went to Chelmsford High, and heard rumors of places like Phillips. Gail went to the same Catholic school, Notre Dame Academy in Tyngsboro, that our mom went to long ago, and she once got invited to a party at Phillips and saw JFK Junior from across a crowded room. That’s as close as kids from Chelmsford got.

But in the Nation, we all wear our B-hats (as my daughter Caroline calls them) the same way. We are one — hardly a democracy, but the best we can do. Those two eighty-year-old gents in chinos on the Phillips courts at 7:45 on this brilliant Sunday morn: They’re happily trading forehands, but they’re dying that the Sox are now dead as doornails. Those two 15-year-old girls walking across the commons to chapel: They may be from Tennessee and Taiwan, but they’re learning about the Nation, and if they’re not yet citizens, they soon will be. Those young families down by the pond (as I jog back through the sanctuary), allowing their retrievers a frisky fall swim: They're discussing those babies that they bear in those snugglies, no doubt, but they’re also discussing the Red Sox collapse. Jim Powers, forever and always the beloved leader of the beestung BLOHARDS, he is lamenting — in Fairfield, probably, or maybe up here in Boston — the plight of the Bosox. My mom and brother in Chelmsford; my pals from childhood Bruce, Mike and Barry ; Bambi and Steve and Bo and John and the girls down in Larchmont, and Bam’s parents in Wellesley (around the block from where my sister lives); the lobstermen on Isle au Haut, Maine; Roger Angell (and, yes, Roger could sue me for this particular stunt), wherever he is; my wife and my own kids back in Westchester, where this morning Caroline is crafting a note to leave for Daddy (a note I’ll tell you about later) . . . my own dad in heaven above, up there with Ted . . . We’re all dying that the Sox are dead, and worse: at the hands of the Yankees.

“Who needs ’em?” he shouted. “Who needs two? Face value.”

How the mighty have plunged. I had been told that I could get something like a 26-fold profit for my $90 seats to the Angels — the Angels! — and now this is what it’s come to at 8:05 on Sunday evening. Later, between innings, the quiz on the message-board will ask us to guess the attendance. The answer will not be in the 35,000s, but, rather, the high 34s. I.E.: Some folks, so brutalized by the worst game ever, will not even show up.

I, however, have had a somewhat restorative afternoon. I drove over to visit with Mom, and Gail came out to Chelmsford, too. We watched the Patriots extend their winning streak to 20, and, as we have done a thousand times in the last couple of years, we voiced our happiness that the Pats had “got it done” (won the Super Bowl) in Dad’s lifetime — even if the Sox hadn’t. (Footnote: That’s not technically correct. The Red Sox won the World Series in 1918, as we all know. Dad was two.)

Brady had been customarily brilliant, and Gail and I had enjoyed the low-key visit. Then I was back in Andover, watching as Jake grilled steak. We ate in a leisurely fashion — we were in no hurry to get to the park — and then we four (Annie and daughter Maggie in back, Jake and I up front) headed down I-93 for the last game of the season. Lowe had been forced into service, so we were going to bid adieu to Derek — and, for that matter, Pedro, and surely that third-base coach who sends everyone, and whomsoever else was leaving the Nation tonight.

“Face value!” he shouted louder as he worked the parking lot opposite the ballpark. No takers.

Well, what to say about the next two games? That they were long? And dramatic? And went deep into extra innings? And featured two blown saves by Mariano? And traipsed upon early morning once, then serious night on the same day as the aforesaid morning? History all over the place: The longest game in ALCS history (five hours and change on Sunday) followed by the longest game in post-season history (just shy of six hours on Monday). Twenty-eight innings of baseball, baserunners all over the place — stranded, stranded and stranded — climactic clouts, big steals and runners thrown out, guys who beat out bunts and guys who can’t bunt to save their lives.

What do you say about those games? Home runs by A-Rod and Papi and classy Bernie and all sorts of people in those games, lead changes, and . . . Do you say that Lowe, whom we have a soft-spot for because he threw his no-hitter while Dad was still alive, pitched great (and Francona pulled him too soon, thereby letting Timlin screw it up) . . . Or do you surge ahead to the crucial single by our Mariano foil, Bill Mueller, which tied it up in the ninth. Or to the witching-hour-plus performance by No-need-to-panic, You’ve-got-Lescanic (“If you tell me Lescanic comes in tonight and wins,” I said to Jake on the way out of the Sunday/Monday game, “I say to you, ‘Well, then, it went twelve — and we’d already burned everyone else.’”) What can I possibly say about the regal Ortiz? Can he do it every night? Apparently he can.

What do you say about the second of those games? I don’t know what to say about Pedro, in his probable Sox swan song before becoming a Yankee. He pitched just as well as Lowe, that is until Francona allowed him to throw Pitch 101, which Jeter hit for a double, three runs scoring. So much going on all the time in this game! Do you even remember that Pedro then hit A-Rod (of course he did; his second hit batsman of the inning)? How about young Bronson’s redemption that final night at the Fens, fanning Rodriguez and Sheffield? Sheffield misplaying Mientkiewicz’s double?