Postscript: Deliverance

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Well, the "he" would be Tim Wakefield, and nuff said. I love Wakefield as a brother—there's no finer human being on the team, and he's as gutsy as they come in the sport of baseball—but he offers a flutterball to the batsmen, as we know, and despite his considerable heroics versus the Yanks in Game Five, he had been going poorly of late.

Though staked to an early lead, Wake was not long for this night, as we know, and neither was Caroline, who started to nod in the fifth. I promised I would rouse her with the news if the Sox won—a promise I would later break—and gave her a kiss goodnight. She and Luci departed for bed, and I was left with the agony of watching four errors committed and a lead blown before Bellhorn—Bellhorn!—did it again.

Sunday morning after Mass we gave Sister Margaret, the diehard Yankee fan, a good natured hard time, and she responded by declaring, "I will not pray for your Red Sox." (The good nun refrained from calling them "your g-d Red Sox.")

"They don't need it," I said bravely, then wondered at my confidence. Since when are Bosox fans possessed of even a soupcon of bravado, be it fact-based or false? I'll tell you since when. Since their team has hooked up 52 times in two seasons with the mega-million-buck Yankees, each and every go-round a playoff-intensity fray, and have split that enormous series right down the middle—now, even unto one ALCS title apiece. It's like boning a bat. If a two-season experience like that doesn't make a team ready to beat any and everybody else, nothing does.

Sunday afternoon saw our merry band attend a ragamuffin parade downtown, then a private Halloween party. Caroline is a witch this year, Mary Grace is Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz; not the Wiggles' dinosaur), and Jack is, inevitably, Spider-Man—one of perhaps 50 Spider-Men in the parade. Mommy is well-dressed, as usual—she refuses to make an idiot of herself—and Daddy, gleefully an idiot in this season, is a cowboy. I own an Akubra hat and a Drize-a-bone riding coat from Australia, pointy-toed boots from Calgary, a denim shirt, a belt with a big buckle, and a string tie from some stupid theme party in the '80s—so if you own it, flaunt it. I reflected as I suited up that, just twelve months ago, I wore that get-up for a week straight as I chased the Sox-Yanks series in the year of Cowboy Up! Was I jinxing the '04 club by taking the garb out of hibernation for today's parade and party? Hey, if I'm feeling tough enough to face down Sister Margaret, I can take on any Curse.

During the party I was at the bar with three Jets fans when Pennington scored with 1:48 left in the first half. I casually remarked, "They've left Brady too much time." Which they had, and the score would remain frozen at 13-6, Pats in front, till the game's final gun. I was turning into one pretty cocky sports fan.

Sunday night I watched the whole thing alone, as it was a school night and Luci was beat from all of the activity. Four more errors but, whoa, that Schilling. This was even gutsier than what he had done against the Yanks, because this night, he didn't have his stuff.

I started wondering, during that game, about the truisms surrounding this Cardinals team. Truisms: St. Louis is the best hitting team in baseball. St. Louis is the best clutch-hitting team in baseball. St. Louis is the best team in baseball on the basepaths. Rolens and Pujols are RBI machines.

So, then, we will hang our hopes on creaming St. Louis's suspect starting pitching, right? That seemed like a good strategy, and the way to go about executing such a strategy might be to score first-inning runs. So let's try that. And, through Game Two, it was working fine.

But those truisms again. Guess what? Turns out we're the best clutch-hitting team in baseball. Clearly the idea against the Cards' starters was patience—get your pitch—and only a week after deciding that Matsui was the best two-strike hitter I'd ever seen, I amended that opinion to: Any Red Sox is the best two-strike hitter I've ever seen AND our entire team is the best two-out-hitting team I've ever seen. St. Louis pitchers seemed to be living the proverbial one strike away, and then, snatch, it was gone, and the ball was floating towards a gap or (worse) towards the bleachers. People named Bellhorn (yet again!) and Cabrera were doing this to them, while big lugs named Pujols and Rolen and Edwards were doing nada.

Of all of the stats that I saw in the paper on the train ride Monday morning, the one that struck me was: Of 350-something pitches delivered to the Sox in Games One and Two, the batters had swung through 18. The guys simply weren't missing anything.

My friend, Jane, had attended the first two. I called her when she returned to New York, and wasn't surprised by her report: "It was great . . really great . . . But, you know, it wasn't near as intense as last week. I don't know if it's the girl getting killed or post-Yankee letdown or what. But it really was weird: The team was winning the World Series, and at no time was it like it was last week."

Jane had mentioned what most Sox fans were leaving unsaid last week: the girl getting killed. After the seventh game of the Yanks series, 80,000 packed in and around Kenmore Square in Beantown, and some of the kids started going nuts. Cops began shooting pepper spray at them and, apparently, a young woman from Emerson College caught some square in the eye. She died. It was an appalling, heartbreaking tragedy, and certainly it cast a gloom over the Series for any thinking fan. It also left us all praying—all of us, Sister Margaret included—that if the Sox won this thing, Boston would stay peaceful.

The stands in St. Louis were rocking and rolling before the first pitch of Game Three, so there was only one thing to do—score in the first inning again, and shut them up. I think when Suppan got caught off third by our nimble first baseman Ortiz, Cards fans knew the world was out of whack and they might not be coming back in this series. Their boppers weren't bopping, their base-runners were blundering and the Sox were starting to look positively slick. Manny was hitting like David, David was fielding like Pujols, Pedro was drawing a walk and Rolen was hitting like Pedro. Most important: Pedro was twirling like old Pedro, and that's a pitcher who can win you a big game. Which he did.

So there we sat, after three games, having led every single one of the 27 innings of the World Series (meaning, you win 'em all). And there I sat last night, in front of the tube, firmly believing we, behind Derek, were about to get it done. The feeling was universal in Red Sox Nation. I had been getting confident e-mails all day long, from BLOHARDS and others, and I'd like to share with you one that arrived only moments before the first pitch. It was sent by my friend Jake, with whom I had enjoyed the Sox-Yanks games at Fenway a week ago. The email was headlined "At the risk of . . ."—an allusion to jinxing what was about to transpire in Missouri—and all you need to know to decipher it is, Tom was Jake's dad, Artie was mine and Hampton a beach in New Hampshire where families from Lowell used to vacation. The email read:

"I know, I know (so do you) but I can't help myself. Plus, this is prompted by one of your recently-penned lines . . .

"I just know that a few short hours from now, your father, my dad, and countless others who never had the good fortune to experience here on earth the ultimate sports fan's pleasure, but who ushered their sons and daughters into the Sox fellowship, will be setting up their lounge chairs in heaven's family room, beaming in anticipation of the pleasure of finally seeing baseball's version of the Holy Grail in our communal grasp. (Ted, Tony C., Harry Agganis, Joe Cronin, Smoky Joe Wood, Ned Martin, Ken Coleman and countless others, large and small, famous and otherwise, will also be in the house for the occasion*).

"Even they don't know the exact score, or in which game, but they do know that this time, at long last, they'll soon be pounding each other on the back and smiling down on us here below as we exult for our team, ourselves, our own next generation of fans, and for them.

"I'd also like to think that Tom and Artie are right now reminiscing together about one almost-forgotten summer at Hampton—yet another lost campaign for the Sox —and thinking how the ironies abound that each had a son—and fellow Sox fanatic — who years later renewed their acquaintance, went on to share a college experience that can't be duplicated, an eternal friendship (and one even introduced the other to the love of his life)—and albeit with lengthy intervals of years in between, continued to go together to countless Sox games, both humdrum and historic.

"Long may we run.

"Jake

"*They're not sure whether the Babe will be there, even though everybody invited him, both because it's not completely clear that he'd be unambiguously happy to be amongst them for that purpose, and because as usual, he's got plans to roister at numerous other parties."

Now we know the exact score; we know the Cards never touched our starting pitching, post-Wake; we know Boston stayed relatively peaceful last night; we know ours is the seventh team ever to win the World Series after being three outs away from losing, the fourth never to trail in the Series and the first to win eight in a row in the post-season; we know the lunar eclipse aided and abetted a re-ordering of the universe; we know God is not necessarily a Yankee fan; we know the Red Sox got in done in our lifetimes—and will get it done again. The Babe has a hangover this morning. And you know what?

I feel for him.