Stephen King - Faithful

Boston has now won seven in a row (tying a postseason record), pushing the Cards to the brink where the Red Sox themselves stood only a week ago. The most amazing thing about the World Series part of the Red Sox run is that the Cardinals have yet to lead in a single game. Their manager, Tony La Russa, certainly knows this, and while his part of the postgame news conference seemed long to me, it must have seemed interminable to him. He looked more like a middle-level racketeer being questioned in front of a grand jury than a successful baseball manager. Part of the reason for La Russa’s long face may have had to do with the game’s key play, which came in the third inning, when Cardinals base runner (and starting pitcher) Jeff Suppan was thrown out at third.

Suppan led off the inning with a slow roller to third. Mueller handled it cleanly, but not in time to get Suppan at first. Edgar Renteria followed with a double to right that had Trot Nixon falling on his ass because of the wet conditions in the outfield. [87] It rained heavily in St. Louis right up until game time, and the warning track was a swimming pool. I hate it when teams are forced to play ball under these conditions, but it’s the same old sordid story: when Fox talks, Major League Baseball walks. If this is going to continue, the Players Association ought to consider insisting on pads and helmets (at least for the outfielders) after October 15th. Suppan probably could have scored right there, tying the game, but perhaps he was held up by the third-base coach. (We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, anyway.) So with runners at second and third and nobody out, up came Larry Walker, a gent who is absolutely no slouch with the stick. He hit a ground ball to Mark Bellhorn.

At that point the Boston infield was playing back, conceding Suppan’s run, which would have tied the score, 1–1. But Suppan didn’t score when Walker made contact, nor did he when Bellhorn threw Walker out.Instead he broke toward home, broke back toward third base, then broke toward home a second time. Meanwhile, Boston’s new kid on the block at first base, David Ortiz, in the lineup because the designated hitter doesn’t exist in National League parks, was observing all this. From Ortiz’s side of the diamond, Suppan must have looked as frantic and disoriented as a bird trapped in a garage. He fired across the diamond to Bill Mueller just as Suppan darted back toward third base a second time. Suppan dove for the bag, but Mueller was able to put the tag on him easily.

The result of this beer-league baserunning was that instead of tying the score against one of the American League’s craftiest power pitchers with only one out, the Cardinals found themselves with two outs and no runs scored. Albert Pujols followed Walker, grounding out harmlessly to end the inning. The Cards would not score until the bottom of the ninth, and by then it was too late. The irony (La Russa’s long postgame face suggested he did not need this pointed out to him) was that the National League team had been screwed by the very rules that were supposed to tip the scales in their favor. It was their pitcher who made the baserunning blunder, and our erstwhile designated hitter who saw it happening and gunned him down.

Although Boston got a pair of insurance runs in the fifth, more two-out thunder from Manny Ramirez in the first [88] Followed, in the bottom of the inning, by Manny’s perfect one-hop peg on a short fly to nail Larry Walker at the plate and keep us up 1–0. This moment of redemption after Manny had made errors on consecutive and very ogly plays in Game 1. Cardinals third base coach Jose Oquendo, like so many other baseball people, mistook Manny’s spaciness for lack of ability. Anyone who’s watched Manny throw knows he’s amazingly accurate and that Walker had no chance. SO and Bill Mueller (batted home by Trot Nixon) in the fourth were all the run support Pedro Martinez needed; he, Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke spun a gem. Following Edgar Renteria’s double in the third inning, Red Sox pitching retired eighteen Cards in a row. Larry Walker broke up the string with one out in the ninth, turning around a Keith Foulke fastball to deep left center for a home run.

So now the St. Louis deficit is 0-3. One would like to say that lightning cannot strike twice on the same patch of ground, and certainly not so soon, but in truth, one cannot say that. Especially not if one happens to have been a Red Sox fan for the last fifty years and has had the cup snatched away from his lips so many times just before that first deep and satisfying drink.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of the limitations of this narrative’s necessary diary form until today. You sitting there with the finished book in your hand are like an astronaut who can see the entire shape of the earth: where every sea ends and every coastline begins again. I just go sailing along from day to day, hoping to avoid the storms and writing in this log when seas are calm. And now I think I can smell land up ahead. I hope I’m not jinxing things by saying that, but I really think I can. Not just any land, either, but the sweet Promised Land I’ve been dreaming of ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap and stuck it on my head in the summer of 1954. “There, Stevie,” he said, blowing the scent of Narragansett beer into the face of the big-eyed seven-year-old looking up at him. “They ain’t much, but they’re the best we got.”

Now, fifty long years later, they’re on the verge of being the best of all. One more game and we can put all this curse stuff, all this Babe stuff, all this 1918 stuff, behind us.

Please, baseball gods, just one more game.

SK:Ah, but I begin to smell exotic spices and strange nerds… er, nards… could these be the scents of the Promised Land? I can only hope they are not scents sent by false sirens on hidden stones beyond a mirage of yon beckoning shore…

But I digress.

We rocked tonight, dude.

SO:It’s good to be up 3-0 instead of down 0-3, but the job’s the same: win the game we’re playing. The guys have to stay on top of it.

SK:You must have been eating the postgame spread with Tito. :-)

It’s Trudy’s and my twentieth anniversary today. We were supposed to be in Chicago last weekend, eating at Charlie Trotter’s and the Billy Goat Tavern (the honest-to-God home of the Cubs’ curse as well as the chee-burger, chee-burger skit from SNL ), but those plans dissolved in the face of Games 1 and 2. Tonight, at Trudy’s insistence, I call and cancel our long-standing dinner reservations at the best restaurant in town. I don’t tell the maitre d’ why. “Enjoy the game,” he says.

Signs and portents everywhere. Tonight’s the eighteenth anniversary of our last World Series loss—Game 7 to the ’86 Mets. Not only is there a full moon, but right around game time there’s a total lunar eclipse. By the time I go outside to see the lip of the earth’s shadow cross the Sea of Tranquility, Johnny has us up 1–0 with a leadoff home run. Later, when Trot doubles on a bases-juiced 3-0 green light to give us a 3–0 lead, the eclipse is well under way, casting a decidedly red stain—blood on the moon, or is it a cosmic nod to the Sox?

For the third game in a row, Lowe pitches brilliantly, giving up just three hits in seven innings. Arroyo looks shaky in the eighth, but Embree relieves him and is perfect for the second straight outing. As Foulke closes, I’m standing behind the couch, shifting with every pitch as if I’m guarding the line. At this point, for no other reason it seems than to torture us, Fox decides to show a montage combining all the horrible moments in Red Sox postseason history, beginning with Enos Slaughter, moving through Bucky Dent and Buckner, and finishing with Aaron Boone. I hold a hand up to block it out (to eclipse it!). At this moment in Red Sox history, I do not want to see that shit. It’s not bad luck, it’s bad taste, and whoever thought it was appropriate is a jerk.