Stephen King - Faithful

With one down, Pujols singles through Foulke’s legs, right through the five-hole, a ball Foulke, a diehard hockey fan, should have at least gotten a pad on. We’re nervous—another runner and they’ll bring the tying run to the plate—but Foulke’s cool. He’s got that bitter disdain—that nastiness, really—of a great closer. He easily strikes out Edmonds (now 1 for 15), then snags Edgar Renteria’s comebacker and flips to Mientkiewicz, and that’s it, it’s that simple: the Red Sox have won the World Series!

While we’re still hugging and pounding each other (Trudy’s crying, she can’t help it; Steph’s laughing; I’m just going: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”) Caitlin calls from Boston. In the background, girls are shrieking. She’s at Nickerson Field, formerly Braves Field, where B.U. is showing the game on a big screen. I can barely hear her for the noise. “They did it!” she yells. “They did!” I yell back. There’s no analysis, just a visceral appreciation of the win. I tell her to stay out of the riots, meaning keep away from Fenway, and she assures me she will. It’s not until I get off the phone with her that I realize the weird parallel: when I was a freshman there, my team won the World Series too.

It’s more than just a win; it’s a statement. By winning tonight, we broke the record for consecutive playoff wins, with eight straight. Another stat that every commentator unpacks is that we’re one of only four championship teams to have never trailed in the Series. [89] Along with Tony La Russa’s 1989 A’s, the ’66 O’s and the ’63 Dodgers. All three, like the Sox, had a pair of aces—Dave Stewart and Bob Welch with the A’s, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally with the O’s, and Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale with the Dodgers. Thanks to Johnny, O.C., Manny and Papi, we scored in the first inning of every game, and our starters, with the exception of Wake, shut down St. Louis’s big sticks. Schill, Petey and D-Lowe combined for 20 shutout innings. Much respect to pitching coach Dave Wallace and his scouts for coming up with a game plan to stop the Cards. As a team, they batted .190, well below the Mendoza Line. Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds went 1 for 30, that one hit being a gimme bunt single by Edmonds against a shifted infield. Albert Pujols had zero RBIs. Reggie Sanders went 0 for 9. It’s not that we crushed the ball. We scored only four runs in Game 3 and three in Game 4. Essentially, after the Game 1 slugfest, we played NL ball, beating them with pitching, and in the last two games our defense was flawless. In finally putting the supposed Curse to rest, we dotted every i and crossed every t . And to make it all even sweeter, the last out was made by Edgar Renteria, who wears—as a couple of folks noted—the Babe’s famous #3.

It came down to this: with two outs in the St. Louis half of the ninth and Keith Foulke on the mound—Foulke, the nearly sublime Red Sox closer this postseason—only Edgar Renteria stood between Boston and the end of its World Series drought. Renteria hit a comebacker to the mound. “Stabbed by Foulke!” crowed longtime Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione. “He underhands to first! The Red Sox are World Champions! Can you believe it? ”

I hardly could, and I wasn’t the only one. A hundred miles away, my son woke up his five-year-old son to see the end. When it was over and the RedSox were mobbing each other on the infield, Ethan asked his father, “Is this a dream or are we living real life?”

The answer, it seems to me this morning, is both. The only newspaper available at the general store was the local one (the others were held up because of the lateness of the game), and the Sun-Journal ’s huge front-page headline, of a size usually reserved only for the outbreak of war or the sudden death of a president, was only two words and an exclamation mark:

When the other New England papers finally do arrive in my sleepy little pocket of New England, I’m confident they will bear similar happy headlines of a similar size on their front pages.

A game summary would be thin stuff indeed compared to this out-pouring of joy on a beautiful blue and gold New England morning in late October. [90] And the summary is simple enough: once again last night we hit and pitched. The Cardinals did neither. Only one Cardinal starter—Jason Marquis—managed to stay in a Series game for six innings, and the heart of the St. Louis batting order (Pujols, Rolen, Edmonds) got only a single run batted in during the entire four-game contest. It came on a sac fly. Usually when I go to get the papers and my 8 A.M. doughnut, the little store up the road is almost empty. This morning it was jammed, mostly with people waiting for those newspapers to come in. The majority were wearing Red Sox hats, and the latest political news was the last thing on their minds. They wanted to talk about last night’s game. They wanted to talk about the Series as a whole. They wanted to talk about the guts of Curt Schilling, pitching on his hurt ankle, and the grit of Mr. Lowe, who was supposed to spend the postseason in the bullpen and ended up securing a magickal and historickal place for himself in the record books instead, as the winner in all three postseason clinchers: Game 3 of the Division Series, Game 7 of the League Championship Series, and now Game 4 of the World Series. And while none of those waiting for the big-time morning papers—the Boston Globe, USA Today, and the New York Times —came right out and asked my grandson’s question, I could see it in their eyes, and I know they could see it in mine: Is this a dream, or are we living real life?

It’s real life. If there was a curse (other than a sportswriter’s brilliant MacGuffin for selling books, amplified in the media echo chamber until even otherwise rational people started to half-believe it), it was the undeniable fact that the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918, and all the baggage that fact brought with it for the team’s long-suffering fans.

The Yankees and their fans have always been the heaviest of that baggage, of course. Yankee rooters were never shy about reminding Red Sox partisans that they were supporting lifetime losers. There was also the undeniable fact that in recent years the Yankee ownership—comfy and complacent in their much bigger ballpark and camped just downstream from a waterfall of fan cash—had been able to outspend the Red Sox ownership, sometimes at a rate of two dollars to one. There was the constant patronization of the New York press (the Times, for instance, chuckling in its indulgently intelligent way over the A-Rod deal, and concluding that the Yankees were still showing the Red Sox how to win, even in the off-season), the jokes and the gibes.

The ball through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986 was horrible, of course, but now Buckner can be forgiven.

What’s better is that now the Bucky Dent home run, the Aaron Boone home run and the monotonous chants of Who’s your Daddy? can be forgotten. Laughed off, even. On the whole, I would have to say that while to forgive is human, to forget is freakin’ divine .

And winning is better than losing. That’s easy to lose sight of, if you’ve never done it. I can remember my younger son saying—and there was some truth in this—that when the Philadelphia Phillies finally won their World Championship after years of trying, they became “just another baseball team.” When I asked Owen if he could live with that as a Red Sox fan, he didn’t even hesitate. “Sure,” he said.