Stephen King - Faithful

The Red Sox (who will go on to romp in this one) put up just a single run in the bottom of the first—not much, considering that they once again send seven men to the plate. The Sox stats this year with bases loaded and two out are pretty paralyzing: just 12 for 54, only two of those for extra bases (both doubles), all the rest mere singles. This time Kevin “Cowboy Up” Millar is the goat, grounding weakly to first. He leaves two more on base in the third, and leaves ’em loaded again in the fourth. The Sox score three that frame, but Millar has stranded eight men all by himself, and the game isn’t half over. I bet his agent won’t be bringing that stat up at contract time.

Even without Millar doing much (anything, really), it’s 9–1 after five, Tim Hudson’s gone, Oakland’s baked, and I’m on my way to my fourthstraight Fenway win. Mark Bellhorn gets 5 RBIs, Manny Ramirez hits another home run, and Kevin Youkilis reaches base four times in five at-bats, scoring twice.

There are lots of things to like about this game in spite of the cold. But maybe the best…there’s this little kid, okay? Ten, maybe twelve years old. And late in the game, after a lot of people have taken off, he grabs one of the front-row seats, and I spot him and Stewart deep in conversation, cap visor to cap visor. They don’t know each other from Adam, and there’s got to be thirty years between them, but baseball has turned them into instant old cronies. Anyone looking over their way would take them for father and son. And what’s wrong with that?

Two number fives on the downward slide: Mr. Kim returns to Korea for unspecified treatment of his back and hip, while the Yankees give Donovan Osborne his outright release. It’s late May, and the Yankees haven’t figured out their rotation. Having Bronson Arroyo definitely gives us the edge.

Tonight it’s the struggling Derek Lowe against Mark Redman, 3-2 with a 3.60 ERA. By comparison, Lowe’s ERA is 6.02.

We have Steph’s sax recital and then dinner after, and get back in the A’s fifth. It’s 6–2 Sox with two down and no one on. I figure Lowe must be throwing okay. Kotsay doubles, Byrnes singles him in. Chavez homers off the wall behind Section 34, and it’s 6–5.

I wonder if it’s me—if I should turn the TV off and come back later.

I’m glad I don’t. In our sixth, Johnny’s on third with one down. Ortiz can’t deliver him, and with two down and first open, Macha has Redman walk Manny. At this point, Redman’s thrown 120 pitches. The switch-hitting Tek is coming up, so with his relievers up and warm, Macha can choose which side of the plate he hits from. He lets Redman pitch to him. Tek hits one onto Lansdowne Street and we’ve got a four-run cushion again.

Anastacio Martinez relieves Lowe, giving up three straight hits and a run before Embree comes on and gets out of it with a double-play ball.

In the A’s eighth, they have two on and one out when Billy McMillon stings one down the first-base line. McCarty gloves it behind the bag in foul territory; his momentum takes him halfway to the tarp before he spins and throws to Timlin covering. McMillon slides and gets tangled up with Timlin—he’s out! The replay’s crazy: I’ve never seen anyone make that play so far in foul ground, and perfectly. That’s exactly why McCarty’s on the team. It makes me wish I could send him back to 1986 to spell Billy Buck for an inning.

In the ninth, McCarty shines again, with a sweeping snatch of a bounced throw by Bellhorn, helping Foulke to a one-two-three inning for his tenth straight save.

On the postgame show, Eck tries to figure out Lowe’s problem. Of the fifth, Eck says, “It’s a mystical inning,” and we crack up. Groovy Eck with his Farrah Fawcett wings. But he’s right too (right on, Eck!): “When you win a game and your ERA goes up, you know you didn’t pitch too good.”

9 A.M.: Neither Stew nor I made it to the ballyard last night. I had a PEN dinner in Boston’s Back Bay and Stewart had his son’s saxophone recital—which, he assured me, is nonnegotiable. The Red Sox did not miss us. Derek Lowe was once more far from perfect, but the Sox bats stayed hot and in his start against Oakland, Lowe was just good enough to go six and eke out the win. The Red Sox rolled to their fifth straight, their seventh in their last eight games.

But I watch SportsDesk this morning musing on my Yankees essay—the one where I talked about how we hate what we fear—and looking at my new hat, which was sent to me from yankeeshater.com. Because the Yankees have also been winning, and while we’ve been doing it at home, they’ve been doing it on the road, which is a tougher proposition. They came from behind last night at Camden Yards not just once but twice, finally putting the Orioles away 12–9. So in spite of this nifty streak of ours, we’re still only a game and a half in front. Two Sox losses combined with just two Yankee wins, and we’re back in second place. This is what the Yankees do. They hang around.

Those suckers lurk.

10:30 P.M.: The summer’s disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, opens this weekend, but disaster struck tonight at Fenway Park, as Boston’s brave little five-game winning streak went bye-bye in a big way. Oakland beat the Red Sox like a drum, pounding out 17 hits on their way to a 15–2 win. Me, I knew it was going to happen. I went to the game with my nephew, Jon, who goes to school in Boston. He came over to my hotel room before the game and tossed my hat on the bed, which everyoneknows is just about the worst luck in the world—talk about bad mojo! But I don’t blame him; the kid just didn’t know.

Also, most (or maybe all) major league teams now insist on a five-man pitching rotation, and our fifth man, Bronson Arroyo, while promising, is still very much a work in progress. That fifth man in the rotation is about stre-et-ching the starting pitching…and that, of course, is all about the money. We’ve been there before in this book, and will undoubtedly be there again. But I can remember a time, children—I believe it was 1959—when the White Sox went to the World Series with what was essentially a three -man rotation. Of course, those were the days when a good pitcher still got paid in five figures and a man could take his whole family to the ballyard for twenty bucks, parking included (and smoke a White Owl in the grandstand, if he was so inclined). I’m not saying those were better baseball days…but I’m not saying they weren’t, either.

In the midst of all this, Kevin Youkilis drew a walk in his last at-bat. He still hasn’t played in a major league game where he’s failed to reach base.

A final note before I pack it in for the night: I took myself off this afternoon to see Still, We Believe, an entertaining documentary which chronicles the star-crossed Red Sox team of 2003, the one that voyaged so far only to tear out its hull (not to mention the hearts of its fans) on those cruel Yankee reefs in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series. This film is currently playing in theaters all over New England, plus a few New York venues (where it is attended largely by sadists in Yankee caps, one would suppose), and probably nowhere else. It’s a charming, funny, sweetly poignant film. Its token efforts to explore the Mind of Management—always supposing Management has a Mind, a hypothesis with little evidence to support it—aren’t very interesting, but when it focuses on the fortunes of four fans, it’s a lot more successful. One is a young man who is wheelchair-bound due to an accident; two are semidaffy (but very endearing) young women I kept thinking of as Laverne and Shirley; the fourth is Angry Bill.