Stephen King - Faithful

So we’re a game behind Oakland in the wild-card race, and we have the unpleasing prospect of three games against the red-hot Minnesota Twins in the immediate future and eight more against the O’s before the season is over. And if we finish the season series with them at something like 7-12, and lose the wild card by two games, we can blame the Birds. Hell, it beats blaming the Bambino.

Now the papers say Theo might try to piggyback that Twins-Pirates deal, shipping Youkilis to Pittsburgh for Mientkiewicz. Just the idea makes me queasy. Trading Lowe or Nomar would be bad enough, even if we have no intention of signing them, but Youk’s the future. After what happened with Freddy Sanchez (though he’s been hurt the last year or so), they ought to know better.

The Sox have a travel day, so to get my daily dose I take Steph and the boys over to Norwich for a doubleheader against the Trenton Thunder. Like New Britain, Norwich has a pretty little park that holds around six thousand, but the food is better here. I get a ball during warm-ups and have former Sox closer and current Norwich pitching coach Bob “The Steamer” Stanley and his former batterymate and current first-base coach Roger LaFrancois sign it.

The Thunder are the Yanks’ double-A club. They used to be ours before we acquired Portland from the Marlins, and the Navigators used to be the Yankees’, so for long-term fans there are some mixed (if not to say confused) feelings. But it’s Camp Day, so most of the fans are too young to care. It’s a brilliant blue afternoon, everyone receives a coupon for free ice cream, and as we leave, the ushers hand out flyers telling us Willie Mays is coming next week. Makes me wish I could be here for it.

It’s the big party for Trudy’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary, a real production, and I can’t get away with the sneaky Pirates radio and earphone. A good half of the guests are New Englanders and diehard Sox fans—the men mostly, with memories of the ’46 club, and the old Braves. To a man, they think Francona’s just another patsy. “The last manager we had with any spine was Dick Williams. You saw, everywhere he went he was a winner.” The women roll their eyes.

After the band’s packed up, we have a nightcap downstairs in the bar. The TV’s silently playing Extra Innings, and Eric Friede and Sam Horn and Jayme Parker are all smiling, so my guess is we won. The Yanks did too, and the Rangers, so we’re behind the A’s again.

They also list a pair of big trades. The Mets have won the Benson sweepstakes. Not only that, but in a five-team deal, somehow they also picked up Tampa Bay ace Victor Zambrano and put themselves in a position to win the wimpy NL East. The other trade is an eight-player swap between the Marlins and Dodgers, the principals being Brad Penny and Charles Johnson, Guillermo Mota and Paul Lo Duca.

No news from Theo.

The Yankees have reversed themselves on Giambi’s intestinal parasite and are now saying he has a benign tumor and may be out for the season. Also, during Fox’s Yankee Game of the Week, an announcer says that Trot will miss the rest of the year (instead of the week or two the Sox originally reported). If that’s true, we’re screwed.

All the friends who came to last night’s party are here for a day at the beach, and there’s a revolving audience for the Yankees-O’s game. A-Rod takes home on the back end of a double steal that the Orioles fall for, and for the rest of the day the announcers crow about how A-Rod stole home as if he’s Jackie Robinson.

I’m just watching the game for any late trade news, since the deadline’s almost upon us. Soon it’s past four—no news—and the Yanks are winning, so I go pack my things to drive Steph home for a friend’s birthday party.

I get the news from my daughter-in-law, a once-upon-a-time Yankee fan (like once-upon-a-time Protestants who convert to Catholicism, lapsed Yankee fans who become Red Sox partisans are the ones who REALLY MEAN BUSINESS), and she sounds the way I feel: shocked but somehow not all that surprised.

The player most commonly identified with the Boston Red Sox, the one whose number most fans probably expected to see someday up on the wall along with Williams’s, Pesky’s, and Yaz’s, is no longer with the Red Sox. Number Five has been traded, and probably the only consolation to be taken by fans who place tradition and heart above salary and statistics is that he’s been traded to the one other team in baseball whose long World Series drought has become not just the stuff of history but that of myth. That’s right folks; at game time tomorrow, Nomar Garciaparra—Boston’s surviving marquee player from the days of Dan Duquette—will take the field as a Cubbie.

Does the deal make sense? I don’t think so; I think that two years from now it will look like a panic move made by a young GM who saw his high-priced (and supposedly high-powered) baseball team treading water eight or nine games behind the monolithic Yankees in the AL East and a game or two behind the Oakland A’s in the wild card (but still more advantageouslyplaced than their closest competition). In other words, I think that Theo Epstein probably pulled the pin on a big deal at the trading deadline mostly because everyone in Boston’s howling oh-God-my-ass-hole’s-on-fire sports community was yelling for it to happen

What exactly did we get for our usually dependable, sometimes brilliant, and (I admit it) at times erratic shortstop, who was batting .321 at the time of the trade? We got two Gold Glove infielders, one with a name that can be both pronounced and spelled—that would be Orlando Cabrera—and the other with a name that can at least be pronounced: Doug Mientkiewicz (man -KAY- vitch) . Putting the bat on the little white ball has seemed a little harder than catching it for these gentlemen, at least so far this season. Both are hitting around .250.

According to Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, the fact that Cabrera and Mientkiewicz currently have batting averages seventy points below Garciaparra’s doesn’t matter. As a disciple of Billy Beane and a follower of Bill James, he likes these men for their defense and their on base per centage (OBP). [30] Mientkiewicz did his best to make Epstein look like a genius in his first game as a Red Sox, going 2 for 4, both singles. The second hit came in the top of the ninth against Minnesota—the only pro baseball team he’d ever played for until this evening—in a game which the Twins led by a score of 5–4. He got to second base—into scoring position, in other words—before Kevin Youkilis struck out to end the game. The other new Boston players should join the club tomorrow. He also likes them because Nomar Garciaparra is in the last year of a contract currently paying him $11 million a year, and resigning him probably would have been très expensive. Stories about how Nomar’s feelings were hurt during the failed A-Rod deal are probably no more than the usual baseball bullshit, but here’s something that isn’t: both Nomar and his agent know that baseball is a business. They also know that an athlete’s period of top earning ability is severely limited when compared to, say, that of a corporate CEO (or a best-selling novelist), and I have no doubt that Nomar and his man of business were determined to Make ’Em Pay this fall, whoever ’em turned out to be. Theo Epstein just decided ’em wasn’t going to be us .