Stephen King - Faithful

Christ, I hope I haven’t jinxed them, saying that.

We’ve won eight in a row and tonight we’re going for the sweep against the Angels, a very good club, yet when Derek Lowe stumbles out of the gate, the Faithful grumble. Not this Lowe, not again. The Lowe who just misses his location and gets frustrated, puts runners on and gets distracted, gets ahead of batters and then throws too nice of a strike. The Lowe who kicks absently at the air like a bummed Little Leaguer after an RBI single.

Colon is having an even worse night. It seems we have two on or bases loaded every inning, but he slows the pace of the game (doing a whole lot of yardwork on the mound), and manages to weasel out of what should be big innings. After three, it’s 4–3 Sox, and at the rate the game’s going, we’ll be here till midnight.

With one down in the Angels’ fourth, Adam Kennedy flies one to Dave Roberts in right. Roberts isn’t a right fielder by trade, and he tracks this one awkwardly, as if he doesn’t quite see it, freezing and then waving at the ball as if it’s suddenly reappeared out of the lights. It hits his glove, then his leg, then the grass. Booooooooo!

It’s tough to hear, since Roberts is an eloquent and genuinely nice guy and a recent addition, and he’s playing out of position, but it’s an important game, and the ball should have been caught. Still, I can’t help reflecting that, even in the best of times, the Faithful are a hanging jury.

Lowe walks the next guy. He’s struggling, and in even more trouble when Chone Figgins pokes a shallow liner to right-center that should drop. The one real tool Roberts has is speed. He reads this ball perfectly, flashing in and diving, picking it cleanly with a nifty backhand. The runner on second is halfway home, and Roberts doubles him up easily to end the threat. A huge, deafening standing O, and gratifying as hell to see a good guy go from goat to hero in a matter of a few pitches.

Lowe seems to take the lesson to heart, and battles into the eighth, when he leaves to a standing O from the same folks (including me) who were shaking their heads a couple hours ago. We hang on for the sweep, knocking the Angels to four and a half back. The turnaround’s complete. Like Dave Roberts and Derek Lowe, with the August it’s had, this team has redeemed itself, and the Faithful are more than grateful, we’re wild with hope.

Tonight’s starter for Texas once pitched for Boston. Red Sox fans remember him well, and not with affection; because of all the home runs he gave up, mostly in a relief role, he became known as John “Way Back” Wasdin. Since then he’s been around, and he’s improved. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to return to the show after a stint in triple-A and land a starting gig with the Rangers, who have performed above expectations all season long and are only now beginning to fade a little in the wild-card race.

We have Pedro Martinez on the mound, and on paper this game looks like a ridiculous mismatch, but I enter Fenway feeling really nervous for the first time since getting here for the second game of the Angels series. Yes, Wasdin is only 2-2, and yes, his current ERA is an unremarkable 7.01, but he remembers perfectly well what the fans here used to call him and he’d really like to be the guy who ends the Red Sox streak. Also, Texas has a formidable hitting lineup. Guys like Michael Young, Kevin Mench, Hank Blalock, and Alfonso Soriano (who came to Texas in the A-Rod trade and has lit it up at Arlington) seem made for Fenway.

All my worries about “Way Back” Wasdin turn out to be justified, and it doesn’t help that two more Red Sox players are sitting wounded on the bench: David Ortiz (shoulder) and Johnny Damon (ankle). Wasdin is throwing some kind of heavy shit [48] A technical baseball term. that has our makeshift lineup popping up all night, and when Wasdin finally departs, he has given up less than a handful of hits. Luckily for us, one is a home run to Manny and another is a home run to Bill Mueller.

Pedro strikes out nine, and faces only one serious threat, in the seventh. With runners on first and third and two out, Gary Matthews Jr. tests Jason Varitek’s arm by trying to steal second. Varitek passes the test. Orlando Cabrera slaps the tag on Matthews, and that takes care of that. Timlin and Embree tag-team-pitch the eighth and Foulke closes out the ninth. The Standells are singing “Dirty Water” no later than ten past ten and the crowd goes insane. The Sox have won their tenth straight, and I find myself doing the Funky Chicken in the aisle with a seventysomething woman I don’t know from the Lady Eve. She’s wearing a Curt Schilling T-shirt, and that’s good enough for me.

Did I say the crowd goes insane? That’s wrong. They already went. It happened at approximately 9:50 P.M., when the scoreboard showed the Orioles beat the Yankees in the Bronx by a score of 3–1, reducing the Yankees’ lead in the AL East to a mere two and a half games. We’ve gained eight in the East since the middle of August, a stretch of less than three weeks. Later, in my hotel room, I learn that Kevin Brown, who started that game for the Yankees, broke his hand after being pulled. He punched the clubhouse wall in frustration. As so often happens in such battles, he fought the wall and the wall won. At least it was his nonpitching hand, and he’s vowed not to miss a start, but I wonder. For one thing, how’s he gonna wear a glove on that baby?

I never expected to see John Wasdin starting again in Fenway, but with the expanded roster, he gets another chance. And as the Sox complete their fifteenth shutout of the season, and their tenth straight win, Adam Hyzdu, the twenty-sixth man, the last one cut in spring training, makes his 2004 debut as a replacement right fielder. Like Wasdin, he’s made his way back to the show, and if it’s only for a short stay, still, he’s here, playing under the bright lights.

Sarah McKenna, a Red Sox media rep, calls me while I’m still doing my morning workout and flummoxes me by asking if I’ll throw out the first pitch before this afternoon’s game. The Farrelly brothers, she says, creators of such amusing (if not quite family-friendly) movies as Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary , are making a romantic comedy called Fever Pitch with a Red Sox background, and they want to re-create Opening Day, complete with sellout crowd and giant flag unfurling across the Green Monster. [49] Fever Pitch , based on a nonfiction book by Nick Hornby, describes a romantic triangle in which a young man must choose between his girl and his baseball team. He loves both madly, deeply, truly. That the baseball team turns out to be the Red Sox should come as no surprise. As pointed out elsewhere in these pages, the Red Sox is the team of choice for romantics. Can you imagine a poet writing an ode to the Yankees? As for lovers and the Yankees… good God, you might as well plight your troth in the lobby of the Marine Midland Bank as at Yankee Stadium, that symbol of baseball commerce. No, when it comes to romance and baseball, you pretty much have to have Fenway Park. Wrigley Field has its ivied outfield wall and a certain rusty exterior charm, but I think Fenway remains America’s true Field of Dreams. I guess neither Ben Affleck nor Matt Damon is in town, and of course native son John Kerry is otherwise occupied this Labor Day weekend.

I want to do it—hell yes —but I’m still slow about agreeing. Some of my reasons are purely superstitious. Some, although pragmatic, are about superstition. The purely superstitious reasons stem from having thrown out the first pitch at Fenway once before, around the time I published a book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon . That was a work of fiction, but in 1998, the year before it was published, Gordon was brilliant—that was a fact.