Stephen King - Faithful

(A side note: Ellis Burks, who’ll be retiring after the season, pinch-hits in the ninth for what may be his last major league at-bat. When he first came up from Pawtucket in 1987, he was a reedy outfielder just beginning to develop power. Since then he’s ripped over 2,000 hits and 350 home runs (nifty trivia: he’s homered against every club in the majors). This year he was hurt and wasn’t really part of the on-field effort, but he’s a clubhouse presence and sentimental favorite. After receiving a warm standing O, Ellis fights B. J. Ryan deep into the count before blooping a single to center. At forty, on creaky knees, he’s still a professional hitter. We applaud long and loud as he’s lifted for a pinch runner, and he goes into the dugout with a smile. Thanks, Ellis.)

SK:We almost took three of four. Papi came up four yards short. Mr. Kim still with the bad karma. My daughter-in-law calls me to ask if it would be all right for her to have ORLANDO tattooed on her ass (I said sure). And consider, S2: THEY COULDA SWEPT US! Baltimore’s the only team in the AL with the nuts to leave Fenway feeling bad about “just a split.” Holy shit, I’m so glad to see the Birds hoppin’ somewhere else, and I feel so bad about having to finish the season back where we started. The Great Wheel of Ka turns…

SO:If Francoma uses the pen by the book tonight we probably win and take three of four. Seems like he wrote this one off in the seventh with the score tied at 5. What good is the forty-man roster if you don’t take advantage of it?

Rangers sweep the A’s and we’ve got a wild-ass race in the West.

The Magic Number remains Nomar.

Was there the slightest hitch in Terry Francona’s walk last night in the eighth inning when he finally went out to take the ball from Pedro Martinez’s hand, and the boos began raining down from the Fenway Faithful? I was sitting in my usual place, just a row up from foul territory between home and first on the Sox side of the field—just about the best seat in the house—and I say there was. If so, such a hitch would indicate surprise. And if Francona was surprised, it would indicate that not even a full season at the helm of this team has taught him the most fundamental thing about the clientele it and he serves: this is no ordinary hardball fan-base. The New Englanders who follow the Red Sox are as deeply scarred by loss, particularly loss to the Yankees, as they are loyal to their club. But it’s more specific than that. They are especially scarred— traumatized would not betoo strong a word—by loss to the Yankees in the late innings, with Pedro Martinez, long regarded as the team’s ace, on the hill. If Francona cannot grasp that, he cannot succeed in Boston.

The Red Sox lost to New York last night 6–4, in spite of home runs by Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and the fiery, not-to-be-denied Trot Nixon. That they played otherwise with remarkable dullness for a team facing its archrival in a last-ditch effort to capture the divisional flag hardly matters, even when you add in the fact that they did it in front of the fans that have loved them so long and so well (if fruitlessly). Love is blind, and most of them will either be back in the park (that would include me and Stewart) or in front of their televisions tonight, rooting for David Ortiz to hit a couple of bombs, and for Orlando Cabrera to make a few more sparkling plays (my scorebook says he made a six-pack of them last night, although he went only 1 for 4 at the plate). We’ll find something to cheer, you may depend on it. To a lover, even a smallpox scar is a beauty mark.

What we won’t forget—and what the newspapers are full of this morning—is Terry Francona leaving Pedro Martinez too long at the fair, in a gruesome replay of the 2003 ALCS Game 7. We came into the eighth leading the Yankees, 4–3. I think everyone in the park, including Yankee skipper Joe Torre, expected to see Timlin and Embree tag-team that frame while Pedro took his well-earned rest on the bench. But Francona, who apparently never read that thing about how the coach who doesn’t learn from the past is condemned to repeat Remedial Baseball, sent Martinez trudging back out, although the little guy’s pitch count was well over a hundred by then. The result was what everybody who wasn’t asleep expected. Hideki Matsui lost the second pitch he saw, tying the game.

Francona, then giving a perfect demonstration of why we stayed in Vietnam as long as we did, left Martinez in to prove he had not made the mistake he had in fact made. Williams doubled. Francona still left Martinez in, taking him out only after he had fanned Posada and then given up the go-ahead RBI single to Ruben Sierra. My theory is that if Martinez hadn’t gotten at least one out to prove Terry Francona hadn’t made a mistake, Martinez might still be in there at 10:30 A.M. the following day, with the score Yanks 949, Sox 4, and blood trickling down from Pedro’s burst biceps.

But in my fury I jest.

I have serious doubts about Terry Francona’s thinking processes and have all year (there are times when I’ve thought there’s nothing but a bowling alley up there between his ears), but Pedro Martinez is as brilliant as he is brave. After the game he said, in effect, “I can only tip my cap to the Yankees. They’ve proved they’re my Daddy.” Meaning, in baseball vernacular, they’re better than me; they have my number. Martinez knows the chances are quite good that he may not be done with the Yankees even yet, and that if he sees them again, the next game will be exponentially more important than this one. His remark was a way of resetting all the dials to zero. If he does have to face them again, he’s lifted a lot of the internal pressure by publicly stating that they can somehow get over, under, or around the best he can do. When (and if) he takes the mound against the Yankees in postseason—probably in the Bronx—he will be able to tell himself that, based on what he’s told the world, he is not the one with something to prove; they are.

None of which solves the riddle of why a manager would deliberately go out and replicate a course of action which has already visited defeat and unhappiness on so many in the very recent past. When you think about it, being a Red Sox fan may have quite a lot to teach about what we’re doing in Iraq.

At Starfleet Academy, every cadet has to confront the problem of the Kobayashi Maru. The Maru is a freighter caught in a gravitic rift in the Neutral Zone. Cadets naturally respond to its distress calls, but once their star-ship enters the Neutral Zone, three Klingon cruisers surround and attack it. The Klingons have overwhelming resources and show no mercy, and the cadet needs to realize he or she is in a no-win situation—that, as Kirk says, there are times when a commander doesn’t have the luxury of winning.

Red Sox fans don’t want to hear that. For all our gloom-and-doom reputation, we expect to win, and we expect our manager to make the right moves to make that happen. And because we’re knowledgeable fans, we know what those moves are before they should take place .

Last night Terry Francona took the Grady test—the Red Sox version of the Kobayashi Maru —and from his solution, it appears he was peeking at Grady’s paper. Since the mid-eighties, the standard sequence has been: get seven strong from your starter, setup, close. Simple stuff, and the night before Francona sacrificed a tie game to rest his setup guy and his closer. So there’s no excuse for Pedro starting the eighth, or continuing to pitch after Matsui’s home run, and we all know it. Once again, the only one who didn’t pass the test was the Red Sox manager.