Stephen King - Faithful

Before I’ve eaten breakfast, the Yanks have crushed the D-Rays 12–1, and the division’s knotted at .500 again. We play the Twins at Hammond tomorrow, then head to Atlanta for two against the Braves before opening in Baltimore.

By Sunday, the club has to make eleven more cuts to get down to the final twenty-five-man roster. On the bubble: Dauber, McCarty, Crespo, Hyzdu and Shump. Three of the bubble guys and one lucky pitcher (maybe a second lefty to go with Embree) should make the team, at least for the next month. The trouble is, we’re short on outfielders. Theo and Francona may have to keep Hyzdu, who’s had the worst spring of any Red Sock, and send down Shump and Crespo, who’s had the best.

On the very last day he could, Shump exercises an out clause in his contract and is free to sign with another club (eventually the Pirates), meaning Cesar Crespo, hitting .361, has earned a spot on the roster.

Met vet Bobby Jones and Tim Hamulack will fight for the final bullpen spot. They’ll both travel to Atlanta—as will Adam Hyzdu, who’s already been told by Francona he’ll start the year in Pawtucket. He’s the twenty-sixth man, the last one cut, and knows he could have made the team if he’d only hit the ball. With Trot out and Kapler starting, our backup outfielders are the thirty-eight-year-old, leg-injury-prone Ellis Burks, first baseman/aspiring pitcher David McCarty and fullbacks Brian Daubach and Kevin Millar.

The roster’s set, if not the lineup. The bench may not be as deep as the Yankees’, but it’s a good club, a 95–100 win club. My only worry now is health, with Nomar, Trot and BK already out. If we lose anyone else important, this could quickly turn into a lost season, like the Angels’ last year.

I drive to Boston to meet my friend Lowry’s lit class at Simmons College, right down Brookline Ave from Fenway. All the way up, I wrestle with the question of whether to drop in on Naomi. I don’t want to freak her out, but she hasn’t returned my calls, and we’re a week away from the home opener.

I’m early, there’s a parking spot, and I can’t resist. From the sidewalk, the office looks dark, but that’s just the tinted windows. The big tally board with all the games broken down by sections is covered with X ’s. Everything’s sold-out except some August games against Tampa Bay and Toronto.

A young guy at a desk is on the phone with someone who got aced out of the Monster seats. “I’m sorry, sir,” the guy says, “but it did say first-come first-serve.”

I’m loitering, and he looks up from the phone in mid-conversation.

“Is Naomi expecting you?”

He calls her, then explains that she’s all the way on the other side of the park (there is no other side of the park—that would be where the batting cages are, under the center-field bleachers). She says not to worry, it’s going to happen. It’s going to be a day-of-game thing, I’ll have to pick them up at the Will Call window.

Outside, a crew is fixing pennants over Gate A. The one they’re working on as I pass says 1918 WORLD CHAMPIONS.

I go down Lansdowne and look up at the Monster seats. Green metal stools perch upside-down on the counters, like a bar after closing. I try to imagine sitting up there, but the wind’s so cold it’s hard to believe the season’s only two days away.

It’s after dinner when I finally catch up to yesterday’s game. We beat the Twins 4–3, taking three out of five from them to win Fort Myers’s Mayor’s Cup. The hero, ironically, was Adam Hyzdu, who homered to break the tie in the ninth. Too little, too late.

Last night we beat the Braves 7–3. Exhibition results mean even less the day before the opener, but I’m glad to see Manny pick up his first homer of the spring.

Today the Braves shut us out, 5–0, with Foulke giving up two runs in a third of an inning. I tell myself it means nothing, but neither does our 17-12 Grapefruit League record (a half game, I’m sorry to report, behind the Yanks).

In the last meaningful action of the spring, lefty Bobby Jones’s slider and 1.74 ERA win him the final roster spot over the less experienced Tim Hamulack.

The Weather Channel’s predicting snow here tomorrow night. In Baltimore, for the first pitch, it’s supposed to be thirty-nine degrees.

Opening Day: Notes on Addiction

I’ve written about substance abuse a good many times, and see no need to rehash all that in a book about baseball…but because this also happens to be a book about rooting, the subject at least has to be mentioned, it seems to me. These are a fan’s notes, after all, and when used in the context of rooting, the word fan ain’t short for fantastic.

I don’t booze it up anymore, and I don’t take the mind- or mood-altering drugs, but over a good many years of staying away from those things one day at a time, I’ve come to a more global view of addiction. Sometimes I think of it as the Lump in the Sofa Cushion Theory of Addiction. This theory states that addiction to booze or dope is like a lump in a sofa cushion. You can push it down… but it will only pop up somewhere else. Thus a woman who quits drinking may start smoking again. A guy who quits the glass pipe may rediscover his sex drive and become a serial womanizer. A gal who quits drinking and drugging may put Twinkies and strawberry ice cream in their place, thus adding forty or fifty pounds before putting on the brakes.

Hey, I’ve been lucky. No sex issues, no gambling issues, moderate food issues. I do, however, have a serious problem with the Boston Red Sox, and have ever since they came so damned close to winning the whole thing in ’67. Before then, I was what you might call a recreational Red Sox user. Since then I’ve been a full-blown junkie, wearing my hat with the scarlet B on the front for six months straight and suffering a serious case of hat-head while I obsess over the box scores. I check the Boston Red Sox official website, and all the unofficial ones as well (most of them fucking dire); I scoff at the so-called Curse of the Bambino, believing completely in myheart even though I know it is the bullshit creation of one talented and ambitious sportswriter. [1] The Boston Globe ’s Dan Shaughnessy.

Worst of all, during the season I become as much a slave to my TV and radio as any addict ever was to his spike. I have been asked by several people if working on this book is a hardship, given the fact that I have two other books coming out this year (the final novels in the Dark Tower cycle), a television series still in production (that would be Kingdom Hospital on ABC, the Detroit Tigers of network broadcasting), and a half-finished new novel sitting on my desk. The answer is no—it’s not a hardship but a relief. I would either be sitting at Fenway or in my living room with the TV tuned to NESN (the New England Sports Network, the regional pusher that services addicts like me) in any case; this book legitimizes my obsession and allows me to indulge it to an even greater degree. In the language of addiction, the book’s publisher has become my enabler and my colleague, Stewart O’Nan, is my codependent.

Now, nine hours before Sidney Ponson of the Orioles throws his first pitch to the first Red Sox batter of the season, I can look at my situation coldly and clearly: I am a baseball junkie, pure and simple. Or perhaps it’s even more specific than that. Perhaps I’m a Red Sox junkie, pure and simple. I’m hoping it’s choice B, actually. If it is, and the Sox win the World Series this year, this nearly forty-year obsession of mine may break like a long-term ( very long-term) malarial fever. Certainly this team has the tools, but Red Sox fans do not need the bad mojo of some false “curse” to appreciate the odd clouds of bad luck that often gather around teams that seem statistically blessed. Outfitted in the off-season with strong pitching and defense to go with their formidable hitting, the Sox suddenly find themselves short two of their most capable players: Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon. 2003 batting champ Bill Mueller, suffering supposed elbow problems (from swinging a leaded bat in the on-deck circle?—I wonder), has seen little spring training action. And Cadillac closer Keith Foulke has been, let’s face it, nothing short of horrible.