Stephen King - Faithful

SO:Yup, as in last year’s division series, our fate may rest in the shaky hands of Mr. Lowe. But that’s the playoffs: maximum stress finding the weakest link.

Twenty minutes before game time, the Sox announce their ALDS roster. Youk, Mientkiewicz and Leskanic made the squad. Mendoza and McCarty didn’t.

I try to take a nap before the 4:09 EDT start of the first Division Series game out in Anaheim and can’t do it. I’m not really surprised. Too many butterflies. That may sound stupid, but I’d argue there’s nothing stupid about it at all. The hell of spectating—a thing I’ve had to rediscover during several Octobers (although never enough)—is that when it comes to baseball, spectating is all I can do. The script is out of my hands.

Instead of a nap I settle for a brisk walk. I’ve got a bad hip as a result of an accident, but I ignore its protests of this unwonted late-afternoon exercise. My youngest son rescues me before it can really start to bellow, picking me up in his Jetta and taking me back to the house, where we settle with sodas, pizza, cookies and a homemade scorecard. Owen also has a crossword puzzle in which he tries (with varying degrees of success) to bury himself, admitting he can barely bring himself to watch the Angels bat, especially after the Red Sox secure a slim one-run lead on a suspect Manny Ramirez double (an E-5 Figgins on my pizza-besmirched scorecard) followed by a scratch David Ortiz single.

As it turned out, Owen and I didn’t have to worry, [66] But of course, as Red Sox fans, we can no more not worry—even with a six- or seven-run lead—than we could not blink if you were suddenly to jab your fingers at our open eyes. although the game remained close until the top of the fourth, and twice in the early going the Angels jockeyed the tying run into scoring position. Then, in the aforementioned fourth inning, Boston staged one of those multirun outbursts that characterized so many of their wins in August and September.Ortiz walked; Millar hit him home with a moonshot to left; Varitek singled; Orlando “I Know Every Team Handshake in the Universe” Cabrera walked; after Bill Mueller struck out, Gabe Kapler hit a single to short left field. Bases juiced, one out, Johnny Damon at the plate. And here’s your play of the game, brought to you by Charles Scribner’s, the publisher that made New York famous.

Johnny Damon, who hits Angels starter Jarrod Washburn about as well as toads do algebra, directs a seemingly harmless ground ball to Chone Figgins, a utility fielder today playing third for the Halos. Figgins double-pumps, then throws the ball to a location somewhere between home plate and the guy selling Sports Bars in the box seats to the left of the Angels’ dugout. Varitek and Cabrera score. One batter later, Manny Ramirez goes pega luna for the first time in the Series (but not, one hopes, for the last). It’s great, but by then the game is essentially over.

Father Curt was far from his best today, but the Angels—pretty much stuck with Washburn as a result of having clinched on the second-to-last day of the season—were not able to steal Game 1, as I’m sure they hoped to. The question, I think, is whether they are now blown out from their gallop to the divisional title, or if they will bounce back with Bartolo (as in Colon) tomorrow night. My son says they’ll bounce. If they’re going to, they had better get to Pedro fast or hope Terry Francona repeats the past and leaves him in too long. If neither of those things happen, then—to quote my collaborator, Mr. O’Nan—the Anaheim Angels are very likely going to be gone like Enron, toast on the coast.

SO:So we’re guaranteed the split. And if Petey takes care of business, we could be sitting pretty.

When’s the last time you saw the Sox squeeze in a run? Nice timing by Mientkiewicz (though McCarty, with his wingspan, might snag that errant toss by Mr. Schill). Is Curt’s ankle okay? When he grabbed for it after that play, I thought, “Oh man, there’s our season.”

SK:Schilling will bull through. He’s the kind of guy who’s gonna think, “I got all winter to heal this ankle up.” And now… with any luck… we won’t need him until the ALCS. I knocked wood when I said it, and the Twins are just three outs away. Accourse against the Yankees that means nada.

SO:That’s a final: Twins 2–0 over the Yanks. Looks like the Santana gambit’s working… so far.

SK:Hopefully the trend of the last few years, where the eventual winners lose the first (or first and second) game, will be reversed. God knows it’s time for a statistical correction in that matter.

SO:I hear the Yanks will start Kevin Brown in Game 3. So they had better win tomorrow night.

They do, though it’s as fishy as Jonah’s old clothes—to my nose. The Twins are leading by one in the bottom of the twelfth with one out and closer Joe Nathan toiling through his unheard-of third inning of work. Nathan throws ten straight balls to put men on first and second, then grooves one to A-Rod. It’s hit deep to the left-center gap, and the whole Yankee dugout leaps up—except A-Rod’s missed it, and the ball barely makes the track (so why leap up when you’ve seen hundreds of flies to the track there and never moved an inch before?). Left fielder Shannon Stewart, playing back so nothing can get through, should have a bead on it but is uncharacteristically slow getting over and then doesn’t even make an attempt. It hits the track, and should win the game anyway, but bounces over the wall for a ground rule double, meaning the trail runner, Jeter, has to go back to third. So with a tie game and one out, Matsui steps in. He’s not patient, and ends up hitting a soft liner to right. Jacque Jones is playing in to cut down the run at the plate, and right field in Yankee Stadium is the smallest in all of baseball. Jones, with a decent if not spectacular arm, should have an excellent shot at getting Jeter. It’s a situation an outfielder dreams of: there’s no other play, no contingency. It can’t be more than 180 feet, and he’s got time to make sure he gets it there in the air so his catcher doesn’t have to deal with a hop. As long as he’s not way off-line to the first-base side, he should have Jeter by five steps, easy.

Instead, he flips the ball flat-footed to first baseman Matthew LeCroy, who relays it, late, and the Yankees win. ESPN’s commentators make no comment on this, which is just as bizarre. So the Yankees split.

SO:Man, I could have thrown out Jeter from there. What the hell was Jacque Jones thinking? Fix! Fix!

SK:Say it ain’t so, Stew! Next you’ll be telling me Jacque Jones was on the grassy knoll.

The stuff between my ears feels more like peanut butter than brains this morning, and with good reason; the Red Sox–Angels contest that started last night at 10 P.M. East Coast time didn’t go final until five to two in the morning. That’s just shy of a four-hour baseball game. A nine-inning baseball game.

Part of the reason is national TV coverage—the breaks between half-innings are longer to allow for a few more of those all-important beer commercials—but in truth that isn’t the largest part. I’ll bet you could count the number of postseason games under three hours during the last seven years on the fingers of your hands, not because of the extra ads but because the style of baseball changes radically once the regular season is over. It becomes more about the pitching, because most managers believe the aphorism which states that in seven games out of every ten, good pitching will beat good hitting. [67] For the record, so do I—I grew up watching Bob Gibson pitch in the World Series, and listening to Sandy Koufax on my transistor radio earphone. Those were the days when the games were still played in the afternoon and pitching the batter high and tight was considered standard operating procedure. Games about the pitching become games about the defense. And games about defense and pitching in the field often become, for the offense, games about what is now called by the needlessly deprecating name of “smallball.” Few twenty-first century baseball teams are good at smallball, and their efforts to bunt the runner over are often painful to watch (although Doug Mientkiewicz of the Soxput down a beauty in Game 1, and it resulted in a run), but smallball certainly does burn up the hours. I bet they sold a sea of beer in Anaheim last night, and the hopeful fans had plenty of time to twirl their Rally Monkeys and beat their annoying Thunder Sticks, but in the end neither the monkeys or the sticks did any good. The Angels must now come to our park down 0-2, and their fans have only this consolation: for them, the game was over before 11 P.M., and they won’t have to spend much of this lovely fall day feeling like what Ed Sanders of the Fugs so memorably called “homemade shit.”