Stephen King - Faithful

Santana had very little trouble with the Yanks: 1 earned run in 12 innings, with 12 Ks. No idea why Gardenhire removed him yesterday after only 85 pitches and still looking fine like cherry wine. The commercial writer in you is right: it’s the matchup MLB needs, and they got it. It’s like Hollywood—you need stars to sell a picture, and, sorry, Jacque Jones and Corey Koskie, but you Rock Cats grads just don’t have the wattage (or the superagents).

And if you look closely at our series, there are some wild hairs there too: Figgins’s glove leading to six runs in Game 1; the absolutely horrible plate umpire in Game 2; and the sudden appearance (and disappearance) of Jarrod Washburn to end Game 3, when all-time Angels save leader Troy Percival was rested and ready.

I’ll hold the league to the same rules I apply to Hollywood: it’s cool as long as it’s entertaining and believable. So far it’s been entertaining.

The 2004 numbers say we do better against the Yanks than against the Twins (or the O’s, Cleveland, Texas…), but you can’t go by that—just by himself, Santana warps the curve. That’s how tough he was.

One chance in four. One chance in two would be more than wavy gravy. It’d be Destiny.

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Yogi said that—not the one from Jelly-stone National Park, but the one who hung out in New York and swung a productive bat at many bad pitches back in the good old days when men were men and baseball players still smoked Camels. [69] Yogi Berra was a Yankee, but how could you not love a man who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”? My favorite Yogi Berra story features Hank Aaron. Yogi was a catcher, of course, and when he was crouched behind the plate, he’d always talk to distract the hitter. During the 1958 World Series, he kept telling Henry Aaron to “hit with the label up, Hank, you don’t want to do it that way, hit with the label up .” Finally Hammerin’ Hank looked back over his shoulder and said—not unkindly—“I came up here to hit, not to read.” Once more the Red Sox have entered postseason via the wild card. Once more they have faced the West Coast team and beaten them (this time quite a bit more tidily, ’tis true). Once more it was Mr. Lowe—magickal rather than tragickal—who was the Last Pitcher Standing, this time notching the win instead of the save. And once more the Yankees have beaten the Minnesota Twins after spotting them the opening victory. It is our ancient enemy—now routinely called the Evil Empire almost everywhere north of Hartford—that we will have to face, and vanquish, if we are to go to the World Series.

I spent most of the weekend in Boston, although this book did not precisely demand it; the Boston-Anaheim series was over, and the Boston–New York series wouldn’t start for another four days. Mostly what I wanted was to sample the atmosphere, and what I found myself breathing in was disturbing, bad for sleep. [70] On the night after the final game against Anaheim, I dreamed that Johnny Damon and I were digging through mounds of discarded equipment—gloves, pads, shin guards—in some filthy, forgotten equipment shed, looking for a magic pitching machine. I think that hitting a few balls thrown by this machine turned you into Mark McGwire. We never found it. I would describe it as a kind of nervy bravado—think of all the old gangster movies you’ve seen where the bad-guy hero is driven into a final blind alley, draws both automatics from the waistband of his gabardine pants, and then screams, “Come and get me coppers! But I’m gonna take a buncha youse wit’ me!”

Doormen, taxi drivers, a guy from Boston Public Works, a driver on the Boston Duck Tour, a clerk at Brentano’s, two homeys at the mall with their hats turned around backwards (Homey A in a METALLICA RULES T-shirt, Homey B wearing one showing Albert Einstein in the audience at a Ramones concert), a woman on the Boston Common walking her little white furball, even a grizzled old two-tooth toll-taker on New Hampshire’s Spaulding Turnpike—all these hailed me with variations on the same theme: “Yo, Stevie! We got just who we wanted, right?”

I’m back with a sick smile and a little wave, like Whatever, dude. Because I’m thinking of that old saying, the one that goes Be careful what you wish for. And when you get right down to where the rubber hits the road, does it even matter? When you get right down to where the rubber meets the road, the Yankees just seem to be our fate, our ka, our name written on the bottom of the stone.

Or maybe that’s just so much literary bullshit. Probably is. God knows the Boston Red Sox have generated enough to fill two or three hundred Mass Pike Port-o-Sans. It’s déjà vu all over again, that much is a pure fact. We can only hope that this time Act II will be different, allowing us still to be onstage, and in uniform, when the curtain goes up on Act III.

Odd news: two relatives of Yanks closer Mariano Rivera were killed over the weekend in a freak accident at his house and he has to fly down to Panama for the funeral, meaning he’ll have to jet back just in time for Game 1. And former NL MVP Ken Caminiti, who admitted his steroid use and became a baseball pariah, dies of heart failure at age forty-one (a cautionary tale for anyone on the juice, not just Gary Sheffield).

We also declare our ALCS roster, making only one change.

SO:So Youk’s out and Mendoza’s in. I guess we’re hoping he has the book on his old club. And that Billy Mueller doesn’t need a breather at third.

And dunno if you’ve looked this far ahead, but do you know what night Game 7 of the World Series falls on? That’s right: Halloween.

The hype leading up to Game 1 is typical and idiotic. The game’s on Fox, and they’ve prepared a five-minute Star Wars intro, complete with Johnny as Chewbacca. If that’s not enough, they play the theme from The Odd Couple over and over. The announcers are desperate to tell us what the story lines are, and the personal dramas. This is one reason I hate playoff baseball—the national networks think the viewers have just tuned in. On NESN, Jerry and Don have no need to fill us in on “The Rivalry,” they just call the game. They also don’t call Bronson Arroyo “Brandon” (McCarver—the true inspiration behind the mute button) or compare A-Rod’s and Jeter’s mediocre years to Manny’s and David’s MVP-type seasons.

The game itself is dull and disappointing from the very first. Schilling can’t push off on the ankle and gives up runs in bunches (later, Dr. Bill Morgan will describe the injury as a tear in a sheath covering a tendon—shades of Nomar!), while the Orioles’ Mike Mussina is spot-on. After three, it’s 6–0 Yanks, through six, 8–0, and the only drama is whether Moose will keep his no-hitter. And then, just as news time is rolling around, and viewers naturally think of bailing, the Sox explode for seven runs, and who should be called in to save the game but plucky Mariano Rivera, who just arrived in the fourth inning from the funeral of blah blah blah native Panama. What an astonishing twist! Why, who could have foreseen such etc., etc.! The announcers play it up for all it’s worth, and if there’s a more egregious use of a human-interest story in sports, please, don’t show it to me. Rivera even gets to start the game-ending DP against his nemesis Bill Mueller. It’s like watching a cheesy movie, every step feels utterly false and plotted. I mean, come on, who writes this stuff?