Build it and they will come....

[JimHow]

Let's play some baseball!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SB16il97yw


My baseball essays from the past (from a Red Sox fan's perspective):

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THE CASE FOR RETIRING TONY CONIGLIARO'S #25

On the night of Friday, August 18, 1967, the Boston Red Sox were at home at Fenway against the California Angels. The Sox were in a pennant race for the first time in a generation. Kenmore Square was abuzz. Some 31,027 fans crowded into the park on a warm summer night to watch Sox pitcher Gary Bell duel California's Jack Hamilton.

The Sox were three-and-a-half games behind the Minnesota Twins in the race for the pennant. In the fourth inning of a scoreless pitchers duel, Boston right fielder Tony Conigliaro stepped up to the plate. Tony C, as he was known, had broken a 0-for-20 slump earlier in the game with a single in his first at-bat.

A smoke bomb had just been thrown onto the grass from the leftfield grandstands, and, even after the grounds crew removed it, smoke still hovered in the lights shining down on the August Fenway night. After a brief delay, Tony stepped into the batter's box. He was crowding in, looking for something on the outside part of the plate. The six-foot, two hundred pound Hamilton threw his first pitch....

Tony Conigliaro was the local boy from East Boston and Revere-- an immediate, enormous New England crowd favorite. He had a thick Boston accent, a swagger, was tall and good-looking. The women loved him.

Besides the good looks, though, he had enormous talent. He came up at age 19. By age 22, he was the youngest major league player to hit 100 career homeruns. (Babe Ruth was 25 when he reached that milestone.) He was a right handed, pull-hitting homerun hitter. He hit in the clutch. For Tony Conigliaro in August 1967, the sky was the limit.

In his book "Tony C: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tony Conigliaro," Boston Herald reporter David Cataneo sums up the player and his times as things stood on that August night in '67:

Baby boomers who remember Dad cracking open a Narragansett while they watched the Sox on television felt closer to Tony C than they ever did to Teddy Ballgame or Yaz. Ted was born during World War I and Yaz was born before World War II. Tony was born in 1945, and to the boomer generation, he was one of them. He wore dungarees and flipped baseball cards in the fifties. His father had a car with preposterous tail fins. He sang Elvis in the shower. He listened to the Beatles on 45s. He didn't like rules. He said exactly what was on his mind. He wanted to be number one. He could be arrogant. He had doting, indulgent parents. He cried the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He didn't believe in waiting his turn. He nearly got married before he was old enough to vote. He collected telephone numbers during the sexual revolution. He got the dreaded draft notice. His best friend was killed in Vietnam. He was disillusioned in the late sixties. He grew funky sideburns in the early seventies. He decided it was time at last to let go of childhood dreams when he hit thirty. He went to California in the late seventies. He felt the tug to come home in the early eighties.

For the Mickey Mouse Club generation, Tony was just right. He came along at the right time. The Red Sox, led by the workmanlike Yaz, had been men in gray flannel suits. Then Tony joined the club in 1964, the year John, Paul, George, and Ringo came to America and added a dash of flamingo plumage. He was a teen dream, young, handsome, audacious. He was sure of himself. He cut a record as if he were Ricky Nelson.

One of my earliest recollections of Tony Conigliaro was from a game earlier in that year. I was eight years old. We were watching the Sox on television on a Saturday afternoon. I was just starting to gain a young consciousness about the Red Sox. My father and his buddy were in the living room watching the game. Tony C came to the plate. "He's going to hit a homerun," I predicted boldly. On the very next pitch, Conigliaro put it into the screen. Amazing. The guy just had a mystique about him.

By August 18th, like the rest of New England, I was completely captured in the Red Sox spell, following every pitch of every game. I had been to my first game at Fenway Park some three weeks earlier. My brother Tom was a fan of Yaz. I was a fan of Tony. In sibling rivalry, I would rub it in when Tony would do better than Yaz, and Tom would reciprocate on the nights that Yaz prevailed.

My mother was sitting in the living room with my two brothers and I on that Friday night, listening on the battery-powered transistor radio to the Bell-Hamilton pitchers duel in the fourth inning. My father was working the second shift at the mill. I can't remember whether it was Ned Martin or Ken Coleman doing the play-by-play that night. (Didn't they used to switch off between radio and TV back in those days?)

Jack Hamilton threw a first-pitch fast ball. Ninety miles per hour. It was high and tight. But it was a pitch that got away-- tailing violently, in a millisecond, towards the head of Tony Conigliaro.

I don't recall exactly how the announcer described it. I don't recall the words that were said. But I remember that moment like it was yesterday evening. Whatever Ned-- or Ken-- said, it resonated. I remember crying, almost immediately. I remember listening to the announcer describing the silence in the ballpark. As though in a nightmare, I pictured the scene as they carried Tony off on a stretcher.

Unfortunately, it was not a mere bad dream. It was all too real. I was absolutely crushed.

In his book, Cataneo provides some of the player-eye-witness accounts:

"As soon as it crunched into me, it felt as if the ball would go in my head and come out the other side," Tony recalled.

Buck Rogers, the Angels catcher, was crouched a foot away when the ball hit. "It sounded like a pumpkin, like taking a bat to a pumpkin," he says.

Bobby Knoop was playing second base for the Angels and heard "a very sick sound."

George Scott was in the Red Sox dugout and recalls, "It sounded like a shot. Like a popgun."

Mike Ryan was also on the Sox bench and was startled by "a whack, a sickening sound. I'd seen guys get hit in the neck, between the eyes, but this was different. The ball hit and it was almost like it stuck there."

Carl Yastrzemski was on the top step of the dugout, caught up in the scoreless game, rooting for a hit. "It was a deafening sound, a sickening sound," he says.

Red Sox pitcher Dave Morehead was stretched out on the steps on the far end of the dugout, keeping a pitching chart, as part of his duties as the next day's starter. "I used to love to watch him hit. There was always a chance he could hit one. Then there was thud," he says.

George Thomas was warming up a pitcher in the Red Sox bullpen and heard the players on the bullpen bench exhale a horrified moan, as if they had witnessed something devastating. "We all stood up to look over the fence to see if Tony was moving his head," he remembers.


On-deck hitter Rico Petrocelli was the first to reach him. Rico knelt near him and tried to soothe him. "Take it easy, Tony, you're going to be alright," Petrocelli told him, as he watched Tony's eye swell on the spot, "like you would blow up a balloon."

It was horrific. Tony C represented a much more innocent time in sports. To many of us, he was an inspiration. Larger than life. I had his autograph. I followed his every action, wanted to be like him. To a skinny kid with coke-bottle glasses, he was a hero. He represented excellence, and achievement, and everything that was good and innocent about the sport of baseball.

Thus, when we awoke to those ghastly pictures of Tony in the morning newspapers that weekend-- propped up in his hospital bed-- chest-bared, necklace of his patron saint dangling from his neck-- with the bulging, swollen, badly-blackened, puss-filled left eye-- the broken cheekbone-- the shattered eye socket-- the broken jaw-- the blood and fluids seeping from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth-- our childhoods, in many ways, were changed forever.

And the Boston Red Sox were in our blood, our sweat, our tears.... Forever.

In the horror of that moment, we were initiated.

For the rest of our lives, from the moment Tony C went down, no matter how good or how bad it got as a Sox fan, there was never going to be anything like that night in 1967... ever, again.

It was the second-worst beaning in the history of Major League Baseball-- second only to the beaning death of Ray Chapman in 1920. We followed his attempted comeback over the years. His vision impaired in his left eye, he valiantly attempted two comebacks. He pursued his singing career.

I stood within a few feet of him a couple years later, near the players’ parking lot. Soon, a whole new generation of Sox players-- led by Fisk, Lynn, and Rice-- came along. And we kind of lost track of him over the years, in the excitement of those Red Sox teams of the late seventies. And then one morning in 1982 we read in the newspapers about his debilitating heart attack-- another devastation that, this time, rendered the once-invincible Tony Conigliaro an invalid-- at age 37. He died in 1990, at the age of 45.

"He was baseball's JFK," Dick Johnson said. Cut down viciously in the prime of his life. The young man who had everything, struck down so unfairly, so cruelly, at his absolute peak. All in one violent split second.

There are some out there who actually believe that baseball is "just a game." There are some who still don't understand why we follow this team so emotionally. So urgently. Many don't understand-- will never understand-- the beauty and symmetry of the sport-- the metaphors and lessons of life to be found between the foul lines-- the lessons we can use in our daily lives.

In our youth-- with one violent pitch-- we learned some very ugly lessons about life, the night Tony C went down.

Baseball in New England changed forever the night Tony Conigliaro lay bleeding, near death, in the dirt at home plate in Fenway Park. In life, Tony C got a raw deal. But he is an inspiration, to this day, to young and old alike. His memory, for many, lives on. For whatever reason-- for the better part of a century-- Red Sox owners have established a policy of retiring the numbers of only those Sox players who are voted into the Major League Hall of Fame. This is a close-minded, arbitrary, stubborn policy that should be exempted by the new owners in the case of Tony Conigliaro.

It should have been done a long time ago. He meant that much to us. It is time to retire Tony Conigliaro's Number 25.

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A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream (In the Bronx) (Written in the summer of 2004)

By the second inning or so a hazy red full moon was rising slowly over the right field bleachers. And with due deference to Christopher Cross, the best that you can do may be to fall in love. But on this night– July 1, 2004– for those of us who got caught between the moon and New York City, a very close second best was to be in Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx for one wild and very memorable night of baseball between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.
Before the moon came up, the Yankees had trotted out what appeared to be a fourteen-year-old on the mound by the name of Brad Halsey, a rookie who was performing an admirable Andy Pettitte impersonation. There was a festive atmosphere in the place that was not quite there to the same degree the two previous nights (with the exception, of course, when they Bronx-cheered the image on the scoreboard of Vice President Dck Cheney, not in some bunker outside of Washington, but right there, apparently, in George Steinbrenner’s luxury box). Perhaps it was because the Yankees had won the first two games of the series and the crowd was primed for a sweep. Perhaps it was because the villainous Pedro Martinez was pitching for the Sox.
I had driven down from Maine for the three-game series. I try to get down to the Bronx each time my Red Sox face off against the Yankees. As a full-fledged member of Red Sox Nation since 1967, I have witnessed many exciting Sox-Yankees games over the decades. Like Fenway Park in Boston, Yankee Stadium is a great venue– loud, obnoxious, passionate. There is a sense of danger when you go into Yankee Stadium with your Red Sox cap and official grey "Boston" team jersey with "Garciaparra" on the back. But I have never had a single problem as a Red Sox fan at Yankee Stadium. In fact, good-natured ribbing aside, I have always been treated in a very friendly way by Yankees fans. In my experience, it is much rougher for Yankees fans who come to Fenway.
On this night, with two outs in the bottom of the first inning, things got a little more festive. Gary Sheffield, the latest All Star on the $180,000,000.00 Steinbrenner payroll, stepped into the batter’s box. "Sheff," as he is known by Yankee fans, with a phony familiarity as though he has grown up in the Yankee system for years ("He’s going to go into the Hall with a Yankees cap on," said one radio caller proudly after the previous night’s game), was stepping in and out of the box on Pedro.
Pedro drilled him in the shoulder with a fastball. Sheff took a step out towards the mound. Words were exchanged. Pedro stared back at Sheff. And 55,000 onlookers screamed in blood lust. To Yankee fans, Pedro is a "punk." As a Sox fan I said to myself: "Yeah, Pedro! Hit him again!" With the sold-out crowd ready to storm the field, skinny little Pedro struck out the next batter, Alex Rodriguez, to end the inning.
It is usually the lesser Yankees stars who kill the Sox in these crazy games. Thus it came as no surprise when Tony Clark, who hit about .100 the year he played in a Red Sox uniform, continued his Mickey Mantle impersonation in the series with another long homer for the Yankees in the second inning off of Pedro. And Yankees catcher Jorge Posada, who had not homered in something like one hundred and twenty at bats, continued his career-long torment of the Red Sox by depositing one high into the right field upper deck. The Yankees were thus up by three on two hits as the game moved quickly into the middle innings, with young Andy Pettitte, Jr., mowing down the Red Sox.
And the big red moon kept rising in the right field sky.
As the game progressed, Alex Rodriguez dived, jumped, and juggled at third, keeping his team in the game. Sox shortstop Pokey Reese ran full tilt for a pop up behind third and ended up in the seats, a harbinger of things to come. Derek Jeter made a nice leaping catch. Kevin Millar corralled a long fly down the right field line.
The wind generally swirls around pretty heavily in Yankee Stadium, but there is typically a stiff jet stream that blows out to right-center field, assisting deep fly balls out over the fence for home runs. In the sixth inning, with a runner on base, Sox left fielder Manny Ramirez-- a native of the Dominican who grew up in nearby Washington Heights and recently attained his U.S. citizenship-- launched a high arcing blast into the wind current and over the right-center field fence for a two run homer. Three to two Yankees.
Two innings later the Red Sox scratched out another run on an infield ground out, and the game was all tied up at three. And then things started to get even more wild... and wonderful.
The big red moon kept rising ominously in the warm Bronx night. By the seventh inning both starting pitchers were out of the game, each manager turning things over to their respective relief corps. In the eighth, Boston's giant David Ortiz belted a baseball that eclipsed the big red orb, headed high and deep towards the right field stands. Sheff raced back to the right field fence, looking up helplessly. The ball was sailing out. Oh yeah, I said to myself. Four-three Sox.
The ball hung up high in the night. I kept waiting for it to come down into the seats. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a gale wind blew in from the direction of the giant moon. It blew right across the stadium, from right to left. This never happens. The wind never blows in from right at Yankee Stadium on warm summer nights. It had been blowing out all night-- until, that is, Ortiz's blast high into the night. Sheff, his back up against the wall, recognized that the wind current had, in an instant, shifted dramatically. The ball was blown back into the ball park. He sprinted forward now, full-tilt towards the infield, about twenty feet. He dived forward for the ball, extending his body fully onto the right field lawn. Out! A spectacular catch!
The 55,000 fans roared. Yankee Stadium rocked.
I laughed....
I just started laughing. Oh, so that’s the way it's going to be, huh? They're going to start getting supernatural on us tonight.... That we have seen before. At that point, when the big red moon blew a Sox home run back into play, I knew in my heart that, no matter what happened in this game, the Sox were not going to prevail.
Reliever Mariano Rivera pitched the tenth and eleventh innings for the Yankees. The Red Sox have been as helpless historically against "Mo" as any other team in the league. Tall, thin, and muscular, Rivera displays a combination of power and elegance that reminds you in baseball of what a young Muhammad Ali was in boxing. Rivera throws a cut fastball at about 95-97 m.p.h. with a control so pinpoint that, even when the hitter knows it is coming, he cannot get the good wood on the ball-- often leaving the batter, if he has not struck out, with a bat shattered and splintered into sharp shards around the batters box area, to be gathered up by a ball boy.
In this particular eleventh inning, however, Rivera was actually looking almost human. A couple of hits and an intentional walk had the Red Sox up there with the bases loaded and nobody out. Surely, at least one run was going to score here.
As a Red Sox fan, though, I was certain of the opposite. The Red Sox were not going to score. We do not score against Mariano Rivera. Certainly not in close games. Certainly not in important games such as this one. Kevin Millar, struggling at the plate this season, came up to bat. The question was not whether, but rather how, the Sox were going to squander another golden opportunity.
Millar smoked the ball. A hard two-hopper down the third base line. A-Rod dived to his right, backhanded the ball in the dirt. He touched third base with the ball and glove. One out there. Gabe Kapler, who had been at third for the Sox, dashed towards home. Because of the force play at third, a much tougher play was now required at the plate. Posada was going to have to tag out Kapler, who was barreling in full tilt. A-Rod, laying on his right side, glanced at home. Because Kapler was running down the line between third and home, A-Rod could not throw the ball on a line to Posada at the plate. Kapler’s back was blocking A-Rod’s field of view from the Yankee catcher. Still laying on his side, A-Rod arced the ball over Kapler’s head. Not too hard, not too soft. Just right. The ball landed chest-high in Posada’s mitt an instant before Kapler barreled into the catcher. Posada held onto the ball. Out at home! Kapler sprawled across home plate. Posada took the ball from his mitt and gunned it back down to A-Rod at third where Manny, coming in from second, was tagged out.
A triple play!
A-Rod and the other Yankees started to sprint off the field in celebration. I could not believe my eyes. Are you kidding me? The crowd went berserk.
The third base umpire waved them all back. Obviously, it was not a triple play. Manny, coming in from second, was essentially put out twice: The first time when he was forced out when A-Rod tagged third base, and the second time when he was tagged out when Posada threw the ball back to third. There were only two outs, with runners still on first and second for the Sox. But I still could not believe my eyes in watching that play by A-Rod. That perfect arc to Posada was like one of those plays we used to see from Bird and Magic, where they’d be dribbling into the lane and, being greeted by some seven footer with his hands up in their face, with no place to go would then elevate the ball an extra four feet or so in the air higher than their normal jumper for a swish, the extra height necessary to get the ball over the hands of the nearby defender. The focus in the media the next day was on another play yet to come, but that diving stop and throw by A-Rod in the eleventh inning was just about the greatest fielding play I have ever seen. And for several seconds, I, like everyone else in the Stadium except the third base umpire, had thought we had just witnessed a triple play.
With two outs now against Rivera, the inning, of course, was over. And the next Sox hitter accommodated, by flying harmlessly to left. Again, I could only shake my head and chuckle. What a game!
********
In the tier deck (the third level) of Yankee Stadium you get a great view of about ninety-five percent of the field. It is a lot of fun sitting up there. The deck is very steep and, even if you are up in the rows farthest back under the lights (where a rain of carcassed moths, gnats, and mosquitoes, having just been toasted by the scorching lights, cascade down upon you throughout the night), you are never really that far from the action. Where ever you sit up there, though, a sliver of the field is cut off from view right below you because the deck hangs down so close to the field. That's not a bad thing, because the small blind spot is worth the trade off for the great view of the other ninety-five percent of the field.
One of the great beauties of baseball is that it combines the immovability and finality of the geometry of the field with the chaos and unpredictability of the human element. In this game of failure (even the best hitters make outs three-quarters of the time) it is always the human element that must succumb, and it is the team of humans who fails the least that usually prevails in any particular contest.
We were sitting in Section 642 of the tier box section, the lower level of seats in the third deck, about half way between the third base bag and the left field foul pole. The field-level seats jut out within several feet of the left field line down there behind third base. With two outs and two runners on in the twelfth inning, Sox hitter Trot Nixon popped a little fly out back of the third base bag, just barely in fair territory. If the ball had landed, the game would have been broken open. With the ball falling quickly, Yankees shortstop and team captain Derek Jeter attempted to bend the rules of nature on the baseball field. Jeter sprinted down the left field line, stabbed the ball, and his momentum carried him another ten feet as he dived, horizontally, into the third row of the stands. From my upper deck vantage point, Jeter was last seen flying through the air towards the stands, before disappearing from view beneath the deck. I watched him on the scoreboard screen when he emerged from the stands after several moments, his face bloodied and bruised. The crowd went nuts. The game continued into the night, tied at three.
In the bottom of the twelfth the Yankees loaded the bases with nobody out. In an extremely rare move, Sox manager Terry Francona moved one of the Sox outfielders into the infield. The Sox first baseman, a lefthander, moved over to second base, the first time anyone can ever recall a left-handed second baseman. We were seeing things in this game that we had never seen before in the century of the sport. Even more amazingly, the bizarre defensive reconfiguration worked. The Sox got out of the bases-loaded-no-outs jam without surrendering a run. Crazy.
********
The angles for viewing a game at Yankee Stadium are much different than at little Fenway Park. When you watch a home run at Fenway you are generally looking up at the ball. At Yankee Stadium, if you are in the giant third deck, you are often looking down at a home run.
Thus it was when Manny Ramirez came back up to the plate in the thirteenth inning. The game was now over four hours old. Manny-- whose carefree, happy-go-lucky personality belies an intensity and assassin-like preparedness at the plate second to no other right-handed hitter in the game today-- hit a screaming line drive across our line of sight on the left field side. In about 1.25 seconds the ball was ricocheting around out past the left field fence for a homer, and Red Sox Nation rose in unison. "Man-ny! Man-ny!" and "Let's Go Red Sox," the red- and blue-shirted fandom chanted and sing-songed in delirium, as Yankees fans sat back quietly into their seats.
The Sox were up now, four to three, in the thirteenth.
********
It is not just that the Red Sox have failed to win the World Series since 1918, shortly before they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Other teams, like the Cubs and White Sox, have gone even longer without a championship. Rather, of course, it is the way we lose. We are tantalized– teased– led like Sisyphus to the top of the mountain– only to be crushed unmercifully by the baseball gods, year after year, in excruciating, ghastly, catastrophic fashion.
My father will be eighty this fall and he has never seen the Sox win it all. In Red Sox Nation we equate these traumas with periods in our life. I was in college in Boston in 1978 when Bucky Dent hit his homer, and went so deep into despair that I literally could not eat for three days. I was just out of law school in 1986 when my girlfriend from New Jersey could not understand why I cried after the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs. Given the time and circumstances, last October’s Game 7 at Yankee Stadium– when they left Pedro in there too long– may have been the most devastating defeat of them all. For the Red Sox fan in Yankee Stadium, therefore, the question in the bottom of the thirteenth inning of an important game is not whether the Sox will blow a one-run lead, but, rather, in what tortuous, sadistic manner the inevitable is going to occur.
The bottom of the inning started off predictably, with two quick Yankees outs. The Red Sox were down to the bottom of their bullpen. Journeyman reliever Curtis Leskanic, whom the Sox had acquired from Kansas City just that week, was actually pitching some gutsy baseball those last two innings. Ruben Sierra scratched a single up the middle, however, and fate was about to take over. Being a Red Sox fan in situations like this is like that scene in the Steely Dan song: "Like the castle in its corner/ In a medieval game/ I foresee terrible trouble/ And I stay here just the same."
I looked out at the Red Sox outfield. Earlier that day I had been listening to the Mets afternoon game on the radio. The Mets were in a tough one-run game in the late innings against Cincinnati. The Reds had a runner on first base. "The Mets are in a ‘no-doubles’ defense," said the announcer at one point. I had never heard it described that way, but I knew what he meant: The Mets outfielders were playing deep, to help prevent balls being hit through the gaps and allowing the runner on first to score the tying run. Now, at Yankee Stadium, the three Sox outfielders were playing deep– in fact, they were literally playing on the warning track. "The no-doubles defense," I said to myself.
The moon, now yellow, was high in the night sky. Miguel Cairo stepped up to the plate for the Yankees. Cairo is not exactly a home run threat, and the only way Sierra was going to score from first base was on an extra base hit. Leskanic got two quick strikes on Cairo. The third pitch was a ball just off the plate, which Cairo barely held off on. The crowd, on its feet, gasped in unison. Leskanic had missed strike three by an inch.
The right handed hitting Cairo then launched one to right center field, exactly between center fielder Johnny Damon and right fielder Kevin Millar. Rather than running horizontally to cut off the ball– the whole idea behind the "no-doubles" defense– Millar first ran forward towards the ball, then, once realizing it was going to get by him, retreated towards the right-center field fence, where, to the immense joy of Yankees fans, the ball was now quickly bouncing around out there all by itself, not a Red Sox outfielder in sight. Sierra scored all the way from first base, and Cairo slid into second with a double against the "no-doubles" defense of the Boston Red Sox. Game tied.
It wasn’t Derek Jeter who got the game-winning hit next, of course, or Alex Rodriguez, or Jason Giambi.... It was the last substitute left on the Yankees bench– back-up catcher John Flaherty, who was hitting .160– who knocked Cairo home with a game-winning single to the fence in left. The stands at Yankee Stadium literally shook.
Yankees fans were delirious. As we exited down into the runways, the chants of "Boston S**cks!" and "Nine-teen-Eight-teen!" were thunderous, drowning out Frank Sinatra. To be honest, it was the first time ever at the Stadium that I felt a little unsafe. Not one person, though, either in the Stadium or out on the street, gave me a hard time. In fact, one guy came up to me and shook my hand: "Sorry, man," he said, not condescendingly, or meanly, but actually sincerely. I think everyone in that ballpark, whether rooting for New York or Boston, recognized– and respected– the greatness of what they had just witnessed. By the next day, some of the experts were calling it "the greatest regular season game ever." Manny said to the media: "You had to see it to believe it."
********
When the snow melts off the seats at Fenway Park each spring, and we have survived yet another cold New England winter, the eternal optimism of Red Sox Nation blooms in full splendor. Thus it was this spring, when the Red Sox bought star free-agent pitchers Curt Schilling (we call him "Curt" affectionately) and Keith Foulke. With these additions to the team, surely we were going to catch the hated Yankees. This was certainly the year we were going to "win it all."
The recent sweep by New York was a bit of a speed bump on our road to World Series victory in 2004. The Sox have been struggling, but they still have a decent shot at the playoffs. If we match up again against the Yankees in a seven-game series in October– with our pitching staff– I still like our chances. The Yankees are good, but they are lucky too. And one of these years their luck is going to run out. And it will be sweet. The Boston Red Sox– and their nation of fans-- will be back in the fall. If the games are a fraction of what we saw recently on this mid-summer’s night in the Bronx, fans will see baseball at its very best.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE BABE AND JIM HOW
(Written the night the Sox won the World series in 2004)


The scene is Fenway Park in Kenmore Square, Boston, Massachusetts.

Along the right field grandstands.

As in a scene out of Shakespeare, the full moon is eclipse by the earth. The order of things in the universe has been moved. The dark sky is red.

Two figures appear in the night on the outfield grass.

All is silent as luna disappears completely.

"Jim...." A raspy voice.... "Jim How...."

A response, a whisper, in the silence of the night....
"Bambino... Is that you Bambino?"

"Jim.... The time has come.... Your hour has come...."

"Bambino.... Why? Why Bambino? Why have you cursed us all these years? We are good people here in New England.... We meant you no harm...."

"Jim.... Do not question these things."

"But Bambino.... 1946... '48... '67... '78.... '86... '99.... '03.... Johnny Pesky.... Jim Burton.... Bucky Dent.... Bill Buckner.... Aaron Boone.... Why have you inflicted such punishment on us? For 86 years? On us, our fathers, our grandfathers? Entire generations of Red Sox fans have lived and died and have never witnessed a World Series Championship.... The unspeakable pain, Bambino, year after year after year.... Why, Bambino? Why?"

The Ghost of the Bambino puts his arm around Jim How. They walk to the right field fence, near the Pesky foul pole, barely 300 feet away from homeplate....

Standing there is an uncorked bottle of 1918 Chateau Haut Brion and two goblets. The bouquet from that hot summer filling the cold October Boston night.... The rotund Bambino-- Yankee cap on his head, pinstriped uniform slightly disheveled, navy blue socks pulled up to his knees, number "3" on his back-- pours the wine in the night. Wine whose grapes were harvested at a time when Woodrow Wilson was President. Grapes grown during the summer that Anastacia screamed in vain. Harvested at a time when the Bambino wore the red socks of the team from Boston....

A thousand miles away, in the City of St. Louis, the 2004 Boston Red Sox were celebrating on the field of Busch Stadium, victorious in the 100th World Series. The Red Sox right fielder, wearing number 19, hugged the centerfielder, wearing number 18. The last batter for the Cardinals wore the number 3.

The stars, the planets, the universe, had been realigned....

"Indeed," said the Bambino. "You-- and your forebears-- have suffered. You have suffered enough...."

The Babe smiled his dimpled smile, the mischievous glint in his eye brightening the night.

"Congratulations, Jim How," said the Babe, as he lifted his glass in toast. "Congratulations to all Red Sox fans, past and present.... Congratulations to the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the Major League Baseball World series Champions!"

Jim How, his red and blue 1975 Red Sox cap tilted slightly sideways, raises his glass in recognition of the feat: An incredible, stunning, gut-wrenching comeback, unparalleled, perhaps, in the entire history of sports.

A purging, an exorcism, of the ghosts, the tears, of the past century....

The Bambino and Jim How drink on in the night on the right field lawn of Fenway Park, finishing off the bottle of 1918 Haut Brion in the cold darkness of the New England night.

They part with a fond embrace in the early morning hours, as the dawn of a new day approaches....

A new day.

A new age....

Indeed, the heavens have been realigned....

The earth and the moon have been shaken from their celestial orbits....

The gods have spoken....

Enough!

Enough tears!

The 2004 Boston Red Sox.... after 86 years of sadness and tragedy...

are the Champions of the World!

[DavidG]

Great stuff to start the season, Jim! Well done, well done indeed!