Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  The quiet, businesslike Reese was, in many ways, a throwback to an earlier era when shortstops were expected to play spectacular defense and not much else. Reese fit that description perfectly, and during his first several months on the team, he made spectacular plays seem like the norm, as he vacuumed up balls hit anywhere near him. During the times he did have success at the plate, Boston fans responded by showering him with adoration.

  Take his performance in a May 8 game against the Kansas City Royals. In the fifth inning, Reese hit a ball deep into Fenway’s right-field corner, and as it rolled around, Reese scrambled around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. The next inning, Reese hit a ball over the Green Monster. He’d hit only two home runs all year, and they came in successive innings. The crowd called him out for a curtain call and chanted his name in the traditional Fenway singsong for the rest of the game.

  Garciaparra’s return, coupled with the surprising offensive prowess demonstrated by shaggy-haired Mark Bellhorn, exiled Reese to the bench. Garciaparra, who’d always been less effective going to his left, was further limited by his heel injury. The contrast with Reese grew starker as Garciaparra began making errors on routine plays, missing balls, and throwing wildly. On rare occasions he was even booed, and every now and then, in a quiet moment at Fenway, a fan would shout “Pokey’s better!” into the night.

  A June 13 home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers encapsulated the relative fortunes of Garciaparra and Reese. It was Garciaparra’s fourth game back, and he’d picked up only one more hit since the single in his first trip to the plate. Martinez was on the mound, and in the seventh inning the Red Sox were leading 4–1. Martinez’s pitch count was mounting, and the seventh would likely be his last inning of work.

  Adrian Beltre began the inning by grounding out to third. Juan Encarnacion was up next, and he hit a grounder up the middle, just off of the second base bag. Garciaparra ran to his left but couldn’t quite reach the ball in time. With Encarnacion on first, Martinez struck out Olmedo Saenz, bringing Alex Cora to the plate. Cora roped a grounder in between shortstop and third base, and while Garciaparra was able to get a glove on the ball, he couldn’t make a play.

  Both of the runners that reached base had hit the ball in Garciaparra’s direction, and while the shortstop wasn’t given an error on either play, there was a palpable sense at Fenway that had Reese—playing second base for the night—been at short, the inning would have been over. Now there were men on first and second with two outs and Dodgers center fielder Dave Roberts at the plate. A base hit would likely score a run, and it would almost certainly be the end of Martinez’s night. What had felt, only moments earlier, like a sure victory began to appear less secure. Roberts, known more for his speed than his bat, hit a flare that looked to be headed directly into center field, and the fans at Fenway let out a collective groan. Then Reese, playing about 10 feet to the right of the second base bag, hurled his body upward, his arm stretched out at full extension. “I thought the ball was in the outfield already,” said Martinez after the game. Reese was able to snare the ball in the top of his glove, and as he tumbled back down to the field, the crowd erupted. “It wasn’t real!” said Martinez, as he ran over to Reese. Fenway began a thunderous chant of “PO-KEY, PO-KEY.” It was still going strong in the bottom of the seventh, when Garciaparra popped out to third base to end the inning.

  By the end of June, the Red Sox were badly slumping and Garciaparra had become as dispirited as he’d been at any point in his professional baseball career. His teammates were telling reporters—on background, of course—that he’d become a distraction, always moping around his locker just to the left of the clubhouse door. When the Red Sox baseball operations office took an informal poll among players about whether they’d be upset if Garciaparra was traded, virtually everyone agreed it would be better for Garciaparra and the team if he were playing somewhere else. Kevin Millar, Johnny Damon, David Ortiz, and even Manny Ramirez personified the free-spirited, fun-loving Boston Red Sox. Garciaparra didn’t seem to fit in with the team’s new mood.

  When the Red Sox headed into Yankee Stadium for a three-game series on June 29 and 30 and July 1, Boston had lost five of its last eight games and was trailing the Yankees by five-and-a-half games. In the three weeks since he’d been back, Garciaparra hit just .233 with a single home run. The Yankees series did not begin auspiciously: Garciaparra made an error during the Yankees’ first at-bat. Three innings later, another Garciaparra error led to three unearned runs for the Yankees, who cruised to an 11–3 win. The next night, an eighth inning error by Garciaparra preceded two more Yankees runs, and the Sox lost, 4–2.

  The last game of the series felt like a must-win contest for Boston. Martinez was on the mound, matched up against Brad Halsey, essentially a spare part called on to make a handful of replacement starts for New York. Garciaparra, who’d played the last nine games in a row, was not in Boston’s starting lineup; both Garciaparra and manager Terry Francona said only that the shortstop needed to rest his heel.

  From the outset, the game had the makings of an exciting contest. In the first inning, the Yankees’ Gary Sheffield stepped out of the batter’s box after Martinez had already begun his windup. Moves like this are part of the normal gamesmanship that occurs in baseball, but for Martinez, it signaled an unacceptable lack of respect, and he nailed Sheffield in the back with his next pitch. The Yankees scored first, on a two-run Tony Clark home run in the second, and Jorge Posada followed that up with a solo shot in the fifth. Pokey Reese made a breathtaking catch to end that inning, as he raced from shortstop into foul territory outside of third base to catch a Kenny Lofton pop-up. Reese slammed into the wall separating the field from the seats and jackknifed into the stands, but still managed to hold onto the ball. In the sixth, Manny Ramirez put the Sox on the board with a two-run shot, and Boston tied the game the next inning. The score stayed knotted at 3–3 for the rest of the seventh, the eighth, and finally through the ninth and 10th innings.

  In the top of the 11th, Boston loaded the bases with nobody out. Kevin Millar hit into a double play that didn’t score a run, leaving men at first and second with two out. Everyone, it seemed, knew what would come next: With weak-hitting Dave McCarty due up, Terry Francona would send Nomar Garciaparra to the plate to pinch-hit.

  But Garciaparra didn’t stir from his seat on a corner of the Red Sox bench, far removed from the rest of his teammates, who were huddled together on the top step of the dugout, nervously watching the action out on the field. McCarty stepped up to the plate—and flied out to end the inning.

  Garciaparra’s absence was made all the more glaring by what happened an inning later. With two outs and runners on second and third in the top of the 12th, Trot Nixon lofted a ball that looked as if it would land just inside the third base line for a fair ball; if it dropped, both runners would probably score, giving Boston its first lead of the night. As soon as the ball left Nixon’s bat, Derek Jeter took off on a dead sprint from his position at shortstop. He somehow managed to snag Nixon’s flare, but his momentum propelled him forward, and he tumbled into the stands. When he emerged, his face bruised and his uniform bloodied, he still had the ball in his glove. Inning over.

  The Red Sox finally scored in the 13th inning on Manny Ramirez’s second home run of the game. They looked poised to add more when Boston put two men on with one out, but Cesar Crespo, a lifetime .192 hitter, was sent to the plate as Garciaparra again remained on the bench. Crespo hit into a double play, and in the bottom of the 13th, the Yankees rallied to win the game, 5–4.

  Now, for the first time, Garciaparra is willing to talk in detail about what happened that night. “I couldn’t play that day,” says Garciaparra. When Garciaparra talks, he often gets a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he almost feels sorry for the people who can’t see the truths so readily apparent to him. “It was funny, because everyone knew that I wasn’t going to play every fifth day because of my [Achilles] tendonitis…but prior to
the Yankees game I played sixteen games straight.” (Garciaparra had played in nine straight games previous to July 1.) That night, Garciaparra says, the trainers told the coaching staff that he should rest his ankle. “The trainers are going, ‘You haven’t had a day off,’ ” he says. “I didn’t ask for one.” When the game went into extra innings, Garciaparra says he told Francona he was available to pinch-hit, and even tried at one point to get loose. He was, he says, sitting alone on the bench only because it was his good luck spot. When he tried to move, he says, “My teammates go, ‘Get back in your spot because we need to score some runs.’ ”

  Francona has a different recollection of the game. At the winter meetings following the 2004 season, Francona told Red Sox beat reporters that Garciaparra had asked to sit out the game because he was upset about the three errors he’d committed in the first two games of the series. After Reese’s and Jeter’s spectacular catches, Francona said, Garciaparra asked into the game. Francona refused to play a player who had already made clear he would put himself and his own sensitivities above the team.

  No sooner had the four-hour-and-23-minute game ended than commentators began referring to it as the best regular-season contest ever played. Even the Boston players agreed. “It was one of the best games I’ve ever seen,” said Martinez in the clubhouse, adding, “You saw Jeter over there leaving his skin and everything, his body, out for the team.” His rebuke to Garciaparra couldn’t have been much clearer. The Red Sox, with their $127 million lineup, had lost eight of their last 11 games and were now eight-and-a-half games behind New York. Since May 1, the team had gone a miserable 27-29. The 2004 Boston Red Sox, the team that had been assembled specifically for the purpose of making a last-chance run at a title before the team’s powerful core hit the free agent market, seemed to be a bust.

  If the July 1 game against the Yankees was one of the low points of Boston’s 2004 season, another contest against New York three weeks later may very well have turned the season around. On Friday, July 23, the Sox opened up a three-game series against the Yankees at Fenway. The Yankees were leading 7–4 in the sixth, before the Sox picked up a run in three straight innings, two of them on Kevin Millar home runs. (Millar had three four-baggers on the night.) But, in the ninth, Alex Rodriguez drove in the game-winning run off Keith Foulke who, after a bout of early season dominance, had blown four of his last six save opportunities.* At the end of the day, Boston was nine-and-a-half games behind New York, and the season seemed to be slipping away.

  Saturday’s game was scheduled to begin at 3:15 P.M. Morning rain showers had soaked Fenway’s grass, whose field was, at the time, one of the slowest to drain in all of baseball, and early that afternoon, the Fenway grounds crew recommended calling off the game. But Johnny Damon, Kevin Millar, and Jason Varitek went into Terry Francona’s office and told him the players were passionate about getting the game in. Their pride was on the line. After a 54-minute delay, Boston’s Bronson Arroyo threw out the first pitch of the afternoon.

  The game did not begin well for the Sox: By the top of the third inning, the Yankees had a three-run lead. Then Arroyo, who led the league in hit batsmen in 2004, plunked Alex Rodriguez on the elbow. Instead of taking his base, Rodriguez stood at the plate, staring out at Arroyo.* Varitek jumped up and stood between Rodriguez and his pitcher. “I basically told him to get the fuck down to first base,” Varitek said later, and soon the two players were pushing and shoving each other’s faces.† Both benches cleared, and in a scene reminiscent of their brawl in the 2003 playoffs, the Red Sox and Yankees went at each other with a viciousness rare in baseball. Boston took a 4–3 lead in the fourth, fell behind 9–4 by the sixth, and was trailing 10–8 by the bottom of the ninth. With Mariano Rivera on the mound, the Red Sox looked finished: The Yankees reliever had converted 23 straight save opportunities and had allowed only one home run all year.

  Garciaparra, who already had two hits and two runs batted in for the game, led off the ninth with a double, and a deep fly ball by Trot Nixon moved him to third. Kevin Millar followed with a single that scored Garciaparra and brought the Red Sox to within a run. Bill Mueller, Boston’s often-overlooked third baseman, was up next. Unlike Millar or Damon, Mueller didn’t seek out the spotlight, and when he spoke to the press, he was usually so bland that his quotes were all but worthless. He wasn’t a multimillionaire All-Star like Garciaparra or Ramirez, wasn’t a prodigious slugger like Ortiz. But he was one of the key players on the team, and he turned in consistently above-average defense and clutch hitting. He dug into the batter’s box, left leg twitching, bat waving gently in the air, a sneer settling onto his face. After working the count to 3-1, Mueller found a pitch he thought he could handle and he uncorked his swing, his top hand flying off the bat. The ball soared into right field and dropped into the Red Sox bullpen for a game-winning, two-run home run. The Red Sox poured out of their dugout to celebrate. The reaction would have been appropriate for a team that had just won a spot in the playoffs instead of a midseason day game against a division rival. It was as if the players knew that, one day down the line, they’d be able to draw inspiration from their comeback against the best reliever in baseball.

  Theo Epstein’s parents, Leslie and Ilene, were at Fenway that day. They’d been warned by their son not to embarrass him in public. (Following his installation as the youngest general manager in baseball history, Theo had to explain to his parents why giving out baby pictures to the media was not going to make it any easier to convince people to take him seriously.) The Epsteins almost always steered clear of Theo at the ballpark, waiting until they saw him alone to talk about this or that game or play. But, on this day, Theo’s parents had to congratulate their son. They went down to the waiting room outside of the Red Sox clubhouse to share in the joy of the day.

  Even Epstein himself, known for his steely demeanor and distrust of hyperbole, seemed a bit overwhelmed. “What can you say? The game was a classic,” he said afterward. “It was a cataclysmic event. This win, the way it happened, should prove to be very important to us. It’s hard to have a more meaningful regular season victory.”

  *After consecutive April rainouts, Terry Francona decided to simply skip one of Lowe’s starts instead of moving everyone in the rotation down a couple of days; as a result, Lowe didn’t pitch from April 7 to April 18. He spent the rest of the season thinking the Red Sox had conspired to deny him a chance at another win and were trying to throw off his rhythm. As the season progressed, he became more and more upset.

  *Foulke was rightly credited as being one of the most valuable members of the 2004 team. It’s worth comparing his numbers with those of Byung-Hyun Kim’s from a year earlier. From July 1, 2003, through the end of the season, the period during which Kim served as the Red Sox closer, he converted 16 of 19 saves, for a success rate of 84 percent, and put up a 2.28 ERA. In 2004, Foulke converted 32 of 39 saves, for an 82 percent success rate, with an ERA of 2.17.

  *Arroyo already had a reputation for hitting Yankees batters. In Game 2 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, Arroyo—in his first-ever playoff appearance—hit Alfonso Soriano in retaliation for Yankees pitcher Jose Contreras throwing a pitch near David Ortiz’s head. “That’s the way the game goes,” Arroyo said at the time. “Anytime you go out there and show people you’ve got a little bit of balls, people respect that.”

  †The image of Varitek seemingly trying to stuff his catcher’s mitt into Rodriguez’s mouth has become one of the most iconic images of the 2004 season, and was featured on the cover of Stephen King and Stuart O’Nan’s Faithful. Varitek made it the screensaver for the laptop he used to prepare for games for the remainder of the year.

  Chapter 32

  Trading an Icon

  JULY 31 is one of the most tension-filled days of the baseball season. A little less than two-thirds of the games have been played, and teams looking to make a playoff run have just two more months in which to prove their mettle. The All-Star game is in the past, pitching rotati
ons have been settled on, and unlikely stars have emerged. It’s also Major League Baseball’s annual nonwaiver trade deadline.* Teams that have fallen out of the playoff race look to unload a high-priced star in return for young, cheap talent that can help the team rebuild. Teams convinced they have a shot at making the playoffs try to find that one missing part, a consistent middle reliever, say, or a potent bat off the bench. And teams like the 2004 Boston Red Sox—well-paid, talent-laden clubs saddled with the attendant high expectations—try to figure out what they can do to save their seasons.

  Since John Henry and Tom Werner had bought the team, the trade-deadline move had become a staple of life in Boston. On July 30, 2002, the Red Sox traded barely used pitcher Sun-Woo Kim to the Montreal Expos for outfielder Cliff Floyd. In 2003, the team picked up two pitchers—Scott Williamson and Jeff Suppan—in the last two days before the deadline. A July trade, explained Larry Lucchino, helped show the players that management was as committed to winning as the players were.