Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  Whatever had been the cause of Lowe’s poor performances, Theo Epstein and Terry Francona decided not to use him as one of the team’s four postseason starting pitchers, instead choosing a rotation of Schilling, Martinez, Bronson Arroyo, and Tim Wakefield. Francona insisted Lowe, who just two seasons earlier had finished third in the league’s Cy Young voting, could still be a playoff asset coming out of the bullpen. “Lowe has some experience in big games, getting some big outs,” Francona said. “I guess my point is, we don’t need to hide him.” In the next day’s Herald, Steve Buckley responded by writing, “That’s complete nonsense, and the only real surprise was that Francona was able to speak the words with a straight face. See, hiding Lowe is PRECISELY what the Red Sox are doing.”

  Despite all this, Boston entered into the playoffs the favorites to capture the American League pennant. The team had a deep bench, healthy starters, and a strong bullpen. “We’re just the idiots this year,” said Johnny Damon before Boston’s first round series with the Angels. “We feel like we can win every game. We feel like we have to have fun—and I think that’s why this team is liked by so many people out there.”

  Damon’s statement wasn’t just hyperbole. This Red Sox team seemed to be as beloved as any in the history of the city. Damon, with his long hair and mangy beard, had embraced his cult status as Boston’s personal Jesus. Upon arriving in Boston, Orlando Cabrera crafted comically intricate, individually tailored handshakes for every member of the team; when Cabrera came back into the dugout after a hit or a good play, the Red Sox looked as if they were communicating in some sort of goofy sign language that involved lots of fist-thumping and pointing at the sky.

  And then, of course, there was Schilling, who sometimes seemed to so crave the fans’ adoration he came off like an overeager teenager. All year long, he would post on the Sons of Sam Horn website, and the night before the playoffs began, he began a thread in the area of the site in which members dissect every pitch of every game in real time.

  “Why not us?” Schilling wrote. “There is no reason the last team standing can’t be us, you know it, we know it. Now is the time to go and prove to ourselves, the fans, the game, how good of a team we are. If 25 guys believe that what we are after is the most important thing in their lives for 4 weeks, there is nothing that can’t be done. Figured I may as well start one game thread this year, considering that coming in here and reading them is sometimes more entertaining than any movie you could see, and often times more entertaining than the game itself.” It seemed as if everyone connected with the team, from the players to the front office to the fans, was convinced 2004 might really be the magical year that Boston banished its demons for good. The Yankees, meanwhile, seemed more than ever like a bunch of stiff, well-paid mercenaries. Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez might be potent offensive forces, but they didn’t look like they’d be much fun to hang out with.

  The Red Sox and their fans certainly enjoyed themselves in the first round. They beat the Angels handily on October 5 and 6, taking a two-game lead in the best of five series back to Fenway for Game 3 on Friday, October 8. That afternoon, the Red Sox squandered a late five-run lead to send the game into extra innings with the score tied at six. In the bottom of the 10th inning, with a man on first and two out, David Ortiz came to the plate.

  Before Ortiz could dig into the batter’s box, Angels manager Mike Scioscia popped out of the visitor’s dugout and walked to the mound. His best reliever, right-hander Francisco Rodriguez, had been pitching since the eighth, and Scioscia wanted a lefty to come in to face Ortiz. He summoned Jarrod Washburn.

  “Washburn is a guy I’ve faced a lot,” Ortiz later told the Globe’s Chris Snow. “Pretty much the last couple of games he’s trying a lot of sliders because I’m driving his fastball pretty good. As soon as I saw him coming out of the bullpen I thought, ‘Here comes my slider.’…I thought, ‘First pitch, he’s going to throw me this, and I’m going to look for it. Give it to me.’ ” Washburn came in and threw Ortiz the slider. Ortiz smashed it over the Green Monster for a game-ending, series-clinching home run.

  Afterward, as the Red Sox sprayed champagne on their fans, the Angels seemed oddly accepting of the methodical dispatching they’d been subjected to. “Those boys are winning the World Series,” first baseman Darin Erstad said. “That’s the deepest team I’ve ever seen. They have every piece of the puzzle. I don’t see anybody beating them.” Shortstop David Eckstein nodded. “As long as they can get the Yankees out of their heads,” he said.

  *Loaiza was such a bust he was called on to pitch mop-up duty in the Yankees’ 22–0 loss, a fact he protested by grooving eminently hittable fastballs to the Indians. Watching the game in the Boston clubhouse, the Red Sox couldn’t help but laugh. “They trade for Loaiza, then pitch him in a 16–goose egg game,” said Derek Lowe, splayed on a clubhouse couch. “Wow.”

  *A starting pitcher can get credit for a win only if he pitches five full innings and leaves with a lead his team doesn’t relinquish. A pitcher can be credited with a loss whenever he leaves a game with his team behind and his team doesn’t rally to win. If a starting pitcher leaves a tie game, or if he leaves with his team trailing in a game they go on to win, or leaves with his team in the lead but before completing five full innings of work, he doesn’t get a decision.

  Chapter 34

  “Can You Believe It?”

  THE RED SOX AND THE YANKEES began their second straight American League Championship Series on Tuesday, October 12. For the first time ever, it was Boston, not New York, that was the clear favorite of the sportswriters and oddsmakers around the country. Boston was the sentimental choice of the rest of the country as well. Two-thousand three’s dramatic Game 7 loss to the Yankees had solidified the Red Sox’s reputation as perpetual underdogs, and the team’s shaggy-dog charm threw the Yankees’ businesslike façade into sharp relief.* The lineup, anchored by David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, didn’t have an easy out in it—batting ninth was Bill Mueller, the 2003 American League batting champion. Schilling and Martinez appeared strong and the relievers were well rested and confident. The Yankees, on the other hand, looked like a poorly constructed fantasy league team. The top of their order was ferocious, with Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui batting in a row. After that, the batters were mostly a collection of castoffs and once-great players well past their prime. How could a team with a $182 million payroll have the depleted 36-year-old Bernie Williams batting fifth and playing center field, or career utility man Miguel Cairo hitting eighth and playing second, or Kenny Lofton—who averaged about 10 home runs a year—as the designated hitter? New York’s pitching looked bad, too, with the starting rotation decimated by age and injuries and the bullpen having been worked into the ground during the regular season. “Going into the series, I thought, looking at the matchups, that we looked pretty good,” Henry says. His players agreed. On the afternoon of October 12, a couple of hours before game time, relievers Mike Timlin and Alan Embree were fielding grounders on the infield grass at Yankee Stadium. “I liked our chances last year,” Timlin said. “I really like [our chances this year].”

  The only real concern for Boston was Curt Schilling’s right ankle. Throughout the season, Schilling had struggled with a deep bone bruise in his right ankle joint—an injury the Red Sox had tried to keep under wraps until Schilling wrote about it on Sons of Sam Horn. From early May through mid-July, Schilling had received an injection of marcaine—a novocaine-like local anesthetic—before every game he pitched, and had frequently been spotted wearing a removable cast-like boot. On September 26, Schilling’s final regular season start, he tweaked his right ankle again, but for the first five innings of Game 1 versus the Angels, he seemed fine. Then, with one out in the sixth inning of that game, Schilling aggravated his ankle injury covering first base. The next inning, with Boston leading 8–1, Schilling was sent to the mound to pitch again, and was obviously uncomfortable while running off the mound to field a lazy gr
ound ball. (Schilling ended up forcing an off-balance, wild throw to first and was charged with an error on the play.) When the next Angels batter hit a run-scoring double, Schilling was finally removed from the game.

  This time, the Red Sox said, Schilling’s ankle injury was not a bone bruise but a tendon injury. It didn’t sound severe—“I don’t know if you’d call it tendinitis. It’s a tendon problem,” said Terry Francona—and Boston’s team doctors assured the press Schilling would be in top form in New York.

  It was clear from the first inning of Game 1 that this was not the case. Schilling began the game by retiring Jeter and Rodriguez, but not before both hit balls hard to right field. The next three batters reached base, and before the inning was over, New York was leading, 2–0. They picked up four more runs off Schilling in the third before the Red Sox’s best pitcher was taken out of the game to a cascade of catcalls and jeers. After six innings, Mike Mussina had retired every Red Sox batter he’d faced and Boston was trailing 8–0. While the Red Sox salvaged some dignity before the end of the night—the final score was 10–7—the loss of Game 1 felt less important than the potential loss of Curt Schilling for the rest of the postseason.

  After the game, the Red Sox finally acknowledged that Schilling was hobbled not by tendinitis, but something far more serious: a ruptured sheath that caused a dislocated tendon behind his right ankle. Tendons are bands of tissues that connect muscle to bone, giving muscles the ability to move the bones. The tendons that connect the shoulder muscles to the upper arm, for instance, allow a pitcher to use those shoulder muscles to propel his arm overhead while throwing a ball to the plate. The rear ankle tendon is positioned in a groove in the fibula, the thinner of the two calf bones that connect the knee with the ankle. For a power pitcher like Schilling, who generates much of his velocity by pushing off his right leg, this tendon is crucial both for balance and for harnessing the leg power he uses to drive off the pitching mound. Schilling had ripped the sheath that holds the tendon in place, and when he tried to pitch, the tendon would snap back and forth across the bone, causing extraordinary pain. Before Game 1 of the Yankees series, the Red Sox had outfitted Schilling with a customized brace and shot him up with painkillers, to no avail. There was no question he’d need surgery as soon as the postseason was over; the only question was whether he’d be able to pitch again that October. At that point, it looked very unlikely. The Red Sox had finally managed to enter the playoffs better positioned than the Yankees, and now, with Schilling sidelined, they went from being favorites to being underdogs once again.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the next night Pedro Martinez lost a taut pitcher’s duel to Jon Lieber, whose sheer averageness was reflected in his career statistics: 100-91 with a 4.20 ERA. Boston’s bats, so powerful all season long, had been silenced. In the first two games, Johnny Damon had gone 0-for-8 with five strikeouts. Manny Ramirez was just 2-for-8 with no runs batted in, while Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller were a combined 2-for-15. As bad as that was, it was about to get worse. In Game 3, played at Fenway Park, the Red Sox were embarrassed, 19–8, putting themselves into a three-game hole in the best of seven series. A season that had once seemed so full of hope had become numbingly depressing. “The Red Sox have been beaten senseless by those damn Yankees again, and the psychological toll threatens to shake the faith of a long-suffering Nation,” Dan Shaughnessy wrote in the next day’s Globe. “The Yankees stripped the Red Sox of all dignity last night…. So there. For the 86th consecutive autumn, the Red Sox are not going to win the World Series. No baseball team in history has recovered from a 3-0 deficit and this most-promising Sox season in 18 years could be officially over tonight. Mercy.”

  Everyone, it seemed, expected the Red Sox to lose. And why not? Their two best pitchers had been beaten. Bronson Arroyo, their Game 3 starter, had been abused, and Tim Wakefield, scheduled to start Game 4, had selflessly offered to pitch mop-up duty in Game 3 to protect the other bullpen arms. Now, the season was thrust into the hands of Derek Lowe, a pitcher so maddeningly inconsistent that Boston had bounced him out of the starting rotation. Three days earlier, scalpers were selling tickets for Sunday’s Game 4 for thousands of dollars. After Saturday night, they were available for less than face value.

  But in the Boston clubhouse, there was a sense not of resignation, but of grim determination. “Don’t let us win one,” Kevin Millar kept saying. It became a mantra that night, as player after player repeated it, sometimes to teammates, sometimes to themselves. “I mean, why not us?” asked Keith Foulke, repeating a slogan Curt Schilling had printed on T-shirts he’d made for the team. “Maybe we’ll be the first team to come back from 3-0. We’ll find out. We have to use every bullet we can to fight and get to tomorrow, and then tomorrow’s no different. We’ll do what we need to do to try to win a ballgame.”

  After the Sox’s Game 3 loss, Theo Epstein downed vodka-and-tonics late into the night with some friends. “I just thought, you know, we need a miracle in Game 4,” he says. At that point, Epstein wasn’t even thinking about coming back to win the series; he was just hoping not to get swept. “I really didn’t want us to lose [Game 4],” he says, “and have our whole season be remembered for getting slapped by the Yankees and for the colossal defeat in Game 3. Our players had been through a lot of adversity, and I really believed in their spirit. I thought it would be inappropriate to be remembered for a loss, or a sweep, rather than for what they had accomplished.”

  On Sunday, just after eleven thirty at night, it seemed that an ignoble sweep was precisely what the 2004 Boston Red Sox would be remembered for. October 17 was a windy night, with temperatures just below 50 degrees. Lowe had pitched admirably in his first postseason start of 2004, allowing just three runs in 51/3 innings. But in the bottom of the eighth Boston was trailing, 4–3, when Yankees manager Joe Torre called on Mariano Rivera, the best postseason reliever in history, to pitch the game’s final two innings. By this point, even the 35,000 fans that had packed their way into Fenway, not to mention the team’s owners, were bracing themselves for another defeat, another humiliation.

  Suite L1, the first luxury box along the third base line, is Larry Lucchino’s box, and he, along with John Henry, Tom Werner, and Charles Steinberg, stared glumly at the field. George Mitrovich, the president of the City Club of San Diego and a guest of Steinberg’s, was talking and gesticulating loudly, and after Rivera pitched his way around a leadoff hit to Manny Ramirez in the eighth, Steinberg decided he had better keep Mitrovich occupied lest he inflame Lucchino. He suggested Mitrovich park himself at a computer and work on preparing some remarks for the postgame press conference the Red Sox would be forced to endure following their unceremonious dismantling.

  Meanwhile, Sox closer Keith Foulke came out of Boston’s dugout to pitch what surely would be the last inning of baseball for the Red Sox in 2004. It was his third inning of work, and Foulke was tiring. He began the inning by walking Derek Jeter, the Yankees leadoff hitter, on six pitches. Jason Varitek threw the ball back to Foulke, who snapped at it in the air, yelled “Fuck” to himself, and turned to stare vacantly at the outfield. Foulke had already thrown 37 pitches. In 72 regular-season appearances, he had thrown more than 30 pitches in a game only four times; he had gone over 40 pitches only once. What’s more, he would now have to face the Yankees’ three most fearsome hitters—Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui—a trio that was hitting better than .500 for the series. On television, Fox was preparing for its postgame show, and its “Plays of the Game”—a couple of infield squibbers in the sixth inning that scored a pair of runs and gave the Yankees the lead—flashed on television screens around the country.

  After the Jeter walk, Lucchino and Steinberg joined Mitrovich and began hammering out statements for the press. Lucchino scribbled away on a yellow legal pad, while Steinberg shared the computer with Mitrovich. “We were concerned we might say something inappropriate or intemperate,” says Lucchino.

  “After the acute pain of this w
ound subsides, we’ll look back on so many remarkable aspects of this season,” Lucchino wrote. “The most remarkable was the passion of Red Sox Nation, of these fans.” As they were writing, Foulke successfully escaped from the ninth inning, striking out Matsui with his 50th pitch of the game. The Red Sox had one last chance.

  As the Sox prepared to bat, Fenway’s PA system blared Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” the motivational song that had become the team’s unofficial anthem. “Look,” Eminem drawled, “if you had one shot, or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted—one moment—would you capture it? Or just let it slip?” A week ago, this song seemed to mean something, and it had riled the Fenway crowd in the bottom of the 10th inning of the final game of the Angels series, right before David Ortiz’s game-winning homer. But now the crowd was lifeless, waiting only for the string to play itself out. At that moment, the lyrics felt like a mockery: “You better lose yourself in the music, the moment / You own it, you better never let it go / You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.”

  Lucchino kept writing as Rivera took his warmup tosses, now just scratching down phrases: “deeply disappointed,” “bitter taste of defeat,” “lost to an exceptional baseball team.” He thought once again of the fans: “The R.S. fans gave their undying loyalty. We will give our relentless effort, redoubled, next year.” And then he turned to the passion for a victory: “This loss in the A.L.C.S. only intensifies our resolve to win. We will be back.” Due up in the last half of the ninth was the bottom third of the Red Sox batting order: Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller, and Mark Bellhorn. Henry was, he says, “utterly distressed.” “We thought we had done everything we could to get back to the point [we were at] last year when it didn’t happen,” he says. “You always ask: What went wrong?”