Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  The first pitch to Millar was a ball, inside: 1-0. Rivera’s strength is his cut fastball, a pitch thrown more than 90 miles per hour that explodes in on a left-hander’s hands or back over the inside part of the plate against a right-hander. It is considered one of the most uniquely unhittable pitches in the history of the game, but Millar is an excellent fastball hitter, and he was waiting for his pitch. The second pitch was one Millar could handle, and he hammered it, but foul, into the left-field stands. The third pitch, thrown just after the clock turned midnight, was inside again: two balls, one strike. The fourth pitch was also inside. And on the fifth pitch of the at-bat, Mariano Rivera, the most dependable reliever in all of baseball, walked Kevin Millar. It was the first postseason walk Rivera had issued in three years.

  Up in L1, Henry glanced down at the diamond and began running numbers in his head. “When Millar walked at the top of that inning, I knew the chances of him scoring had gone to about 55 percent,” says Henry. “I’m the math guy. If he makes an out, our chances of scoring drop to about 15 percent.” Still, logic often seemed to have no place when it came to the Red Sox and the Yankees; after all, Manny Ramirez had opened the eighth inning with a hit but never came around to score. Nonetheless, Lucchino and Steinberg abandoned their concession statements to walk to the edge of the suite, where they looked down at the field.

  As Millar trotted to first, outfielder Dave Roberts stepped out of the Sox dugout. Roberts had been another trade-deadline pickup for the Red Sox, sent to Boston from the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for a minor leaguer. One of the best base-stealers in the game, Roberts was exactly the type of player it seemed the Red Sox wouldn’t be interested in: He had little power, a weak throwing arm, and didn’t hit for very good average. But Epstein knew that just because stealing a base isn’t a smart idea most of the time didn’t mean it couldn’t be a crucially important weapon in very specific situations. Now was just such a situation. The Red Sox had one inning left to manufacture a single run. If they couldn’t, their season was over. Before he was called on to pinch-run, Roberts had been hunkered down in the video room of the Red Sox clubhouse, studying Rivera’s pickoff moves to first base. This was his first appearance in the Yankees series.

  Roberts and Millar knocked fists, and Millar jogged back to the dugout. His night was over. Roberts, who was 38-for-41 in steal attempts in 2004, glanced back. From the dugout, Terry Francona winked, a single bat of the eyelid that meant Roberts had the green light to try to steal second base.

  As Rivera prepared to pitch with Bill Mueller at the plate, Roberts shuffled down the base path, stretching his lead to five, six, 10 feet. He was poised on the edge of movement, his left leg almost straight, his right leg bent, his arms twitching between his knees. Every time Rivera made a move on the mound, Roberts’s entire body would tense as he decided whether to dive back to first or take off for second. Rivera threw to first; Roberts dove back in safely. Rivera threw to first again; again Roberts dove back, safe. When Rivera threw over to first one last time, the Fenway crowd began to boo. The throw was close, and as the first base umpire signaled safe, Roberts pursed his lips into an O. “When everyone in the ballpark knows you’re going to steal against Rivera, it’s pretty tough,” Roberts would say later. After three pickoff throws, Rivera was ready to pitch. As he made his move to the plate, Roberts took off. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada’s throw to Derek Jeter was slightly to the left of the second base bag, and Robert’s left hand slid in just ahead of Jeter’s sweeping tag. Safe.

  That first pitch to Mueller had been a ball, so now the count was one ball, no strikes, no outs, a man on second. Fenway Park, depressingly subdued for most of the night, suddenly came to life. The switch-hitting Mueller was batting left-handed—just as he had been on July 24 when his ninth-inning home run had beaten Rivera and the Yankees—and he stepped out of the batter’s box and peered down at Dale Sveum, the team’s third base coach. The Red Sox, a team that hated to sacrifice the batter in order to move a runner over a base because it meant wasting an out, were going to bunt. Rivera squared to throw again, and Mueller leveled his bat before letting the ball land squarely in Posada’s catcher’s mitt, a cutter thrown right over the plate. Strike one.

  Mueller stepped back and once again looked down to third. With Fenway now at a fever pitch, everyone, seemingly, knew what Mueller would do: try again to lay down the bunt to move Roberts over to third. Rivera, likely concentrating on getting in position to field the ball, grooved a pitch down the middle of the plate.

  Except the bunt sign was called off. “Dave’s at second base with no one out,” explains Epstein. “The crowd’s murmuring, ‘Bunt—you don’t have anyone out.’ But the bunt is not the right play there. With a guy like Rivera throwing 94-mile-per-hour cutters in on Mueller’s hands, the most likely outcome of that at-bat [if he swings away instead of bunting] is a ground ball to second base, which gets [Roberts] over [to third base] anyway. [Without the bunt] you have a shot of getting a base hit.”

  True to the script, Mueller lashed Rivera’s eighth pitch of the inning straight up the diamond, sending the Yankees pitcher sprawling and Roberts sprinting in from second base. As Roberts rounded third, Bernie Williams, the Yankees weak-armed center fielder, threw the ball in, and Rivera caught it near the mound without even bothering to throw home. The score was now 4–4. Tie game. “You know the analogy ‘Get up off the canvas’?” asks Epstein. “We had been kind of down and out after Game 3, and that was sort of the start of a rising. The crowd finally got into it.”

  The Red Sox had their chance to win it in the ninth. An error and a walk loaded the bases with two outs, sending Ortiz to bat. His two-year tenure as the Sox designated hitter had already been filled with dramatic, game-winning hits. But Ortiz popped out. As he came back to the Sox dugout, he was inconsolable, and the game remained tied at 4–4.

  “You can’t do it every time,” Jason Varitek told Ortiz. “It’s not humanly possible to get a hit in every single time in these situations.” Varitek’s words were well-intentioned, but Ortiz probably found no comfort in them: Ortiz, after all, does feel he can do it every time. Three innings later, at 1:22 A.M., he proved it. With no outs in the bottom of the 12th, Ortiz hit his second game-ending home run of the postseason, smashing an offering from Paul Quantrill into the Yankees’ right-field bullpen. Fenway Park erupted as Ortiz and the Red Sox danced around home plate. As the Standells’ 1960s garage-rock classic “Dirty Water,” with its moaning talk of frustrated women, lovers, fuggers, and thieves, played from Fenway’s loudspeakers, one of the uniformed policemen ringing the field nodded to a reporter and said out of the side of his mouth, “Oh, we’re gonna win this thing. No doubt about it. We’re gonna win.” Curt Schilling agreed. “I believed we felt like we had them when we won Game 4. Whether we did or not, I don’t think was relevant. I think we believed it. Which was all that really mattered.”

  Game 5, which began less than 16 hours after the end of Game 4, already had special significance. With Pedro Martinez set to become a free agent once the postseason ended, this was, as everyone knew, potentially the last game he’d ever pitch as a member of the Red Sox. “I just want to treat my fans, if this is my last outing, to the best I can give them for today and let’s see what happens at the end of these playoffs,” he said. Martinez was matched up, as he had been so many times over the last several years, with the Yankees’ Mike Mussina. Both pitchers lasted six innings, but when Martinez walked off the mound, the Red Sox were trailing, 4–2. The score remained there until the bottom of the eighth, when Ortiz brought Boston to within a run with yet another homer and Jason Varitek tied the score at four with a sacrifice fly off Mariano Rivera. And there the score stayed, through the ninth inning, then the 10th, then finally the 11th and 12th. By the 13th, the Red Sox were on their seventh pitcher, Tim Wakefield, who once again had been called upon for emergency relief duty. The good news was that his knuckleball was dancing so effectively it was confounding the Yankees. The ba
d news was that it was also confounding Varitek—three passed balls put runners on second and third, despite the fact that the Yankees hadn’t collected a hit in the inning. Finally, on the fifth batter of the inning, Wakefield struck out Ruben Sierra. After Varitek looked down at his glove to make sure he’d actually caught the ball, he sprinted into the dugout to refuel with some Gatorade and applesauce.

  In the bottom of the 14th, Yankees pitcher Esteban Loaiza came out for his fourth inning of work. A bust during the regular season, Loaiza had been unhittable in this game, with a devastating sinker falling off one side of the plate and a wicked cut fastball collapsing on the other. His last three innings of work may have been the best pitched innings of the series thus far. Since entering the game in the 11th with runners on first and second and one out, he’d allowed just one walk. Now, Loaiza struck out Mark Bellhorn to begin the inning, and a pair of walks sandwiched around another strikeout put Johnny Damon on second base and Manny Ramirez on first with two outs. David Ortiz was due up at the plate. A base hit would likely win the game.

  As Ortiz walked to the plate, he spit into his batting gloves and then smashed his hands together. As he dug into the batter’s box, he tried to drown out the serenading cries of “PAPI, PAPI,” to ignore the adulatory signs that freckled the Fenway stands. “You want to shut everything down,” he later told the Globe’s Chris Snow. “After you shut down all the noise and everything around you, that’s when your concentration comes. That’s when you focus on what you want to do.”

  Ortiz is often described as a hitting genius, as if his talent is purely God-given. He’s more comfortable than many other players talking with and teasing reporters, but English is not his first language, and he often plays the part of the friendly jokester. However, Ortiz works on his hitting as much as anyone in baseball. While his teammates are in the field, Ortiz often retreats to the Red Sox clubhouse to study his previous at-bats against that night’s pitcher. Ortiz had been preparing for Loaiza ever since he’d taken the mound. “I wasn’t trying to go too crazy with him,” Ortiz said later. Because of the late movement of Loaiza’s pitches, Ortiz said, he “just wanted to stay on the ball longer.”

  Loaiza’s first pitch looked hittable, and Ortiz took a monstrous cut, but at the last moment the ball dove down and away, and Ortiz missed. Strike one. A ball and a foul made it 1-2. The Yankees were one strike away from sending the game, which had already taken longer than any postseason game in baseball history, into the 15th inning. The fourth pitch was outside but not by enough for Ortiz to take, and he punched it foul. He hit the next pitch deep enough to be a home run, but it hooked foul into the right-field stands. Loaiza followed with another ball, bringing the count even, to 2-2. Ortiz stepped out of the batter’s box.

  As Ortiz and Loaiza battled, Fenway was in a complete frenzy. A group of young men just behind home plate had been pounding on the dividing wall that separated the field from the stands since the eighth inning. Down the third base line, ESPN’s Peter Gammons stood, poised by the entrance to the field, as he waited for the game to end so he could run out and collect a few quick on-camera quotes. He’d been standing there for a couple of hours already, ever since the bottom of the eighth, when the Yankees looked as if they were about to put away the game, and the series. Gammons, who’d seen the Red Sox beat the Cincinnati Reds in extra innings in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, couldn’t seem to erase the grin from his face. “Unbelievable,” he occasionally murmured, shaking his head.

  Ortiz knew a walk would load the bases, and with Doug Mientkiewicz on deck, he also knew the Yankees would much prefer to pitch to the light-hitting defensive specialist than to the man whose postseason highlight reel seemed to grow with each passing day. At this point, the difference between men on first and second and men on every base was negligible: With two outs, the lead runner would be off on contact in either case, and a base hit would likely win the game regardless of whether Damon was on second or third. Even with two strikes, Ortiz knew Loaiza wasn’t going to give him anything on the fat part of the plate, and the way Loaiza was pitching, he could keep on painting the corners forever. Ortiz dug in, determined to foul off as many pitches as it took until there was one he could handle.

  And so Ortiz fouled off the seventh pitch of the at-bat, and then the eighth and the ninth. As he stepped out of the batter’s box again, he examined his bat before seizing it by the barrel and smacking it, handle first, into the ground to make sure one of Loaiza’s cutters hadn’t splintered it. Satisfied, he tucked it under his arm, spat into his gloves once more, smacked his hands together again, and settled back in to hit. On the 10th pitch of David Ortiz’s seventh plate appearance of the night, Loaiza threw a cut fastball in on Ortiz’s hands. Ortiz, no longer swinging for the fences, fisted the ball over Derek Jeter’s head, where it fell in front of center fielder Bernie Williams. On national television, commentator Joe Buck exclaimed, “Damon coming to the plate, he can keep on running to New York. Game 6, tomorrow night!” As Loaiza walked dejectedly off the mound, he spit out his gum and took a swat at it with his glove. This had been the best he’d pitched all year, and still Ortiz had beaten him.

  It was Ortiz’s second walk-off hit of the series and his third of the postseason; no other player in history had hit more than two in his entire career. Afterward, Theo Epstein said, “It might be the greatest game ever played. I’d like to hear other nominations…. That might have been one of the greatest at-bats to end the greatest game ever played.” Pedro Martinez, who’d made headlines in September after referring to the Yankees as “my daddy” after a tough loss to New York, said simply, “The Yankees need to think about who’s their Big Papi.”

  In less than 48 hours, the Red Sox had crawled from a three-game hole to bring the series to 3-2. The next two games were in the Bronx, but even with the Yankees returning to their home turf, the entire tenor of the series had shifted. Curt Schilling, perhaps the best postseason pitcher of his generation, was slated to pitch Game 6, just days after it looked like he was finished for the season. And if Schilling won Game 6, anything could happen in a winner-take-all Game 7.

  The fact that Schilling looked prepared to take the mound at all was nothing short of a minor medical miracle. The Sox had been desperately casting about for some short-term solution to Schilling’s dislocated tendon. “Everyone was thinking, ‘Well, is there some way to strap [the tendon] down?’ ” Epstein explained. “Can we just screw that freakin’ tendon to bone? What can we do here?” Red Sox medical director Bill Morgan and the Boston training staff had another idea: How about suturing the skin around the injured tendon down to the deep tissue, creating what was essentially an artificial sheath to hold the tendon in place? Epstein was willing to consider it as a last-ditch scenario. But, as far as they could tell, the procedure had never been attempted before, so Morgan had no other surgeons to consult. He decided to do what med school students did when first learning surgery: practice on human cadavers. After a couple of tries, he was convinced it could work, and Morgan, Epstein, and Schilling decided the big right-hander would go under the knife. On Monday, a couple of hours before Boston’s Game 5 victory, team doctors cut into Schilling’s ankle. The doctors were actually making the injury worse—they were suturing the tendon out of place—but they hoped that by immobilizing it they could stop the tendon from snapping back and forth across Schilling’s anklebone.

  It was clear from early in Game 6 that this was a different pitcher than the one who had taken the mound in Yankee Stadium a week earlier. Schilling retired nine out of the first 10 batters he faced, and then, after letting up a pair of back-to-back singles to start the fourth inning, retired 10 more in a row, even as blood seeped out of one of his newly opened stitches and into his sanitary hose. The only blow against him was Bernie Williams’s seventh-inning home run. Amazingly, Schilling lasted seven full innings, and left with a 4–1 lead. This gave the Boston bullpen a crucial break: Over the previous 48 hours, Alan Embree, Keith Foulke, and Mik
e Timlin had each thrown more than two innings, every one of them in high-pressure situations. Game 3 starter Bronson Arroyo came in to pitch the eighth. A one-out Miguel Cairo double and a Derek Jeter single scored New York’s second run and brought Alex Rodriguez to the plate. After going 6-for-14 in New York’s three victories, Rodriguez was only 2-for-12 in Games 4, 5, and 6. Now, facing Arroyo, the pitcher who’d nailed him in the elbow in July, Rodriguez hit a meek dribbler up the first base line. Arroyo fielded the ball and went to tag Rodriguez, but Rodriguez took an odd, uncoordinated, openhanded swipe at Arroyo’s arm, knocking the ball loose and sending it rolling into right field. The first base umpire called Rodriguez safe, and Jeter scrambled around to score. But, after convening as a group and discussing the play, the umpires reversed the call. Rodriguez was out and Jeter was sent back to second base.

  It was the second time that night the umpires had overruled a decision in the Red Sox’s favor: In the fourth inning, with two out and two men on, Mark Bellhorn had hit a home run to left field that a fan had caught and dropped back onto the field. The hit was initially ruled a ground-rule double before the umpires got together and correctly called it a homer. This second call was too much for the New York fans to handle. A couple of days earlier they’d been pounding their chests and preparing for another satisfying victory at the hands of their Boston rivals. Now, the Yankees looked poised to suffer the worst postseason collapse in baseball history. Fans began throwing baseballs onto the field, which were quickly followed by bottles and debris. Before play resumed, riot police were called out to ring the infield. Once they were in place, Gary Sheffield popped out to end the inning.