by Seth Mnookin
In the ninth, Keith Foulke was called upon for the third straight game. Out of everyone in Boston’s bullpen, Foulke was likely the most spent. He’d thrown 50 pitches two nights earlier in Boston’s Game 4 victory, and followed that up with 22 more pitches in Game 5. Before that, the most pitches Foulke had thrown in a game that year was 41, and the most he’d thrown in any three-day stretch was 62. When he came to the mound in Game 6, he’d thrown 72 pitches in the previous 48 hours.
Foulke’s best pitch is his changeup. Changeups are thrown with the same pitching motion as a fastball, but come in with less speed; because the hitter can’t tell what’s coming, the reduced speed leaves him off-balance. In order for a changeup to be effective, a pitcher must have a decent enough fastball to keep the hitter honest. Foulke’s fastball had never been overpowering, but at 90 or 91 miles per hour it was respectable enough to adequately set up his change.
It was clear from the first batter Foulke faced in Game 6 that he wouldn’t be throwing in the low 90s. His fastball was topping out at 88 or 89 miles per hour, which didn’t provide as much deception for his mid-70-mile-per-hour, knee-buckling changeup. What’s more, home plate umpire Joe West had a tight strike zone: anything the slightest bit off the plate was going to be called a ball. Hideki Matsui, the first man up in the inning, walked, bringing the tying run to the plate. After Bernie Williams struck out and Jorge Posada popped up, Ruben Sierra came to bat. Like Matsui, Sierra—who’d been 0-for-3 with three strikeouts against Schilling—battled his way on base via a seven-pitch walk. He was followed by first baseman Tony Clark, and as Clark prepared to hit, the angry and frustrated fans in Yankee Stadium came to life. This was how it was supposed to work in New York. A walk-off home run by one of the Yankees role players would make up for the anguish of the last several days.
“That at-bat, for me, was the most nerve-wracking moment of the series,” says Epstein. “Foulke has nothing, he’s getting squeezed, and a Clark home run ends it all.” At home, at least the Red Sox would get a chance to bat last—in Yankee Stadium, there would be no more chances. As Clark settled into the batter’s box, the Boston outfielders moved back about 10 feet. They’d gladly sacrifice a single in order to save a game-tying double from getting over their heads.
When Foulke pitches, he looks a bit like a cobra striking: He has a compact delivery and jerks the ball out of his glove before exploding toward the plate. He wound up and threw in to Clark. Ball one. Seconds later, he tried it again. Ball two. In the Red Sox dugout, Terry Francona bowed his head and began rocking back and forth. Foulke’s third pitch was eminently hittable, but Clark held off, bringing the count to 2-1, and a fourth pitch foul evened it up. The fifth pitch of the at-bat was in the dirt. With a full count, the Yankees runners would be off with the pitch, meaning they’d be even more likely to score on a single. Foulke took a deep breath, walked around the mound, and started his windup. He threw an 88-mile-per-hour fastball, which Clark swung through to end the game. As Foulke ran off the field, his voice hoarse, he pounded Bronson Arroyo on the back. “Gotta make it interesting,” he shouted before heading to the showers.
In the 25 previous Major League Baseball best-of-seven series in which one team had gone up three games to none, not a single series had been forced to a seventh game. “We just did something that has never been done,” Schilling said afterward. “It’s not over yet by any stretch.” The Red Sox had already made history. Now the pressure would really be on New York.
After all the drama of the previous three days, Game 7 was almost anticlimactic. With Derek Lowe pitching one of the best games of his career, the Red Sox annihilated the Yankees. It was 2–0 after one, courtesy of a David Ortiz home run. It was 6–0 after two, courtesy of a Johnny Damon grand slam, and 8–1 after four, after another Damon homer. The final score: Red Sox 10, Yankees 3. By the end of the night, the loudest sound in Yankee Stadium came from the Boston fans in the stands chanting “Let’s go Red Sox!”
“How many times can you honestly say you have a chance to shock the world?” Kevin Millar asked afterward in the champagne-drenched Red Sox clubhouse. “It might happen once in your life or it may never happen. But we had that chance, and we did it.” Epstein, mindful of Boston’s history, nodded to the Red Sox’s longtime tormenters. “There have been so many great Red Sox teams and players who would have tasted World Series champagne if it wasn’t for the Yankees,” he said. “Guys in ’49, ’78, and us last year. Now that we’ve won, this is for them. We can put that behind us and move on to the World Series and take care of that.” Then, once the cameras were off, he embraced John Henry. “We did it,” Epstein shouted. “We did it in their fucking house.”
There was lots of talk about how beating the Yankees and winning the American League Championship Series was only the first stop on the Sox’s march into the history books. The Red Sox insisted that they still had to win the World Series, where they’d face the mighty St. Louis Cardinals, the winningest team in the major leagues and one stocked with prodigious sluggers and slick fielders.
But this matchup would have none of the drama of the Yankees series, Boston won in four straight games as a World Series that can only be called anticlimactic. The first game was the only one that featured any real excitement, when the Red Sox won 11–9 following Mark Bellhorn’s eighth-inning, two-run home run. Schilling shut down the Cardinals in the second game, 6–2, and two days later Pedro Martinez won the first World Series game he’d ever pitched, 4–1.
Derek Lowe took the mound for Game 4 and, once again, he pitched brilliantly. “Basically, for the last 13 innings he pitched, no one hit a ball hard,” says baseball operations executive Jed Hoyer, referring to the final game of the Yankees series and the clinching World Series victory. “It was remarkable.” In the ninth inning, Boston was leading 3–0 with Keith Foulke once again on the mound. With two out and a man on base, Cardinals shortstop Edgar Renteria came to the plate. Henry, Werner, and Lucchino fidgeted nervously in their seats near the Red Sox dugout. A Red Sox staff photographer was located nearby, ready to take their picture at the moment of victory.
In the visiting team’s radio booth in St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, Joe Castiglione surveyed the field. Castiglione, a Connecticut native, had been broadcasting Red Sox games since 1983, and his high-pitched, nasal voice has introduced thousands of fans to the team. Back in 1986, he had missed one of the most iconic plays in baseball history: When Mookie Wilson’s ground ball rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs, Castiglione had been in the bowels of Shea Stadium, camped out in the Red Sox clubhouse so he would be on hand to cover the victory celebration.
Foulke’s first pitch to Renteria was a ball, and Albert Pujols, who’d led off the inning with a single, swiped second base without drawing a throw. Foulke set to pitch once again, and this time, Castiglione was ready, the words coming out in a rush. “Swing and a ground ball, stabbed by Foulke. He has it. He underhands to first, and the Boston Red Sox are the World Champions! For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship! Can you believe it?”
*More than one opposing general manager quipped that only the $182 million, George Steinbrenner–owned Yankees could make the $127 million Red Sox look like lovable rebels.
Part VI
Feeding the
Monster: 2005
Chapter 35
The Morning After
THE DRAMA AND EXCITEMENT of the Yankees series had, in some ways, dulled observers to how completely Boston had annihilated its ultimate opponent. The 2004 St. Louis Cardinals won 105 games, a total only five other teams in the previous 30 years—the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, the 1986 New York Mets, the 1998 New York Yankees, the 1998 Atlanta Braves, and the 2001 Seattle Mariners—have managed to reach.* The Cardinals’s offense had been almost as dominant as the Red Sox’s during the regular season, leading the National League in average runs per game, total hits, batting average, and slugging percentage. Not to be outdone, the team’s pitchers had allowed
the fewest runs per game and were virtually tied with the Braves for the league’s lowest earned run average.
The Red Sox transformed the mighty Cardinals into a collection of overmatched Little Leaguers. During the regular season, center fielder Jim Edmonds, first baseman Albert Pujols, and third baseman Scott Rolen had been the most prolific offensive trio in baseball, collectively hitting .316 with an average of 41 home runs and 119 runs batted in. In their four World Series games against Boston, Edmonds, Pujols, and Rolen were a combined 6-for-45, for a measly .133 average, with no home runs and just one RBI. Boston didn’t just sweep St. Louis, it did so without ever trailing, the fourth team on record to accomplish such a feat.* In so doing, the Red Sox became the first team in the history of Major League Baseball to end the season by winning eight straight playoff games.†
After so many decades of agonizing defeats, the Red Sox World Series victory functioned as a kind of exorcism and, as such, seemed rich in coincidences of the sort that inevitably came to feel deeply symbolic. Two-thousand four’s clincher was played on the 18th anniversary of the final game of the Red Sox–Mets World Series in 1986, the loss that had inspired the first stories about the Curse of the Bambino. The final out of the Series had been made by Edgar Renteria, whose uniform bore the number 3—the same number Babe Ruth had worn with the Yankees.‡ After that out was recorded, the first two Red Sox players to embrace were right fielder Gabe Kapler and center fielder Johnny Damon, who wore the numbers 19 and 18, respectively, which combined to represent the year in which the Red Sox had last been champions. The Cardinals, in addition to being the second-most successful organization in baseball history, had been the team that had dashed the Red Sox’s championship hopes in both 1946 and 1967. Best of all, Boston’s march to the World Series had involved not just a mere defeat of New York, but its abject humiliation. Although nothing would ever erase the demoralizing losses the Red Sox had suffered at the hands of their archrivals, this came close. Not even the Red Sox had ever managed to blow a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven series.
On the night of the final game against the Cardinals, October 27, 2004, at 9:14 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, the full moon slowly faded out of sight as it settled into the earth’s shadow, the first full lunar eclipse to occur during a World Series. The mythologies of many ancient cultures, from the Chinese to the Serrano Indians to the Vikings, explain lunar eclipses as the moon being swallowed by a malevolent force. In all these cultures, the people of earth had to make as much noise as possible to scare off the evildoer and restore the moon to its rightful place in the sky.
Red Sox fans certainly did their part. At 11:40 P.M., after the final out was made, church bells rang throughout New England. In Boston itself, the streets were filled with honking cars and delirious Red Sox loyalists. In St. Louis, hundreds of Boston fans gathered behind the Red Sox dugout,* screaming themselves satisfyingly hoarse as they waited for each one of their sweat- and champagne-soaked heroes to emerge from the clubhouse. Dave Roberts, who hadn’t appeared in a game since he pinch-ran for Kevin Millar in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the Yankees series, hoisted the championship trophy above his head and paraded it around the field. Derek Lowe lit up a victory cigar and surveyed the frenzy. Even the hundreds of assembled reporters got into the act, surreptitiously grabbing handfuls of infield dirt or anything with a 2004 WORLD SERIES logo on it.
The players spent more than an hour celebrating on the field before riding the team bus the few short blocks to their hotel, where the festivities continued. Just after two in the morning, the team, by now blissed out on a combination of alcohol and exhaustion, piled back into their buses, which were immediately engulfed by scores of screaming fans too wired even to consider sleep. The Red Sox flew back to Boston early that morning, and by the time the team charter landed at Logan Airport, the roads into the city were lined with fans and adulatory banners. It was clear this was a celebration that was not going to end anytime soon. Within hours, Larry Lucchino was meeting with Boston mayor Tom Menino, planning the details of the team’s victory parade, which, they decided, would occur that very weekend. Saturday brought a chilly drizzle, but no matter: As the Red Sox rode the city’s iconic duck boats through downtown Boston and eventually onto the Charles River, throngs of fervent fans lined the streets to shout their thanks.
The coming months served as a testament to how epic and all-encompassing the Red Sox’s wild ride had been. It wasn’t only Boston that was swept up in the team’s victory, or just Massachusetts or even New England—it was the whole country. The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell asked of the Red Sox’s victory over the Yankees, “Is it possible to weigh the sports equivalent of a miracle?” He went on to call the American League Championship Series “the most fun—the most unadultered, disbelieving, decades-overdue fun—that baseball has experienced in our time.” The week of November 1, 2004—a week that featured a presidential election—Time magazine put a picture of Jason Varitek leaping into Keith Foulke’s arms on its cover. “The Joy of Sox!” read the headline; nothing else had to be said. Sports Illustrated named the entire Red Sox team its Sportsmen of the Year. In his cover article, SI’s Tom Verducci explained that “the most emotionally powerful words in the English language are monosyllabic: love, hate, born, live, die, sex, kill, laugh, cry, want, need, give, take, Sawx.” ESPN named the Sox the team of the year, Game 5 of the Yankees series the game of the year, and Curt Schilling the championship performer of the year. Throughout New England, the Red Sox were as ubiquitous as Michael Jackson during the Thriller era or the Beatles in 1964. There didn’t seem to be a gas station or a convenience store that wasn’t selling commemorative World Series memorabilia, and it often appeared as if those people on the street not wearing Red Sox caps had missed the memo about the regionwide dress code.
By Monday, November 1, Larry Lucchino was already looking for ways to build on the team’s victory. “Some would think when you get to some level of success you stop and enjoy it,” says Lucchino. “Fans are pouring into games, things are going well. But from our point of view that’s the moment of maximum opportunity to capture other people, to deepen the relationship with existing fans. We need to proactively exploit the moment and not just passively celebrate it.” To that end, Lucchino launched the World Series trophy tour, vowing to bring the Red Sox’s trophy to every one of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, as well as scores more cities throughout New England and the rest of the country.
With this type of effort, Lucchino hoped, the Red Sox could mirror their on-field success with accomplishments on the business side. Every year since John Henry and Tom Werner had bought the team, the Red Sox had added new seats to Fenway Park, starting with the two rows of dugout seats, then the seats atop the Green Monster and on the right-field roof. New luxury boxes had been built, and there were plans to renovate the .406 Club. (In four years, the team had spent almost $100 million improving Fenway—the ballpark John Harrington had insisted couldn’t be saved.) Instead of simply figuring the Sox would sell out most of their games and that that was good enough, the team had assembled 10-game packs of tickets that went on sale months before the season began. These packs all included a handful of highly desirable games (there was a pack that featured several Yankees games, as well as an Opening Day pack and a weekend pack) as well as some April and May midweek games that usually didn’t sell as well. The team’s creative efforts paid off, and in 2004 and 2005, the Red Sox sold out their entire 81-game home schedule, becoming only the second team in baseball history to do so.*
Although these marketing and promotional efforts led to increased revenues, they did not translate into profits for the Red Sox. Baseball’s revenue-sharing system meant the Sox were handing over 34 percent of all their taxable local revenue (about $50 million in 2004*) to less financially successful teams.† The theory behind revenue sharing made sense—Henry, Werner, and Lucchino had all advocated for it when they owned or ran the Padres and the Marlins—but the practice, they felt, ha
d gone too far.
Instead of leveling the playing field, baseball was squashing innovation on the part of the most successful clubs and discouraging creative efforts among the least successful ones. The Red Sox, in baseball’s sixth largest market, were effectively being punished for running their business so effectively that they generated the second-most revenue in baseball. Instead of rewarding innovation, baseball discouraged it: The Sox, by 2005, had to generate $2 in pre-Major League Baseball taxed revenue in order to justify every $1 investment because of the combined effect of revenue sharing, income tax, and inflation. On the other hand, teams like the Philadelphia Phillies, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Toronto Blue Jays knew that if they generated more income, they wouldn’t be adding to their bottom line but would simply be getting less of their competitors’ money.‡
Even when the Sox came up with new money-generating plans that would produce taxable revenue, Bud Selig often rejected them—his goal, more and more baseball owners were coming to feel, was not to increase competitiveness but to completely flatten the playing field. At one point, the Red Sox and Yankees had discussed selling local sponsorships for their regular season series, a deal that could have brought in millions of dollars. Major League Baseball nixed the idea. The Sox had proposed opening Red Sox Taverns around New England and selling Red Sox lager; Selig said no.
“It’s frustrating,” says Henry. “It’s easier to depress the entrepreneurship of the upper clubs and try to reduce their revenues as much as possible than to increase lower clubs’ revenues. Teams like the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Dodgers—we should be allowed to compete in the global entertainment marketplace, and also against football and basketball and hockey. But we’re not allowed to do that.” By this point, even the terms of the Red Sox’s deal with NESN had become a source of conflict, as baseball’s revenue-sharing committee tried to force the team to charge above-market rates for the right to broadcast the team’s games.* The result of that, of course, would be more shared revenue.
