Faithful

by Stephen King

  SK: Poor Father Curt. Go you Lowe!

  SO: Down 2–0 to our evil nemesis, with our best arms gone, I feel like we’re Batman and Robin stuck in that giant snow cone, with the Joker (George) and his dumb-as-mud henchmen in their striped shirts (Yankee fans) laughing their asses off and then leaving us for dead. But you know what happens then…that’s right, Batman goes to his super-utility belt. It’s time for us to pull something out.

  October 15th/ALCS Game 3

  Stewart and I meet for dinner before the game, and although he agrees to split a BLT pizza on honey wheat crust, he expresses strong doubts about a pizza that comes with a topping of mayonnaise-dressed lettuce. Still, he eats his share. I guess that after some fifty games at Fenway between us, we’ve had our fill of hot dogs. As we munch, we talk about—what else?—baseball. Of that we have not had our fill. Specifically we discuss which team will be most apt to benefit from a rainout, which seems likely; the Massachusetts weather on this October evening is pretty awful.

  We agree, reluctantly, that the Yankees would probably be better served by an extra day of rest, because they could bring Mussina back sooner. The stars seem to be aligning themselves, and the horoscope doesn’t look favorable if you happen to be a Sox fan.

  When we walk into California Pizza at 5:45 P.M., a light mist is hanging in the air. When we walk back out again at 6:45, the mist has thickened to a drizzle. By the time we’ve raised our arms to be frisked and have given our game bags over for examination outside Fenway Park’s Gate D (it’s just how things are done in twenty-first-century America, where the citizenry now live on Osama Mean Time), the drizzle has become a light rain.

  Before clearing around midnight, the forecast calls for heavy downpours accompanied by strong winds. During the regular season, the fate of the game would be in the hands of the Red Sox up until the instant play started, and with the umps thereafter. In postseason, however, these contests are in the hands of Major League Baseball, an organization that seems to care a great deal more about TV revenue (witness the 8 P.M. starts, which ace out millions of little kids who have to get up for school on weekdays) than they do the fans, the players or the game itself. Last night, in the Houston–St. Louis game, play went on through a steady downpour. Base hits spun up wheels of water as they rolled into the outfield. I don’t mind getting wet, but I really don’t want to see Manny Ramirez, Trot Nixon or Bernie Williams leave his career on the outfield grass of Fenway Park.

  I don’t have to worry about that for long. An usher I know is leaning nonchalantly against the counter of the Legal Seafood kiosk, chattering away into his walkie-talkie, as Stew and I walk by. He drops it into the pocket of his yellow rain-slicker and waves us over. “Go on home, you guys,” he says. “Game’s gonna be called at seven thirty.”

  I ask him if he’s sure. He says he is.

  We hang in a little while, anyway—long enough to soak up the rainy atmosphere of Fenway Park (soak it up, geddit?), where the game still hasn’t been officially called. The tarp remains on the infield at 7:58 P.M., however, and that pretty much tells the tale. The news and TV guys arehuddled under canvas mini-pavilions, reduced to taking pictures of and doing interviews with each other. Peter Gammons comes bopping busily along, looking like some strange but amiable human crow in his black trousers and long black raincoat. Stewart and I pass a few words with him, mostly about the possibility of Father Curt pitching again this year (unlikely but not impossible, given Schilling’s fierce competitive drive), and then we leave. I am actually back in my hotel room, drying my hair, before Major League Baseball can finally bring itself to unloose its clenched and rain-puckered fingers enough to let this one go.

  October 16th

  I open the curtains at 8 A.M. on cloudless blue skies. Tonight the Yankees and Red Sox will play baseball.

  I’m bringing the whole famn damily to this one, so I have to buy tickets from a broker, and end up paying through the nose so we can watch what turns out to be the worst game of the year, maybe of my life—worse even than Mr. Lowe’s rainy debacle at Yankee Stadium. It’s fifty degrees, but the wind is gusting up to 40 mph, and we’re sitting in the very last row of the grandstand. Gales blow through the wire fence, around the mercifully insulating standing-room crowds at our backs and into our collars. Caitlin’s shivering, so I break down and sign up for a credit card just to get a free MLB blanket.

  Bronson’s got nothing, but Kevin Brown’s equally ineffective. “Kev-in,” we chant. Jeter makes an error that leads to a run, and it’s “Jeeeee-ter, Jeeeee-ter.” (He’s been terrible in the field, just as distracted as last year, fodder for critics who say A-Rod should play short; but Jeter doesn’t have the reactions or the gun for third, and probably won’t accept a demotion to second.) After Bronson we throw the dregs of our pen, as if the Coma is conceding the game—as if he’s okay with being down 0-3. Weird.

  Matsui drives in five. After Sheffield powers out a steroid shot, the standing-room crowd disperses and the wind cuts through us. In Little League, there’s a ten-run mercy rule, but not here, and to save our real pen, Wake volunteers to soak up some innings, meaning Lowe will be starting tomorrow (far better, I think, considering how Wake has thrown this season). But instead of holding the Yanks so we can get back in the game, Wake lets a runner inherited from Leskanic score, then gives up five runs of his own, putting the game way out of reach. Embree looks bad, and then Francona leaves poor Mike Myers out there to face righties in the ninth, something that should never happen. Myers sucks it up and ultimately gets it done, but by then it’s 19–8.

  It’s ugly, and humbling, but the worst thing that happens is that the Faithful (if these really are the Faithful) turn on Mark Bellhorn, booing him mercilessly when he makes an error that leads to a run, and then with each successive strikeout. It’s as if they don’t remember the Marky Mark who stepped up and kept us in first place through April and May. It’s wrong, and it pisses me off even more than the Yankees taking walks late in the game, or Matsui swinging for the fences with a ten-run lead.

  October 17th

  The Yankees played. The Sox got shelled.

  I slouched into my hotel room well after midnight and jotted only a brief game-related note in my journal (Red Sox lost. Horrible) before falling into bed, where I got roughly six hours of shallow, dream-infested sleep. [74] I got up at 7 A.M. this morning, pulled on a pair of exercise shorts and my new Kevin Youkilis shirt (a gift from Stewart O’Nan, bless him) and went around to Au Bon Pain for orange juice and a croissant. I did not buy a Boston Globe in the hotel newsstand, and I certainly did not turn on SportsDesk when I got back to my room. I turned on the headline news program with the ticker across the bottom of the screen instead, and only long enough to confirm the final score of last night’s abortion. Then I shut the damned thing off and did my morning exercises for once without the benefit of media: no scores, no polls, no reports of suicide bombings in Baghdad.

  19–8. That was the final score. Replace the hyphen with a 1 and you have the last year the Red Sox won the World Series. Maybe there’s a curse after all. Or a Curse, if you prefer. Until the third inning of this train wreck, there was actually some semblance of a game. After that, the Yankees simply piled it on. Jason Varitek had a good offensive night for the Red Sox; Hideki Matsui, unfortunately, had a sublime night for the Yankees, the kind of night baseball players dream about and have maybe once, and only then if they’re lucky.

  19–8, and I’m sure that Dan Shaughnessy, Boston’s Number One Cursemonger, will make hay of that in today’s unread newspaper, but the fault, dear Brutus, has lain not in our stars but our stats—especially those of our mediocre relief corps, which this series against the Yankees has mercilessly exposed. Arroyo didn’t have much, but Arroyo can only be held responsible for the first half dozen runs or so (ow, it hurts to write that). Leskanic came on and gave up a three-run homer to Gary Sheffield; Wakefield lasted three and a third largely ineffective innings; Embree followed Wakefield and was worse;
then came Mike Myers and the song remains the same. There may have been others. “You could look it up,” Ole Case used to say, and he was right, but for that I’d have to buy a Boston Globe, and while I might be able to avoid Dan Shaughnessy’s curse-mongering, my eye would surely fall on the hairy, downcast mugs of the Red Sox players.

  Coming back from New York, already down two games to none thanks to Schilling’s bad ankle and Olerud’s home run, the Sox players kept telling reporters they were loose. And so they were; last night they were so loose all four wheels fell off their little red wagon. It’s true that Ramirez, Mueller, Cabrera and especially Jason Varitek found their offensive strokes, but putting eight runs on the board means little when you could double that and still lose by three.

  Yet still we are faithful; to steal the title of the movie that played in New England this past spring (a spring that now seems impossibly distant and hopeful), still we believe. Tonight we’ll once again fill the old green church of baseball on Lansdowne Street, in some part because it’s the only church of baseball we have; in large part because—even on mornings like this, when the clean-shaven Yankee Corporate Creed seems to rule the hardball universe—it’s still the only church of baseball we can really love. No baseball team has ever come back from a three-games-to-none deficit to win a postseason series, but a couple of hockey teams have done it, and we tell ourselves it has to happen sooner or later for a baseball team, it just has to.

  We tell ourselves Derek Lowe has one more chance to turn 2004 from tragickal to magickal.

  We tell ourselves it’s just one game at a time.

  We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight.

  * * *

  During BP, a liner dings off the photographers’ well in front of me and bounces out into the shallow outfield grass. Don Mattingly’s walking back from the cages under the center-field bleachers with a balding guy in a champagne-colored suit, and as they near the ball, I realize it’s Reggie Jackson. “Reggie,” I holler, “hit the mitt,” and hold out my glove, and he does—maybe for the first time as an outfielder.

  I hustle over to Steve to show him the ball. I can rationalize my excitement because Reggie, in my mind, will always be an A—and one of those hairy, wild A’s from a team much like this year’s Sox, kind of goofy and out of control, full of personality. I’m jazzed, just watching the parade of celebrity sportscasters when Steve hands the ball back. On it, he’s written: The curse is off, and then on the sweet spot has signed it: Babe Ruth.

  Later, another piece of luck: in the tenth inning, in an incredibly tight and great game, Bernie Williams fouls one high off the roof facing, and the ball plummets directly toward me. All I have to do is raise my arm and the ball hits dead center in the pocket of my glove. The next inning I’m on the JumboTron with my mitt, and my particles are beamed out across the nation to friends and relatives everywhere—and I have enough sense left (or maybe I’m just too tired) not to point at myself and go, “Look, I’m on the JumboTron!”

  And this is just the beginning. From here the night just gets better.

  October 18th/ALCS Game 4

  It turned out that Mr. Lowe was pretty magickal, and so we live to fight another day. Today, in fact. This afternoon, at 5:10 P.M., when Pedro Martinez and Mike Mussina match up in the year’s last American League game at Fenway Park.

  Last night’s twelve-inning tilt was the longest game in postseason history, clocking in at five hours and two minutes. I went with my daughter-in-law, and we finally left when Boston failed to score in the bottom of the eleventh. My reasoning was simple enough: if Boston won, I’d be back the next day (make that the same day; it was ten past one when we finally made our way out of the park). If Boston lost, I didn’t want to be there to see the Yankees dancing on the carefully manicured pair of green sox decorating the infield.

  As things turned out, our final (and winning) pitcher of the night—Curtis“The Mechanic” Leskanic—was superb in relief after being just one more slice of bullpen salami in the Game 3 blowout. He gave up one of those dying-quail singles to Posada to open the twelfth (this we heard on the radio, heading back to the hotel on eerily deserted streets), then got Ruben Sierra to ground out and Tony Clark to fly out. [75] Miguel Cairo fanned, setting the stage for the dramatic Red Sox finish, which I arrived back in my hotel room just in time to see.

  By then Paul Quantrill was pitching for the Yankees. Joe Torre rolled the dice by bringing Mo Rivera on to pitch two innings and try to close out the series. Rivera is the game’s premier closer, but he has occasional problems with the Red Sox, and last night he blew the Yankees’ one-run lead in the ninth, giving up a single to Bill Mueller with speedy Dave Roberts, pinch-running for Kevin Millar, on second. [76] Gordon replaced Rivera and went two scoreless. Quantrill—not exactly chopped liver—was what was left. He never got an out. After yielding a single to Manny Ramirez, he threw David Ortiz what looked to me like either a fastball or a slider. Whatever it was, it was in Ortiz’s wheelhouse, and Big Papi crushed it.

  Like every other Red Sox fan, I’m delighted that this isn’t going to be a sweep, like most postseason series that start off 3–0. As a contributor to this book, I’m even more delighted to have a victory to write about before the ultimate sign-off. But one who loves the Boston Red Sox is also one who loathes the New York Yankees; it’s as true as saying night follows day. So it pleases me most of all to point out we are now 12-11 overall this year against George Steinbrenner’s team of limousine longballers, and that last night’s victory, combined with the ALCS best-of-seven format, ensures an odd and wistfully wonderful statistical certainty: the Yankees can’t beat us this year. Not overall. They can go on to the World Series (and probablywill, although I still harbor faint hopes we can prevent that), but the best they can do against us for the season is a tie…and they can only do that by winning today. That will not matter a single whit to them, of course, but when you’re a Red Sox fan, you take consolation wherever it is available.

  Last night after the game, I hung around the dugout to shout “Jefeeeeeeeeeeee!” to David Ortiz and chant “Who’s your Pa-pi?” with the rest of the diehard Faithful. When I finally got out onto Yawkey Way it was two o’clock, and most of the players had left. On Brookline Ave, the riot cops were standing in close formation on the bridge to Kenmore Square, forcing us stragglers to walk down Lansdowne and then along the scuzzy streets bordering the Mass Pike. I didn’t mind. There were a couple other fans in sight, and we were all ditzy from the win and just how very late it was. The street I was on curved up to Boylston, and as I reached the intersection, a motorcycle cop came wailing up on his Electra Glide and stopped in the middle of the street. He hopped off and started pointing to the oncoming cars, waving them to the side of the road, and as it dawned on me what was happening, here came the Yankees’ team bus—appropriately from Yankee Bus Lines, and appropriately yellow—and my legs found a strength and a spring I thought I’d lost back in the fifth inning, carrying me to the exact spot I needed to be in, the right place at the right time. I watched heads inside turn toward me, bleary faces puzzled by this apparition in black in a PawSox hat standing in the vacant other lane, lit like a devil by the red stoplight, proudly holding up his middle finger.

  Today the guys show up at the parking lot before Game 5 wearing their very best suits and wheeling luggage like it’s any other travel day—a good sign, I think. Yesterday when Mark Bellhorn walked by, a few people booed, and he didn’t look over. Today I holler, “Hey Mahk, don’t let the bastards get you down!” and he smiles and nods. Johnny’s had an adhesive Ace bandage on the meaty flat of his right hand (his lead hand) for a couple of weeks now, and I wonder if he can grip the bat correctly. Every day I ask, “How’s the hand, John?” and he says it’s okay, but without conviction, as if it’s still bothering him. These are the guys we need to set the table for Manny and David. If they don’t pick it up, we’re going nowhere.

  Just before game time, I visit with Bob the usher over in S
ection 32. We chat and then say good-bye, shake hands. It’s our last home game of the ALCS, and there’s a fall feeling of the season being over, things being packed away, but I can’t let it stand.

  “I’ll see you for the Series,” I say.

  “I hope so,” he says.

  “I know so,” I say, full of false bravado. “Right here, baby.”

  October 19th/ALCS Game 5

  It probably wasn’t the greatest game in postseason history—I’d still pick Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, the one where Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk waved his extra-inning walk-off home run fair, for that honor—but it was almost certainly the greatest game to be played since the major leagues went to the League Championship format. At five hours forty-nine minutes it was the longest, and the teams who engaged in the struggle were surely the most evenly matched. When it ended, the Red Sox had scored one more run (five to the Yankees’ four) and managed one more hit (thirteen to the Yankees’ twelve). Each team used seven pitchers, and each committed a single error. The game, which began in broad daylight at 5:20 in the afternoon, ended just an hour shy of midnight, in the bottom of the fourteenth. I have never been so simultaneously drained and exalted at the conclusion of a sporting event; would have believed, prior to last night, the two states of emotional being were mutually exclusive.