THE 2004 BOSTON RED SOX
To win a best-of-seven playoff series, one team has to win four games. By midnight after Game 3 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the New York Yankees demolished the Boston Red Sox 19–8 to take a 3–0 lead and climb one win away from going to the World Series for the second year in a row, no one in Boston would have minded if they just skipped the fourth game. Maybe no one in Boston would have cared if baseball had never been played again, ever.
For Red Sox fans, it was all too much: too much pain and not enough victory. The people of Boston were fiercely loyal to their beloved Red Sox—there was so much caring about the team, so many years of winning only to lose at the end, and often in the worst possible ways. Too many years invested, every summer of sun and hope and fun for as long as anyone could remember only to end in heartbreak. The worst part was that so much of the losing was to the same team: the hated Yankees.
They liked to call it a “rivalry,” but was it really? A rivalry is when one team wins one year, and the other wins the next. This Yankees–Red Sox relationship was more like the hammer and the nail—a whole lot of hurt in Boston at the hands of New York.
What was the point of continuing? The result was always going to be the same, because it hadn’t changed in more than a century. Even during years when the Red Sox were great, the Yankees were better. The Red Sox just couldn’t find a way to beat them. It wasn’t that the people of Boston stopped caring—it was that they cared too much only to have their hearts broken.
Fans had to go back—way back!—to a time before their parents and grandparents were born to remember when it wasn’t this way. The Yankees had beaten the Red Sox when Boston traded a pitcher named Babe Ruth to New York in 1920, and not only did he become the greatest player of all time, but the Yankees became the greatest team of all time. Before the Ruth trade, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series. The Yankees never even reached the series until Ruth arrived.
Then, from 1919 to 2003, the Yankees won twenty-six World Series. The Red Sox won zero.
When the Red Sox won 96 games in 1949, the Yankees won 97 and went to the series. The Sox would win 94 games the following season . . . but of course the Yankees won 98 games and again went to the series. In 1978 the Red Sox had a 14-game lead over the Yankees with two months left in the season. The Yankees would go on to tie Boston in the regular season and then beat the Sox in a one-game playoff to decide the division winner. The Red Sox went home, heartbroken, while the Yankees went on to win the World Series.
In 1994 Major League Baseball changed its playoff format. For the first time, a wild card team that failed to win its division would qualify for the playoffs. In the first five years of the wild card format, the Yankees and Red Sox claimed four of the five slots in the American League. This gave the two teams a chance to meet in the playoffs. It finally happened in 1999 when they met in the American League Championship Series. The result? The Yankees won in five games and went on to win the World Series.
The Yankees and Red Sox would go on to meet once more with the World Series on the line, in 2003. Despite finishing second to the Yankees in the American League East Division, the Red Sox believed they had the better team. This was to be a classic American League Championship Series. It went to seven games and only ended when the Yankees’ Aaron Boone hit a series-winning home run in the bottom of the eleventh inning, leading the Yankees to yet another World Series.
The 2004 Red Sox team was supposed to be different. They had to wait an entire year for the opportunity to get revenge. Now, here they were, exactly where they had envisioned themselves—playing the Yankees for another chance to get to the World Series. Yet they were now down 3 games to 0. No one gave them much chance to come all the way back and win.
For some reason, hours before Game 4 the next afternoon, near the home dugout at Fenway Park, Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar was in a surprisingly great mood. “All I’m going to say is, don’t give us a chance,” Millar said. “If they’re going to beat us, they better beat us tonight, because in Game 5, we’ve got Pedro going, and if we get that game, then we go back to New York. If we go back to New York, then all the pressure is on them, because they’ll know they have to win. If we go back to New York, that’s bad enough for them, because it’s not supposed to go back there. And if it gets to a Game 7, no way will we lose.”
Millar walked away. Meanwhile, Red Sox officials were talking about how the game was sold out but many people were trying to sell their tickets and were even having trouble doing that, because no Red Sox fan wanted to witness losing yet again to the Yankees.
The Yankees had Orlando Hernandez on the mound. Hernandez was one of the great playoff pitchers of his time. He had eleven postseason decisions and had won nine of them. The Yankees were in a good position.
New York jumped out to a 2–0 lead when Alex Rodriguez, considered the best player in all of baseball at the time, hit a two-run homer off of Derek Lowe in the third inning. Before the season had even begun, the Red Sox and Yankees had competed in a bidding war to acquire Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers. The Red Sox thought they had struck a deal with Texas, but then, at the last second, the deal was nullified. The Yankees swooped in, traded for Rodriguez and, in a different sort of contest, beat the Red Sox yet again.
Even down 2–0 thanks to Rodriguez, the Red Sox were far from ready to call it quits. Boston chased El Duque by scoring three two-out runs in the fifth, including a go-ahead two-run single by David Ortiz. But in the next inning, the Yankees took the lead right back with two runs and led 4–3.
It stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth. Three more outs and Boston would be finished. Another year, another gut-wrenching loss to the Yankees. Mariano Rivera, the great Yankees closer, the greatest closer to ever play, was on the mound. He had shut the Red Sox down in the eighth and now faced Millar to start the ninth.
Then things began to change. Millar worked a walk, and was replaced by pinch-runner Dave Roberts, a speedy backup outfielder who had been acquired from San Diego late in the season. Roberts had one job: to steal second. When he took off, it looked like he would be caught. The throw by the catcher, Jorge Posada, beat Roberts . . . but he slipped in just under Derek Jeter’s glove: safe!
The next batter, Bill Mueller, the Red Sox’s third baseman, stepped to the plate and singled up the middle. Roberts came home to score and the game was tied, 4–4!
The Red Sox looked about to win the game right there. Mueller went to second on a bunt and then to third on an error, but Rivera regrouped and escaped without further damage.
The two teams went to extra innings. They remained tied until the twelfth inning, when David “Big Papi” Ortiz homered off Paul Quantrill, giving the Red Sox a 6–4 victory.
A great win, but still, winning Game 4 was just one game. The Red Sox could not lose again. They couldn’t afford any big mistakes or they would be going home. The great Pedro Martinez, maybe the greatest pitcher of his time, pitched Game 5 for Boston, while the excellent Mike Mussina pitched for the Yankees.
The Red Sox quickly scored two in the first, but the Yankees remained unfazed and came back to score four runs off Martinez, including three in the sixth inning, giving them a 4–2 lead.
But momentum began to shift the Red Sox’s way. Martinez had lost the lead, but with two on and two out in the sixth, Boston right fielder Trot Nixon snared a sinking line drive by Hideki Matsui that would have scored at least two more runs. Nixon’s catch kept the game within reach.
After a long season and the grueling extra-innings game the night before, the Yankees’ bullpen was weary. Nixon’s catch in the sixth inning grew even more important when Ortiz, who had won Game 4, hit another home run in the eighth to make it 4–3, cutting the Yankees’ lead to just one run. As the pressure mounted, Yankee pitcher Tom “Flash” Gordon walked Kevin Millar and gave up a single to Nixon, putting the speedy Dave Roberts at third base.
Yankee manager Joe Torre turned once again to the great Rivera, giving him a second chance to close out the series. But it turned out to be déjà vu for Rivera, who gave up a fly ball to Jason Varitek that scored Roberts, and the Red Sox and Yankees were tied again.
Then some good luck went Boston’s way: In the top of the ninth, with Ruben Sierra on first base, Yankees first baseman Tony Clark hit a double down the right field line. The ball hit the dirt and bounced on one hop into the stands for a ground-rule double. Had the ball stayed low and bounced around the outfield wall, Sierra would have had an excellent chance to score from first and the Yankees would have had the lead again, but it was not to be. Boston escaped the inning without allowing a run.
As yet another game went to extra innings, nerves frayed and the players wearied. Boston and New York remained tied until late into the night. Then, in the fourteenth inning, Ortiz—who had won Game 4 with a home run and kept the Red Sox alive in this game with a homer in the eighth—hit a single up the middle off of Esteban Loaiza to score Johnny Damon.
The Red Sox, whom no one in Boston wanted to see lose, had won again!
This wasn’t happening, was it?
It was.
The Red Sox were still alive and going back to New York for the final two games of the series.
Kevin Millar turned out to be right: When the Red Sox returned to New York for the final two games, they destroyed the Yankees. Curt Schilling, pitching on an injured left ankle that was so bad he bled through his sock, shut the Yankees out early while the Red Sox took a 4–0 lead and held on to win Game 6, 4–2, setting up a winner-takes-all Game 7 at Yankee Stadium, the same place where the Red Sox had lost a year before.
This time, there would be no suspense. The Yankees were tired and beaten while the Red Sox soared. Ortiz (again!) hit a home run in the first inning. Damon hit a grand slam in the second and it was 6–0 before many of the 56,129 fans expecting a Yankee win had even gotten to their seats.
The final score was 10–3, Boston. It was the greatest comeback in the history of baseball. No team had ever come back from being down three games to none to win a playoff series. For eighty-six years the Red Sox had found a way to lose to the Yankees, but in 2004, in the most improbable of ways, Boston finally beat the team that had brought them so much pain.
The World Series went by fast. The Red Sox demolished the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games to win the World Series for the first time since 1918. The losing was over. The Red Sox had become champions by coming back from three games down and not losing again for the rest of the season.
From that day since, Red Sox history changed. The Red Sox would no longer be expected to lose, but to win. Ortiz grew into the symbol of victory in Boston, not another player just good enough to lose to the Yankees. Boston would win the World Series again in 2007 and 2013. The magic the Yankees held over them for all those decades would disappear and the two teams would finally be what they were supposed to be: true rivals once and for all.
“I’m going to say two things,” David Ortiz said in 2014. “The first is I have no idea why Millar was so positive. I thought he was crazy. No one was saying ‘We’re going to lose’ in the clubhouse, but being down that much to the Yankees, well, you knew that something amazing had to happen.
“The second thing,” Ortiz said, “is that I completely forgot we were down three games to none! I thought it was three games to one. To come all the way back like that? Three games to none? Against the Yankees? I don’t think you’re ever gonna see that again.”