AT FIRST, no one in Fenway seemed to comprehend what had happened. The park was utterly quiet. E.A. realized that the wind had died as abruptly as it had come up. There was no breeze at all, just bright fall sunshine on a packed and silent stadium.
E.A. knew it wasn’t his fault as Jacks crossed the plate with the home-run hitter close behind him. He knew that the curve ball he’d thrown had been a perfect pitch. The batter had connected with it, however poorly, through sheer luck, and the quirk of wind, later estimated at between 60 and 70 mph, had turned a pop-up to shallow left field into a two-run homer.
“That’s baseball, kid.” Spence was standing beside E.A. on the mound.
As bad as E.A. felt, and as completely as he understood that a right-handed pitcher simply cannot throw a better curve to a left handed batter than the one he had thrown, he was determined not to make an excuse. “Sorry,” he said. “I caught too much of the plate with that hook.”
Spence shrugged. “You ever see that old picture show? Big Wind from Winnetka?”
E.A. shook his head.
“Well, that was it. The Big Wind from Winnetka. Now it’s behind us. It ain’t even breezy no more. See?”
E.A. nodded. This was the Legendary Spence at his best. No raving, no storming. Just straight baseball talk.
“We’ll get them runs back for you,” Spence said. “This weren’t your fault. Don’t worry about it.”
The Legendary Spence swatted E.A. on the butt and trotted off the field. E.A. walked the next batter on a 3–2 count with a pitch that could have gone either way, but before the woodchuck chant could get up a head of steam he got the next hitter on three straight 21st-Century Limiteds. The third fastball was well out of the strike zone, but the Mets’ seven hitter swung at it from his heels and missed by a mile, and now the crowd was up and cheering for a Sox rally in the bottom of the eighth. For one more miracle in this miraculous season.
With one out, the Sox’s shortstop and three hitter, who’d saved the day in the seventh with his double play, hit a line drive high up on the wall. It was fair by thirty feet and would have been a home run in any other baseball park in the world, but the Mets’ left-fielder snagged the rebounding ball with his bare hand, whirled, and threw a strike on one bounce to the second baseman, holding the runner to a single.
The next hitter struck out on a pitch that E.A. could have sworn Villa literally pulled out of his hat, leaving the Sox one out and one last at-bat away from yet another devastating failure.
Eduardo Salvadore walked to the plate to a tintinnabulation of foot-stomping and hand-clapping, intensifying into a roar louder than the roar after Fisk’s Shot Heard Round the World, as the Sox superstar took a short stride, head tucked down, swung compactly, and drove Villa’s first pitch over the right-fielder’s head. The outfielder raced back, reached up over his shoulder—and the ball skipped off his outstretched glove, over the fence.
Boston 3, New York 2.
Euphoria.