MIDDLE INNINGS

MO TOWN

Late on yesterday’s dazzling, post-summer afternoon in the Bronx, each batter and infielder moved and ran with his own autumnal sharp-shadow cutout barely attached at the foot. The brilliant, reminding light was relentless; it never let us up, enamelling the grass at the outset, then producing late-inning gateways of alternate shadow and sun between the mound and home plate that made each pitch flicker in its flight. No, no, you wanted to say: Not so fast. Not yet. (“ONE MO TIME,” said a fan’s held-up plea.) It got late early up there, as Yogi once said, and the outcome we didn’t want arrived just the same, in spite of plaques and speeches. Mariano Rivera’s pregame “Exit Sandman” final-Sunday ceremonies at the Stadium—he’s retiring after nineteen seasons—had been awkwardly merged with Andy Pettitte’s recently announced decision to depart for good, too, after eighteen (all but three with the Yanks), but, because Andy would be starting against the visiting San Francisco Giants and was preoccupied with that, it remained Mo’s day mostly, and sweetly reassuring. Waterford crystal, the comical rocking chair, parents, family, current teammates and old ones. Paulie, Jorge, Bernie, Derek, Tino, manager Joe, Rachel Robinson (Mo, of course, the last player to sport Jackie Robinson’s universally retired uniform number, 42). Michael Kay. Speeches, smiles—Rivera won this category, hands down—and an actual surprise: Metallica, live and in person, there to play his entrance song.

© The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Credit 43.1)

All this was happily cheered and clapped for and phone-flashed by the attending forty-nine thousand one hundred and ninety-seven fans (as it had been previously and similarly done in the honoring ballparks where Mo appeared this summer), but, once the game began, these same thousands found themselves for the last time painfully checking off and folding and tucking away their own shared but also private memories of the two, beginning with Pettitte’s prayerful, early-Renaissance gaze in at his catcher’s signals, with his cap pulled low, his hands up, and his lips touching the top of his upheld black mitt.

Andy was almost great, giving up two hits in seven innings—the first a home run in the sixth by the rookie San Francisco shortstop Ehire Adrianza, and the other a double in the eighth by Pablo Sandoval, which shortly became the winning run—Andy had gone, with a final hat wave—in the Yanks’ excruciating 2–1 defeat. Mariano came on with one out in the eighth, and surrendered a single but no runs, and along the way gave us still again his eloquent entering run from deep center field; the leaning stare-in with upcocked mitt over his heart; the reposeful pre-pitch pause, with his hands at waist level; and then the burning, bending, famed-in-song-and-story cutter. All these, seen once again, have been as familiar to us as our dad’s light cough from the next room, or the dimples on the back of our once-three-year-old daughter’s hands, but, like those, must now only be recalled.

The game ran down, then ran out, with the Yanks somehow failing to score anybody after putting runners on second and third base with no outs in the bottom of the eighth. The TV camera, sweeping the dugout rail one more time, caught a gallery of derelicts. The last batter, a twenty-two-year-old rookie catcher named J. R. Murphy, went down swinging. Shattered by injuries and with their bullpen worn to a frazzle, the Yankees have lost six of their last nine games. Sagging in the tatterdemalion struggle for that second American League Wild Card in the last week of the season, they will be caught by the heels in the next day or two and gobbled up by the statistical werewolf. Baseball, as Bart Giamatti told us, breaks your heart, but he was thinking of the back-then Red Sox.

Post, September, 2013

SOX TOP SLOPPY CARDS

Game 1, 2013 World Series

Red Sox 8: Cardinals 1

World Series opening games can feel like a sunny day at Camp 6, a deserved picnic where we enjoy the fabulous views we’ve attained and contemplate the last push to the summit, but all images of the sort flew away quickly last night, when the inept Cardinals gave up five runs in the first two innings at Fenway Park, in the course of an 8–1 pasting by the Red Sox. Jon Lester, the lefty Boston starter, struck out eight Cards over seven and two-thirds innings, and David Ortiz knocked a home run and a single and a sac, driving in three runs: thrilling star material on a better night, but only satisfactory here. The Cards, the best defensive team in the National League, were stinko, with three infield errors, two of them by shortstop Pete Kozma. The pattern of the game became clear when the veteran Cardinal starter Adam Wainwright could only smile wanly after allowing a feeble pop by Stephen Drew to drop like a thrombosed dove at his feet, to begin the Sox’ second. No replays, please.

Big Papi’s most telling blow may prove to have been his fly ball out to the rim of the Sox’ bullpen later in the second—a near replica of that grand slam in the A.L.C.S. sixth game that pinwheeled the Tiger right fielder Torii Hunter. This ball, not quite a line drive, came down a yard or two north of that one, and was plucked back niftily from beyond the barrier by the Cards’ Carlos Beltran, who slammed heavily into the four-foot wall there but held on. (Tim McCarver, the sterling Fox commentator, pointed out that that low bullpen wall is safe enough for outfielders when their backs are turned but deadly whenever they raise their arms.) Beltran’s contused rib forced him to leave the game, and his absence tonight and perhaps later on, removing his powerful bat from the order, would be worse for the Cards than losing a trifling opener.

The Never Before moment arrived early, when Ortiz, the fourth Boston batter of the evening, hit a soft grounder to the right, where second baseman Matt Carpenter flipped to Kozma to begin a potential double play. When the ball came loose out there, second-base umpire Dana DeMuth signalled that Kozma had held it long enough for the force, even though everyone in the northern hemisphere, including my watching fox terrier and I, could plainly see that Kozma had barely touched the toss with the tip of his glove. The out stood up, stare decisis—or would have in an earlier era of umpiric reasoning. Here, though, and to my amazement, five neighboring umps came circling in, like crows or undertakers, and, after consultation, DeMuthed the call—safe on an error, the out cancelled. Justice and common sense had prevailed (along with a snub to the possibility of instant electronic replay to decide such calls next year), but a part of me felt a twinge of loss. Umps should always be right, even when they aren’t. In their hearts, as Bill Klem said, they never missed a call.

Post, October, 2013

CHINNY-CHIN-CHIN

Game 4, 2013 World Series

Red Sox 4: Cardinals 2

Series Tied

Last night’s game, like Saturday’s, ended with a losing-team player disconsolate in the dirt, but this time without an attached ruling to talk about. Kolten Wong, a ninth-inning Cardinals pinch base runner, was cleanly picked off first base by the Boston closer Koji Uehara, for the last out of the game. No excuse: Sox win, 4–2, knotting the series at two games apiece. The play was a fillip, not a filibuster, with the evening’s main event remaining Jonny Gomes’s three-run homer in the top of the sixth, which broke a 1–1 tie, and held up, guaranteeing that the teams, no matter who wins tonight, will return to Boston on Wednesday, for a sixth and then possibly a seventh and determining contest. Serious stuff by then, with every pitch tense and fraught, and winter now just down the street. No more fun, I mean, so let’s pause here and for one last time talk about beards.

In resuming the topic, I don’t expect to match or approach the charming and scholarly essay recently posted by my friend and colleague Richard Brody, who said that “one of the beauties of the beard is that its lushness is polysemic, lending itself to an interpretive exuberance to match its flow.” Yow, Richard, and excuse me, but might I demur?

Beards are kudzu.

Jonny Gomes’s beard—a brown frigate bird’s nest—is among the uglier sported by the hairy Sox this year, and when numbers of his teammates began grabbing it and ritually tugging on it upon his return to the dugout after his blast I was among a minority in the land who were hoping they’d pull it off. Gomes, a nice guy from Petaluma, California, has broad sloping shoulders and a pleasant, or O.K.-ish, everyday expression, but he’s shaved his head now, too, which doesn’t help, unless you’re eager to join the crowding recent hordes of the undead. C’mon, Jonny.

Gomes’s isn’t the worst Sox beard—the title goes to backup catcher David Ross, whose unkempt cabbage includes a clashing streak of white that cascades over his chin—perhaps a relic of a childhood moment when he ran into his grandfather in the narrow back hall outside the bathroom. The other catcher, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, has a raggedy garden-border growth, in keeping with the encircling back-yard shrubbery of his hair. Mike Napoli’s beard is thickest; Dustin Pedroia’s the weirdest, since it comes with his desert-saint stare and that repeated on-deck or between-pitch mannerism of opening and stretching his mouth into a silent O: a screech owl with laryngitis.

I’m a gentle fellow, and intend no lasting hurts here. I admire Big Papi’s plunging mid-cheek parenthesis, which has been there for many seasons, of course, and now feels as familiar and locally reassuring as a statue by Daniel Chester French. I also offer praise for the angle-iron jawline wool sported by tonight’s Boston starter, Jon Lester: an aesthetic so clearly modelled on Gunnar Björnstrand’s trimmed-down growth while he portrayed Fredrik Egerman in Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.”

Can I ask a question? Where are the Red Sox wives or sweetie pies in all this? Have none of them spoken up—privately or in the Globe or in a thousand tweets—to protest this office fad? How does it feel to wake up, night after night, in immediate proximity to a crazed Pomeranian or a Malamute or an Old English sheepdog stubbornly adhering to the once caressable jaw of the guy on the nearest pillow? Doesn’t it scratch? Doesn’t it itch? Doesn’t it smell, however faintly, of tonight’s boeuf en daube or yesterday’s last pinch of Red Man? And what about the kids—how long can you keep putting them off with another recital of “The Three Little Pigs” or Edward Lear? Who does your husband/significant other think he is, anyway—Dostoyevsky? Brigham Young? Darwin? An Allman brother? Alexander Cartwright?

Come on, guys, think this over. Time to grow up. And what if you lose in the end this week, beards and all? Is this a lifetime commitment?

Hmmm. (Rubs chin.)

Post, October, 2013

PAPINESS

Game 6, 2013 World Series

Red Sox 6: Cardinals 1

Sox Win World Series

O.K., about those beards—I give up. The Red Sox took this World Series in six games, but by something wider in retrospect. The Cardinals, ahead two games to one in the early going, led only once after that—a little 1–0 margin that held up for two innings in Game Four. In actuality, they outhit the Sox, .224 to .211, but did not draw sustenance from this gruel, because of a collective batting debility. The bottom four hitters in their order failed to deliver a single base runner in scoring position over the seven games. Their dugout was tomblike last night after Shane Victorino’s three-run double, high off the wall in the third inning, and no wonder. The eight Boston batters not named Ortiz, by contrast, stayed upbeat throughout—a boys’ club, you felt—despite a similar collective fatuity at the plate. Somebody or other would provide: Gomes with a three-run homer in Game Four; David Ross with a seventh-inning double the next night; that Victorino double yesterday. All this can be blamed on St. Louis pitching, of course, but there was clearly something else in play during these games—a winning conviction beyond the reach of stats. Beards did it.

Big Papi had four walks last night, three of them on free passes from the Cardinal pitchers, and struck out at last in the sixth, dropping his batting average from .733 to .688, still good enough by miles for the Series M.V.P. award. No one has ever been hotter—unless it was St. Louis third baseman David Freese, back in 2011, when he saved the Cards from extinction by the Texas Rangers in Game Six of that World Series with a ninth-inning two-out, two-strike, two-run triple, then won the game with a lead-off homer in the eleventh. Freese was present but not present this time around, striking out seven times—you wanted to look away.

Fox TV provided a nice little Ortiz vignette, with an overheard water-cooler chat between Cards catcher Yadier Molina and home-plate ump Jim Joyce as Big Papi approached the plate once again. “The guy’s unbelievable,” Molina said, through his mask.

“He’s fun to watch,” Joyce agreed.

I also appreciated a Fox shot that reprised Stephen Drew’s fourth-inning home run into the Sox bullpen, where the presiding Boston cop, Steve Horgan, again raised his arms in triumph, exactly as he had famously done in the A.L.C.S. when Ortiz’s homer landed there, with Tiger right fielder Torii Hunter spinning after it, head over heels. Drew’s shot put the Sox up by 4–0, and there was time for me to muse about Horgan’s duties while on patrol out there: Patting down pigeons? Breaking up a deadly international ring of autograph counterfeiters?

Such are the idle between-time pleasures of baseball, but that season has now flown away, worse luck. The Red Sox have taken their third World Championship in ten years, and the first clinched at Fenway Park since 1918. No trace remains of the Curse of the Bambino and accompanying New England paranoias that filled up our paragraphs and night thoughts for so many years. Winning almost all the time has a lot to be said for it, but not quite winning, barely missing again and again, keeps you whining and breathing, and might even be more fun in the end.

Post, October, 2013