This game would be totally forgotten by anyone who wasn't there... if it wasn't for Dave Righetti pitching a no-hitter. He even managed to strike out the tough-to-fan Wade Boggs for the final out. Yankees 4, Red Sox 0.
This was because the Sox had great starting pitching: Roger Clemens, Bruce Hurst, Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, and even the final, somewhat hard-luck season of Tom Seaver. In contrast, the Yanks' rotation was weak: While Dennis Rasmussen went 18-6, no other Yankee pitcher, starter or reliever, won in double figures. Ron Guidry had an uncharacteristic 9-12 after winning 22 the year before, and Doug Drabek, Bob Tewksbury and 41-year-old knuckleballer Joe Niekro (whose brother Phil had pitched for the Yanks the preceding 2 years) won just 34 between them.
Also, Boggs, who did have the excuse of a sore hamstring, sat this series out, and wins the AL batting title over Don Mattingly, who slumped badly in the last 2 weeks.
October 25, 1986, Shea Stadium, New York. "The Buckner Game" was played in New York City, and it did make the Sox look like morons. But it had nothing to do with the Yankees, and it makes the Mets look heroic, and I don't think either Yankee Fans or Sox fans want to hear about that. So let's just move on.
September 28, 1987, Yankee Stadium. Mike Easler -- not traded from Boston to New York for Don Baylor in the 1985-86 off-season, although it did sort of work out that way -- treats Calvin Schiraldi even more harshly than the Mets did in the previous year's World Series. He hits a pinch-hit home run to win the game, 9-7.
May 27, 1991, Yankee Stadium. The Sox are the defending AL East Champions, while the Yankees had finished last the year before, something they'd only previously done in 1908, 1912 and 1966. Only 32,369 come out for this Memorial Day matinee between the old rivals, and the Yanks trail 5-3 in the bottom of the 9th.
But Mel Hall -- who would later leave the Yankees under a cloud -- takes Jeff "the Terminator" Reardon deep. Yankees 6, Red Sox 5. (Maybe Sox fans can blame the 1st base umpire, Larry Barnett, the same ump who they, in their delusions, think screwed them in Game 3 of the '75 World Series.)
A lot of Yankee Fans point to this game as the beginning of the rise from the abyss. It wasn't: 1991 and '92 were both bad years, though not as bad as '89 and '90. But the building blocks were in place: George Steinbrenner had been suspended for 2 years, former good-field-no-hit infielder Gene Michael was running the show as general manager, and the Yankees were making good trades and draft choices, including, the following June, a shortstop from Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, a former New Jerseyan named Derek Jeter.
This Mel Hall homer is also cited by some as the beginning of Yankee broadcaster John Sterling's closing call of, "Ballgame over! Yankees win! Theeeeeeee Yankees win!" I'm not so sure. Granted, I was watching this one on WPIX-Channel 11 with Phil Rizzuto, Bobby Murcer and Tom Seaver, rather than listening to Sterling and Joe Angel on 77 WABC. But even as late as Jim Leyritz's 1995 Playoff walkoff against Seattle, his "Theeeeeeee... " was still just a "The... " without much elongation.
September 14, 1991, Yankee Stadium. This was my 1st live Yanks-Sox game, included among an attendance of 45,758. This was a 4-game series, and the Sox won 3 of them. Not this one: Yankees 3, Red Sox 1. And, yes, Sox fans were every bit as obnoxious as you might expect, especially since they were still in the race (they'd be caught at the death by those pesky Blue Jays) and the Yanks were awful, having just begun their climb back from the abyss of last place the season before.
December 15, 1992, Yankee Stadium. Having been allowed to leave via free agency by the Sox, Boggs signs with the Yankees. It was weird seeing him in Pinstripes, but I got used to it, because he could still hit for average, began to hit with power (taking advantage of the short porch in right field at Yankee Stadium), and his fielding, already good, got better.
September 21, 1996, Yankee Stadium. Cecil Fielder turns 33, and becomes the 5th, and the oldest, Yankee to hit a home run against the Red Sox on his birthday. Paul O'Neill also homers, and Tim Raines, better known for stealing bases than slugging, hits 2. The Yankees win a wild one, 12-11.
October 26, 1996, Yankee Stadium. The Yankees beat the Atlanta Braves 3-2, to win Game 6 and clinch the World Series, their 1st such win in 18 years. A moment in time by Red Sox standards, but interminable by ours.
Boggs, who'd come so close with the 1986 Red Sox, got on a policeman's horse and rode around the field in the celebration. Rubbing it in? He may not have thought so, but we sure did.
As Denis Leary, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, a big Sox fan, but also with connections to New York through his comedy career and his TV series The Job and Rescue Me (about policemen and firemen, respectively), put it: "If you had told my father in 1986 that, within 10 years, Wade Boggs would be celebrating winning a World Series with the Yankees while riding on the back of a police horse, his head would have blown up."
May 24, 1997, Yankee Stadium. Charlie Hayes is best remembered by Yankee Fans for catching the last out of the 1996 World Series. Almost forgotten is this game the following spring, in which he hit a walkoff homer against John Wasdin -- or "Wayback Wasdin," as some Sox fans called him. Yankees 4, Red Sox 2.
February 18, 1999, Yankee Stadium. Although the rivalry was amped up a little bit by the Yankees signing Boggs, Boggs riding that horse, and the arrivals in Boston of Pedro Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra -- the latter forging a rivalry-within-the-rivalry with Yankee shortstop Jeter -- and the Sox had made the Playoffs the season before, this is the day the rivalry really gets going again.
On this day, the Yankees trade pitchers David Wells and Graeme Lloyd, and infielder Homer Bush, to the Toronto Blue Jays for Roger Clemens, whom the Red Sox had cast aside 2 years earlier. Then-Sox general manager Dan Duquette saw Clemens not getting enough run support to get a plus-.500 record, and gaining weight, and said he was "in the twilight of his career."
Whether Duquette blew it big-time, or Clemens really was in the twilight of his career and turned that around with performance-enhancing drugs, may never be fully proven. What we know for sure is this: One way or another, Clemens got back into shape, had 2 great years with the Jays, and became a Yankee Legend, albeit one most of us on the Light Side of The Force are not comfortable with.
In contrast, Sox fans have treated Clemens as their "Darth Vader," forgetting just which side is good and which side is evil.
July 13, 1999, Fenway Park. The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is held at the ancient home of the Sox. Yankee manager Joe Torre is manager for the American League team. Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox starts for the American League at shortstop, and receives a standing ovation from the fans after Jeter comes in to replace him after they embrace.
Later in the game, when he came to bat, Jeter gave Garciaparra a tribute by mimicking his batting stance. Pedro starts for the AL, strikes out 5 of the 6 National League batters he faces, and ends up as the winning pitcher. The AL wins, 4-1.
Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Jeter, at Yankee Stadium
Before the game, nominees for the MLB All-Century Team are introduced. The legends wear the current caps of their teams, not necessarily the caps their teams wore in their own time. One of the nominees is Reggie Jackson, former recipient of "Reggie Sucks!" chants from the Fenway stands, and he gets a nice cheer. Hearing this, he looks at the TV camera, wearing his Yankee cap, and winks.
Fenway Park, during pregame ceremonies for the 1999 All-Star Game
July 30, 1999, Fenway Park. I was there for this one. The Sox had recently published their plans for New Fenway Park, to be built across the street, and I figured this might be my last chance to see a Yanks-Sox game at Fenway in the heat of a Pennant race. Who knew at the time that, 10 years later, Fenway would still stand, and it would be the Yankees who had built a new stadium across their
street?
I paid a scalper $42 for a $24 obstructed-view seat -- $76 for a $44 seat in today's money. It was worth every penny. On the 2nd pitch of the game, Chuck Knoblauch hit a home run over the Green Monster. On the 5th pitch of the game, Jeter hit a home run to dead center field. The victimized Sox pitcher was Mark Portugal, who had been a fair pitcher with the Houston Astros, but was now washed up, would retire after the season, and literally fell off the mound a few pitches later.
The Yanks left the 1st inning ahead 2-0, and while the Sox did tie it up, the Yanks unloaded the lumber afterward. Yankees 13, Red Sox 3. Joe Torre let Hideki Irabu pitch a complete game. No, I'm not kidding: Torre let a pitcher go the distance, and Hideki I-rob-you, no less.
At the start of the game, there were 33,777 paying customers in Fenway, and about 10,000 of them were Yankee Fans. By the 7th inning stretch, there were about 15,000 people there, and about 10,000 of them were chanting, "Let's go, Yankees!" A great night. I even ran into a guy who played football at my high school, who was by this point going to Boston College. And he was also a Yankee Fan. What were the odds?
September 10, 1999, Yankee Stadium. Chili Davis hits a home run off Pedro. That's the only hit that Pedro allows, and he strikes out 17 batters, which, through the 2016 season, remains the most ever fanned by a Yankee opponent. Had Andy Pettitte not allowed a home run to Trot Nixon, Pedro would have pitched a one-hitter and struck out 17 Yankees, and lost. Instead... Red Sox 3, Yankees 1.
Pedro begins to achieve godlike status among Sox fans, a status achieved since World War II only by Ted Williams, Tony Conigliaro, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk and Nomar. But the Yankees win the American League Eastern Division, while the Sox get the Wild Card.
The part that bothered me in this game was the fans in the bleachers, holding up Dominican flags and banners with Pedro's name on it. I don't care if you're also Dominican: Pedro plays for the enemy. When you come to Yankee Stadium, you are Yankee Fans, and your nationality gets put away. I'm Polish, but I never cheered for the Red Sox just because they had Carl Yastrzemski; and even if I would have, I certainly would have put that on hold against the Yankees.
October 13, 1999, Yankee Stadium. Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. Because the Boston Tie Party of 1978 is officially counted as a regular-season game, this is the first "real" postseason game between the Pinstripes and The Scum. Sox fans are sure that their deliverance from the Yankees and the Curse of the Bambino are finally at hand.
Not tonight: Bernie Williams -- who later says that Yogi Berra told him, "We've been playing these guys for 80 years. They can't beat us" -- leads off the bottom of the 10th inning, hits a home run to dead center field off Rod Beck. Yankees 4, Red Sox 3. The Yanks will take Game 2 as well.
Tino Martinez, Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill
October 16, 1999, Fenway Park. Game 3. Pedro pitches superbly, while the Sox batter Clemens. As Clemens walks off the mound after getting knocked out of the box, a fan holds up a sign saying, "Roger, thanks for the memories -- especially this one!" One side of Fenway chants, "Where is Roger?" The other side chants, "In the shower!" Red Sox 13, Yankees 1. Sox fans are delirious, and are now sure they will beat the Yanks and go all the way.
But, as Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, the man who popularized the phrase "Curse of the Bambino," pointed out, the point was not to beat Clemens, but to win the series. And the Sox still trail it, 2 games to 1. The Yankees don't lose again until April 5, 2000.
October 17, 1999, Fenway Park. Game 4. Admittedly, there were a couple of umpiring mistakes that worked in the Yanks' favor. But it's still 3-2 Yanks in the 9th, and poor fielding leads to a Ricky Ledee grand slam off Beck. Sox fans, furious at the umpiring, throw garbage onto the field.
Since then, the description of Boston as "the Athens of America" gets this response from me: "Bullshit." While there were many fans who had stood by the Sox through all the torment, this was a limited few who had come to the team through Pedro and Nomar, and were more likely to get blitzed than the ones who did so in '78, and they were animals. Of course, these are the ones who get noticed, the kind that got stereotyped as the "Red Sox fans" we have come to know, lampooned on Saturday Night Live by Jimmy Fallon (before he moved on to the U.S. version of Fever Pitch).
Anyway, Yankees 9, Red Sox 2.
October 18, 1999, Fenway Park. Jeter and Jorge Posada hit home runs, Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez pitches superbly, and the Yankees beat the Red Sox, 6-1, and clinch the Pennant, and dance on the field at Fenway. They go on to win the World Series.
May 28, 2000, Yankee Stadium. Roger vs. Pedro again. This one remains scoreless into the 9th, before Trot Nixon hits a home run off Roger, and the Sox win, 2-0.
April 22, 2001, Yankee Stadium. David Justice bangs his gavel off Derek Lowe, hitting a walkoff homer to give the Yanks a 4-3 win.
May 24, 2001, Yankee Stadium. On the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan -- a man who once wrote a song about Catfish Hunter, and another song titled "Seven Curses" (but it had nothing to do with baseball) -- Pedro is getting ready to pitch against the Yankees. "I don't believe in curses," Pedro says. "Wake up the damn Bambino, and have me face him. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass."
But the Yankees beat him. Yankees 2, Red Sox 1. The Yanks move into 1st place, Pedro gets hurt in his next start, and doesn't win another game for the rest of the season.
You don't believe in curses? You mock Babe Ruth -- a better pitcher than you were, Pedro? What a fool. As Dylan might have said, "They'll stone you just like they said they would." When Pedro was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, he walked up to the statue of Ruth in the foyer, and apologized.
September 2, 2001, Fenway Park. Mike Mussina comes within 1 strike of pitching a perfect game, but Carl Everett's 9th-inning, 2-out, 2-strike single is the only baserunner allowed by Mussina. By an amazing coincidence, David Cone, the last Yankee pitcher to throw a perfect game in 1999, had started the game for the Red Sox. Yankees 1, Red Sox 0.
September 18, 2001, Fenway Park. The Sox play their 1st game since the 9/11 attacks. They play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and win, 7-2. A fan at Fenway holds up a banner of solidarity, which would have been unimaginable 8 days earlier (and on most days since September 2001): "TODAY, WE ❤ NY."
The Yankees also play their 1st game following the resumption of play, in Chicago against the White Sox, and win, 11-3.
December 20, 2001, Fenway Park. The JRY Trust, named for Jean Yawkey, sells the Sox to New England Sports Ventures, the company now named Fenway Sports Group, run by John W. Henry. This ends 79 years of Yawkey family-connected ownership of the Sox. (Tom and Jean never had any children to take over for them; Jean inherited the team when Tom died in 1976, and John Harrington had run the club through the Trust since Jean's death in 1992.)
The Henry group, including former Florida Marlins owner Henry, former Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres president Larry Lucchino, and the youngest general manager in the game at the time, Theo Epstein, change the culture around the club.
The fans, having already changed into the Chowdaheads that they became at the dawn of the Nomar-Pedro era, don't change, but they sure embrace this change.
December 26, 2002, Fenway Park. The Yankees sign Cuban pitcher Jose Contreras, and new Sox president Larry Lucchino, in a fit of petulance, calls the Yankees "the Evil Empire."
Oh, really? Putting aside the question of which team is actually more evil... The term "Evil Empire" had been used by President Ronald Reagan -- who knew more about baseball than he did about economics or foreign affairs -- to describe the Soviet Union. Excuse me, Larry, but how do you square the image of the heavily capitalist Yankees with Communism and its prohibition of private property?
Some Yankee Fans, however, connect the word "Empire" with the villains of the Star Wars film franchise, including one fan who made a T-shirt with Darth Vader's helmet, saying, "May the Curse be with you."
October 11, 2003, Fenway Park. Game 3 of the ALCS, and another Roger vs. Pedro matchup. Pedro hits Karim Garcia in the head, on purpose. Not the first time he's hit a Yankee on purpose, nor will it be the last, but it is easily the most notorious.
There is yelling back and forth. Jorge Posada, himself a former Pedro victim, yells in Spanish so that Pedro has no problem understanding. Pedro points at his head, then at Jorge. Message: "I'm going to hit you in the head." Making such a threat is a crime.
Later in the game, Clemens pitches to Manny Ramirez, and the pitch is head-high... but over the plate, and clearly not intended to hit Manny. (As we've seen, if Roger Clemens wanted to hit a batter, that batter got hit.) Manny points at Clemens and walks toward him, still holding the bat. The benches clear again, and Yankee coach Don Zimmer -- manager of the Sox in 1978, but also a former player who nearly died from a beaning in Triple-A ball in 1953 -- runs toward Pedro.
Pedro Martinez, age 32, grabs Don Zimmer, age 72, by the head, and throws him to the ground. Attempted murder, if the jurisdiction is New York City. In Boston, Zimmer ends up forced to apologize, with Pedro getting a $50,000 fine -- pocket change, with what the Sox are paying him.
Refresh my memory: Did we have to apologize to Japan for putting Pearl Harbor in the way of our Pacific Coast?
English soccer fans like to refer to their rivals as "The Scum," and their rivals' fans as "Scummers." As far as I'm concerned, this was the day the Red Sox stopped being mere arch-rivals, and truly became The Scum. They can take their "Evil Empire" talk and shove it up their own evil asses.
October 16, 2003, Yankee Stadium. It comes down to a Game 7. David Ortiz hits 2 home runs (cough-steroids-cough), and the Sox lead 5-2 in the bottom of the 8th. By this point, Ortiz, a.k.a. "Big Papi," has been hitting the Yanks like crazy all year. His success against the Yankees will eventually beg the question, "How many times does a guy have to get big hits off you before you plunk him?"
Ah, but there's a double standard at work: A Sox pitcher can hit a Yankee batter, and get away with it every... single... time; a Yankee pitcher can hit a Sox batter, and he gets thrown out of the game, fined and suspended. Anyway, the Sox need 5 more outs.
Derek Jeter doubles. Bernie Williams singles, Jeter scores. 5-3.
Sox manager Grady Little comes out, and he has to know that Pedro has thrown too many pitches, and that the next 2 batters are Hideki Matsui, a lefty; and Posada, a switch-hitter but much better from the left side than from the right; so the right thing to do is to bring in a lefthanded pitcher, probably Alan Embree (who usually pitched well against the Yankees), to pitch Matsui lefty-on-lefty and turn Posada to his weaker right side. The decision seems obvious to everyone: Sox fans, Yankee Fans, the Fox broadcast team, neutral TV viewers.
Obvious to everyone, that is, except for the man whose decision it was: Little. He leaves Pedro in. Matsui hits a ground-rule double, moving Bernie to 3rd base.
2nd & 3rd, only 1 out, and the dangerous (especially from the left side) Posada coming up. Now Little has got to take Pedro out, and bring in Embree.
But he stays in the dugout. Pedro remains on the mound, and Jorge dumps a looper into short center, scoring Bernie and Hideki. 5-5. Yet another legendary Sox choke, and The Stadium shakes with fans cheering and jumping. (And, considering Game 3, I find it very fitting that Posada got the hit that ended Pedro's night.)
Bottom of the 11th, and Tim Wakefield, who had beaten the Yanks in Games 1 and 4 of the series, and had pitched a scoreless 10th, opens the inning by throwing a 69 miles-per-hour knuckleball to Aaron Boone. Boom. Yankees 6, Red Sox 5. Boone takes his place alongside Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner.
So, to me, the Bucky Dent Game remains the greatest. We won the World Series after that one.
November 28, 2003, Fenway Park. Having failed to trade Nomar to the Texas Rangers for Alex Rodriguez, the Red Sox instead pull off a "reverse Tom Seaver": They trade 4 nobodies to the Arizona Diamondbacks for one of the top pitchers in the game, Curt Schilling, who had previously driven the Yankees nuts in the 2001 World Series.
As a Philadelphia Phillie, Schilling had been described by general manager Lee Thomas as follows: "One day out of five, he's a horse; the other four, he's a horse's ass." Schilling lives up to that reputation at his introductory press conference in Boston, by saying, "I guess I hate the Yankees now."
February 15, 2004, Yankee Stadium. With the Sox having failed to trade for A-Rod, making a very public mess of the negotiations with the Texas Rangers, the Yankees succeed, sending Alfonso Soriano to Texas for the biggest name (if not the best player) in baseball. With Jeter still at shortstop, A-Rod moves over to 3rd base.
July 1, 2004, Yankee Stadium. As wild a regular-season game as you'll ever see. The Yankees end up using everyone on their roster. The Sox use everyone on theirs, except for 2. One is backup catcher Doug Mirabelli. The other is Nomar, apparently injured but not on the Disabled List -- and the fact that Nomar is not sent into what is very much a key game, calendar be damned, is telling.
Once, Nomar, Jeter and A-Rod were the subjects of a debate as to who was the best shortstop in baseball. Now, Jeter is making a diving play that saves the game, A-Rod is playing 3rd base and moving to shortstop after Jeter got hurt on that play, and Nomar is sitting on the bench, leading to his being traded by the Sox within a few days.
Manny homers in the top of the 13th, but Miguel Cairo and John Flaherty double in the bottom of the 13th to win it. Yankees 6, Red Sox 5. A stunning game whose re-airing on the YES Network the next morning gets relabeled from "Yankees Recap" to "Yankees Classic." (It also allowed "Flash" Flaherty to turn his one big hit in the major leagues into a broadcasting career on YES. Then again, one big hit is more than Fran Healy, a backup catcher for the Yankees who broadcast for both New York teams, ever got.)
July 24, 2004, Fenway Park. Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo -- white people should never wear cornrows, except for Bo Derek -- purposely hits A-Rod in the back. A-Rod curses Captain Cornrows out. Sox catcher and Captain Jason Varitek leaves on his mask, like the coward that he is, and pushes his catcher's mitt into A-Rod's pretty face, instigating a full-scale brawl.
Bill Mueller takes Mariano Rivera deep in the bottom of the 9th. Red Sox 9, Yankees 8. Mueller has often been suspected of steroid use, but has thus far been protected from such revelations.
September 19, 2004, Yankee Stadium. Yankees 11, Red Sox 1. The Yankees, the one team that seems to give Pedro trouble, beat him yet again, pounding him. In a postgame press conference, he says, "I just tip my cap, and call the Yankees my daddy."
"Who's Your Daddy?" chants will dog Pedro for the rest of his career. One fan -- was it Vinny Milano, a.k.a. Bald Vinny the River Avenue T-shirt vendor? -- made up a T-shirt showing Darth Vader wearing a Yankee jersey, and saying, as if to Luke Skywalker, "Pedro, I am your father!"
October 17, 2004, Fenway Park. Game 4 of the American League Championship Series. The Yankees had won the 1st 3, including 19-8 last night. The Sox were looking pitiful. Still, their resident wisenheimer, Kevin Millar, told the media, "Don't let us win tonight."
It seemed like a ridiculous thing to say, for 8 1/2 innings. It was 4-3 Yankees going to the bottom of the 9th. All the Yankees needed to complete a sweep was 3 more outs without a run, and Mariano Rivera was on the mound.
But, Cliché Alert: Walks can kill you, especially the leadoff variety. Rivera issued a leadoff walk to Millar himself. Manager Terry Francona took Millar out, replacing him with pinch-runner Dave Roberts. Everybody watching this game, in Fenway or on TV, knew that Roberts would try to steal 2nd base. Joe Torre could have called a pitchout. He didn't, and Roberts had what is now the most famous stolen base in baseball history. Bill Mueller singled up the middle to bring Roberts home with the tying run.
In the bottom of the 12th, Paul Quantrill allowed a single to Manny Ramirez, and gave up a walkoff home run to Ortiz. Red Sox 6, Yankees 4.
October 18, 2004, Fenway Park. Okay, it was 1 game. The Yankees just had to win tonight to close it out in Boston. And Mike Mussina had taken a perfect game into the 7th inning of Game 1. This shouldn't be too hard.
Is it sounding like the 1978 Boston Massacre yet, with the cleat on the other foot?
The Yankees trailed 2-1 in the top of the 6th, but took a 4-2 lead. That lead held into the bottom of the 8th. But former Sox pitcher Tom Gordon gave up a leadoff homer to Ortiz. Again, Millar drew a walk; again, he was replaced by Roberts. No steal necessary this time: Trot Nixon singled, Gabe Kapler ran for Nixon, Mariano was brought in, and Varitek hit a sacrifice fly to score Roberts and tie the game. For the 2nd night in a row, Rivera had blown a postseason save. The entire rest of his career, he did that only twice.
The game went to the bottom of the 14th. At 5 hours and 49 minutes, it was, at the time, the longest postseason game by time. Esteban Loiaza, a former Chicago White Sox ace who'd been shaky for the Yanks that season, had pitched valiantly since the 11th, and struck Mark Bellhorn out to start the inning. But he was out of gas. Again, it was walks that made the difference: He walked Damon and Ramirez, bracketing a strikeout of Orlando Cabrera. Then Ortiz hit not a home run, but a looping single that was enough to bring Damon home. Red Sox 5, Yankees 4.
October 19, 2004, Yankee Stadium. Game 6. The series had come back to Yankee Stadium, home of Mystique and Aura and 39 American League Pennants and 26 World Championships. All the Yanks had to do was win tonight, and all those brand-new Sox memories would have been as wasted as Carlton Fisk’s home run that won Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.
Except Curt Schilling (who had said before the series, "I'm not sure I can think of any scenario more enjoyable than making 55,000 Yankee Fans shut up") was pitching for the Sox. So badly hurt that he couldn't pitch well in Game 1, he’d had a special surgery on his ankle that allowed him to pitch tonight.
And the Yankees refused to test that ankle by bunting on him. John McGraw would have done it. Casey Stengel would have done it. Earl Weaver (not a New York manager but a crafty one) would have done it. You can be damn sure that Billy Martin would have done it. Joe Torre didn't do it. What good is "class" if you lose? Especially to The Scum?
Schilling pitched 7 solid innings, and Bellhorn (cough-steroids-cough) hit a home run. It was a reverse of the Jeffrey Maier play in 1996: The ball hit a front-row fan in the chest and bounced back onto the field. It was an obvious home run, but the umpires ruled it went off the wall. Sox
The Sox still led 4-2 in the bottom of the 8th, but the Yankees got Derek Jeter on 1st. With 1 out, Alex Rodriguez came to the plate. And the pitcher is Bronson Arroyo, Captain Cornrows (cough-steroids-cough), whose purpose pitch to A-Rod's back at Fenway back in July led to a nasty brawl.
Alex hits a weak grounder back to the mound, and as Arroyo tries to make the tag just before 1st base, he (or so it first appears) drops the ball. It’s been 18 years (minus 6 days) since the Bill Buckner Game. Now, at another New York ballpark in October, a ball rolls away from 1st base down the right-field line, and a run scores against the Red Sox! It's 4-3 Boston, and A-Rod is on 2nd with the tying run! The Stadium is going bananas! Red Sox fans are in full "Oh, noooo, not again! It can't be happening again!" mode.
Except this call is reversed as well. It's The Slap Play. A-Rod slapped the ball out of Arroyo's glove. It met baseball's legal definition of interference, and he was called out. What's more, Jeter was sent back to 1st.
That's the part that bothers me, ruling-wise: Jeter had nothing to do with the interference, and he would have had 2nd legitimately even if A-Rod had done nothing out of the ordinary, and Arroyo had been allowed to properly tag him out. It wasn't Jeter's fault: 2nd base was rightfully his, interference or no, even if 3rd and home were not.
This killed the rally, but, as mad as I was at the umpires, A-Rod was rightfully the real target of Yankee Fans' wrath, including my own. This was the beginning of A-Rod's image as "a player who screws the Yankees over in the clutch," and he did not shake it until October 2009. Though he did his damnedest to restore it in the next 3 Octobers, and again in 2015. (So how many bad Octobers does one good October excuse? Apparently, at least 8.)
The Sox held on to win by that same 4-2 score, and the series was tied, the 1st time a Major League Baseball team had ever come back from 3-games-to-none down to force a Game 7.
For the first time since I became aware of the Curse of the Bambino, I believed it was not going to work. As the man who popularized the Curse, Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, pointed out, the kinds of things that usually went against the Red Sox and/or in the Yankees favor were now working the other way around.
As bad as the next night was, Game 6 was really the day that any curse, jinx, hex, hoodoo, hammer, whammy, whommy, whatever you want to call it, that the Yankees had over the Red Sox came to an end.
And those of us who are old enough to remember could feel it coming. I had no confidence at all that the Yankees would win Game 7, not even at home, especially with their starting pitching options so messed-up. As the aforementioned Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Brooklyn Dodger fan as a kid but a Red Sox fan since going to Harvard, likes to say, "There's always these omens in baseball." This was an omen to rival Damien Thorn.
Had the Yankees won Game 6, there would have been no Game 7. David Ortiz's "heroics" of Game 4 and Game 5 would have been meaningless, as they were the year before. The Yankees would have prepared for the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, and probably won it.
If that had happened, you can be damn sure that the outcry from Red Sox fans (and fans of other teams that hate the Yankees) that, due to the steroid use of A-Rod, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, "The Yankees cheated" and should be stripped of their Pennant and title. And their willing accomplices in the media would have gone along with it. There would have been a cloud over the Yankees, the way there never has been over the Red Sox, who, through Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, were far more reliant on performance-enhancing drugs, and, from 2003 to 2016, the Big Papi Years, probably wouldn't even have made the Playoffs, much less won 3 World Series.
The Yankees wouldn't have gotten away with it, as the Red Sox always have.
Still, having that cloud over us -- which we essentially had put over us anyway -- would have been preferable to the insufferable unearned arrogance of the Boston fans of 2004 onward, especially the bandwagoners.
And I still want the blood on Schilling's sock tested! I think he was using steroids, too! And somebody else must think so. It can't be only his rotten personality, his politics, and his post-retirement business shenanigans that's keeping him out of the Hall of Fame. If anything, those things, as bad as they are, should be irrelevant as to whether he belongs in Cooperstown.
October 20, 2004, Yankee Stadium. Game 7 is a disaster from the outset, as proven steroid user Ortiz homers again. Red Sox 10, Yankees 3.
What a difference 4 days can make.
The Red Sox become the 1st Major League Baseball team to come back from a 3-games-to-0 postseason deficit, and win the Pennant, clinching at Yankee Stadium, a house of pain for them for so long. They go on to beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, killing the Curse of the Bambino after 86 years.
Or so they thought. Now we know the truth.
Part V, the finale, is ahead.