TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, October 28, 2004

It's Over

It's not really very easy to describe the sensations I'm feeling tonight to anybody who hasn't been a Sox fan for quite a while. I hope for the fans of the city of Chicago we have company some time soon. But it's a sense of release: now we can get back to admiring the baseball and not worry quite so much about the outcome. We can go back and marvel at how far the '86 Sox got against teams that were better than them, how much heart the '75 team played with, how great that '78 team was despite not even making it to the dance, how improbable the '67 pennant was, how great Pesky really was and what a pity it was he missed the war years so we'll never know how fine he might have been, what a bomber the beast was, and what a great pitcher Ruth was. We can move on and enjoy our team without holding them to an impossible burden of relieving the horrors of nearly 90 years.

I'm particularly happy for a few people in particular.

One is Dan Duquette. He was vilified for trying a bit too hard and not being nearly enough of a communicator with the fans and his own employees, but he laid out the groundwork for the great victory. Four of the starters tonight were his. He made the second-best Sox trade of the last generation in getting Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe for Heathcliff Slocumb. He acquired the great Pedro Martinez, who will be remembered a hundred years from now. And Duquette was such a fan, even unemployed by organized baseball he paid his own way to see the Sox finally win it all.

Another is Lou Gorman. Lou was not well-loved at the end of his tenure with the Red Sox, and represented an old school that really didn't fit too well. But Gorman did put the Red Sox close in '86 and '88 and '90, and his last first-round pick, Trot Nixon, was in the lineup tonight, hitting three doubles and getting two RBI. Lou is still employed by the club as a consultant and may well share in the glory, finally.

We are very grateful for the gracious presence of Tim Wakefield on this club for the past ten years. Wakefield was a cast-off from the Pirates when he upped with the Red Sox, and came within a start of winning a Cy Young in his first full year with the club. He's had an up and down career (no pun intended), but has always been there through thick and thin. He did not get the job done in Game 1, yet somehow I feel this victory is more his than anybody else's. Timmy is a strange throwback to another time with his knuckleball, his gentle way, and his genuine warmth. After last year's ignominious defeat at the hands of the Aaron Boone homer, he, more than anybody else, deserves to hold this trophy for his perseverance.

I continue to hold a special place in my heart for Johnny Damon. I was privileged to see Damon's first championship, in 1994, for the high-A Wilmington Blue Rocks. That team featured a half dozen future major leaguers, notably Damon and Jon Lieber. It won over 100 games in a short minor league season plus post-season, and swept the post-season series 3-0 to win the Carolina League. Damon was a second-baseman then, clean-shaven and with short hair, and was one of the nicest players I've had the privilege to talk with. He just never seemed to get caught up in the hype, either back then or during his stint with the Sox, the A's, and the Royals. He was as much an MVP for the Red Sox this year as anybody, and despite a temporary outage of production in the ALCS ended up being instrumental to their post-season success as well.

I'm so happy for Derek Lowe, who may or may not be the quality of pitcher he showed in 2002. But no matter what happens to Lowe's career the rest of the way, he'll have the 2004 post-season to look back upon. No pitcher can do anything but match what he did: win the deciding game in three consecutive post-season series, and pitch his team back from the brink of elimination twice in the same post-season.

But most of all, I'm ecstatic for myself and my fellow New Englanders. The Patriots? Myeah. A late expansion to our pantheon. The Celts, the B's? Sideshows. The Red Sox form the rhythym of the season that counts in New England, summer. I can get back to an account of town ball being played in the time of George III in about four generational leaps. The Red Sox matter more than most sports franchises because entire families mark their histories by what the Sox were doing at such and such a time. My sister was married during Game 4 of the 1990 ALCS; my wife and I picked the date of Fisk's homer (the actual date, since it was hit past midnight) for our own wedding because it was the one childhood memory we first discovered we had in common; I watched Game 6 of the '86 series with my best friend from college in a smelly dorm lounge. A million families have their own versions. It's as meaningful a way of marking our time on the planet as anything else.

And for all those families, from the centenarians who remember the last championship to the snips of kids who don't have a clue about how long this wait was, this will always be: the Year the Sox won it.

posted by The Crank 1:07 AM