TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Zombies Eat Flesh of Yankees

The Dead Rise and Walk the Earth!

There's a scene in the mini-series Band of Brothers (and a gazillion other similar war stories) where the ice-cool Lieutenant, Shifty Powers, tells a frightened Private how to get through the fear of death: just assume you're already dead. Across New England this week, millions in Red Sox nation, facing the inexorable pronunciations that no team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in a 7-game series -- hadn't even forced a seventh game, not once in 25 times -- that the team was as good as done. Schilling's ankle needs surgery, Arroyo stank, Lowe's got a dead arm, the team was a day late and a dollar short on the offense in the first three games, accepted the death of the season. Yet they soldiered on, as did the Red Sox themselves.

The grueling games of the previous two nights kept the faithful up past the witching hour, and not even some sugary zombie dust on a sinker and a 32-ounce Dunkin' Donuts coffee (the kind with the carry handle) could keep the fans from dragging. Imagine how the players must feel! Imagine being Jason Varitek, having caught 26 innings in just over 25 hours, and then being entrusted tonight with calling a game for the man rising from the season's grave, Curt Schilling. To complete the horror story for the Yankees, Schilling was literally stitched together tonight. The red in his Sox was the color of blood, because it was blood oozing from the stitches, which had come apart during his warm-ups.

This is why, as a Red Sox fan, I am eerily calm at the prospect of Game 7. Having been content at being dead already, and come to terms with it, and having seen the dead walk the earth and throw seven incredible innings off the mound at Yankee Stadium, having seen an actual closer shut down the Yanks in the ninth with the winning run at the plate, it seems impossible the Red Sox could go on to win a game seven. I abandoned all hope a long time ago, and in doing so have entered a state of freedom. If they win tomorrow, they surely can't go all the way in the World Series, with Schilling just as likely out for the season as anything. He's practically pitching on a stump. The kind of game Schilling pitched on a Keri Strug ankle injury, to nail that 9.2 for the team medal, will be more than the stuff of legend on Boylston street. It's quite likely going to be remembered among the all-time great pitching performances, and may, like Fisk's homer in Game 6 in 1975, be the moment the lives forever -- remember, the Red Sox lost Game 7 the next day, but, much to Joe Morgan's consternation, nobody remembers his big blasts to win it, because when anybody outside of Hamilton County thinks of 1975, they conjure Fisk to mind as the epitome of the great game.

Whatever happens to the Red Sox, it's going to be hard to ever think of this 2004 team as losers. The moment was won tonight, regardless of the Championship. The Yankees under George Steinbrenner have this compulsive, wretched fixation with the literal fact of winning the title of world champion. Curt Schilling showed tonight what a true Champion is.

---

One odd coda to this game. Schilling was doing a stand-up interview in the locker room hallway after the game, during most of which I was screaming at the TV screen, "Curt, get off your )U#)@#(ing feet! Take the weight off that thing!" I noticed Schilling nervously chewing on something that didn't appear to be gum. Schilling, by my recollection, along with most of the '93 Phillies had a nasty chewing tobacco habit -- I shudder at the memory of the U-shaped chaw stain on the artificial turf that framed Lenny Dyskstra's spot in Centerfield at Veteran's staidum. He developed a pre-cancerous growth in his mouth, though, and got scared out of the habit, much to his credit. My wife speculated tonight maybe he was chewing nicorette, but the way his mouth was moving around, it looked more like he was chewing a few nicoderm patches stuffed in his mouth. It's possible -- I hope -- he hasn't fallen off the wagon and it was just gum. But in a reflective moment with Gammons, it was truly strange the way Schilling moved whatever the wad of stuff in his mouth was around like it was chaw, as if the muscle memory of the old relaxing habit had carried him through the pain.

All Curt could talk about in the end, though, was how proud he was to be a part of this team. This is a guy who was co-MVP of the 2001 championship Diamondbacks. He's been to the mountaintop before, and seen the view down into the valley, and yet he seems genuinely more fulfilled by this experience.

Even more telling about the make-up of both Schilling in the end days of his career and this Red Sox team, though, was to contrast Schilling's reaction in 2004 to watching Arroyo and Foulke risk losing his victory to his poor wretched state in 1993 when Mitch Williams was blowing Game Six of the World Series to the Blue Jays. In those agonizing steps leading up to Joe Carter's famous game-winning -- series-winning -- homer, that destroyed Schilling's victory and that marvelously messy Phillies' team its one shot at a ring -- the TV showed Schilling in the dugout, a towel completely over his head, his hands covering his eyes as an extra protective layer. He couldn't watch, and I can't say as I blamed him at the time. In 2004, Schilling watches calmly, his gaze steady, no visible signs of nerves. He's alert, but he can handle it. Arroyo gets out of the jam, Foulke gets out of the jam, Curt gets the win. And later, he sticks his tongue into the side of his mouth, like he's got the world's biggest hunk of Mail Pouch there.

posted by The Crank 10:26 PM