Boston Red Sox Championship Run 2004, Part One
With the baseball season almost upon us (Opening Day is in less than three weeks now), I have been thinking a lot about the Red Sox 2004 World Series win. Okay, unless you were stranded on Mars for the last 90 years, everyone knows that it was their first WS win in 86 seasons. I know I will never forget it, even if they somehow win the next ten in a row…..
Now, it has been a year and a half, and I remember things pretty vividly. I also have the DVD collection of the ALCS and WS. But the way all those games personally affected me won’t have been captured on the DVD. The feelings I had, the utter “go for broke”, excitement of total abandon, won’t be captured anywhere but in my head. So, I decided to write about it.
So, here goes…. This is my retrospective on those three weeks in October of 2004.
October 16-17 2003
Okay, so I went back before 2004 for this one. We all know what happened. Probably the only notable thing about this game was the fact that the Sox had yet another seventh game opportunity to do it to us again. They were ahead by five runs. My wife, a baseball fan, but not a total strategy nut like me, was upbeat. I was nervous, very nervous.
Did you ever see a horror movie where the good guys (usually a couple of guys, and a least one well-endowed girl wearing a something that either starts out as very revealing or ends up that way after the all the crap they go through) are almost out of the “bad place” — you pick it: jungle, cave, haunted house. They’re mere yards away from safety when the monster or bad guy in a hockey mask, or whatever, manages to grab one of the guys and kill him.
That’s the way any tried and true, dyed in the wool, Red Sox fan felt that evening when they were up by five. You just knew it was coming. You knew that Buckner, Bucky F-ing Dent, or a phenomenally fired up Bob Gibson was going to appear.
I kept telling my wife that they’d find a way to let it slip away. When Grady Little came to the mound after Pedro had given up a couple of doubles, my wife said to me, “Phew, they’re taking him out!” I had wished they’d gone to their solid bullpen to start the inning, but I too was relieved. When Little walked back to the dugout, leaving a tired Pedro in, well, you know that monster was getting closer and closer.
The Yankees tied it up, and a journeyman infielder parked a Wakefield knuckler in the 11th, and that was that.
Truth be told, that monster hadn’t just gotten the guy and chewed him up — no, that monster reached out of the movie screen and punched me right below the belt just before the final credits rolled……
It took me a lot of hours before I could finally get to sleep. It took me a lot of months before I could finally say “Well, maybe next year.”
Regular Season 2004
So much has been written about the entire Red Sox season in 2004. They started off with so much promise in April and May, then went into a long stretch of mediocre .500 baseball. It was maddening, becuase you had a feeling that they had even more talent than in 2003.
The big turning points obviously were the Nomar Garciaparra trade — which brought much needed defense — and the game against the Yankees on July 24. That game saw the Sox get into a brawl with the Yanks, started by A-Rod and Jason Varitek. It ended with a two run walkoff homer by Billy Mueller against Mariano Rivera. I don’t think anyone knew it at the time, but something changed that day.
The Sox came close to catching the Yanks, ended up clinching the Wild Card spot down in Tampa, and celebrated just a little bit, before finishing up the season. Down the stretch, the playoff picture took a long time to form so we (my wife, my friends and other Sox fans) talked and debated who we thought the Sox would get, and who they might match up with. Beneath it all, we all wanted one thing — a chance to pay back the Yankees.
Red Sox vs. Angels
The Sox first playoff game since the Night of Agony in 2003 was on the afternoon (late afternoon Eastern Standard time) of October 5, 2004. We had to suffer through Chris Berman doing play-by-play for ESPN, and had to listen to all the talking sports-heads discussing how difficult it would be for the Sox to beat the Angels.
Now, I like Chris Berman, but he’s a lousy play-by-play guy. And I was at work when the game started anyway, so I caught a lot of it on the radio on the ride home with Castiglione and Trupiano.
Sox got out to a big lead, thanks to a 7 run 4th inning, Curt Schilling appeared to hurt his ankle a little and the Sox went up 1-0 in the best of three series by winning 9-3.
Game Two was a late game on October 6. Couldn’t stay up that late and still be remotely functional at work the next day so I went to bed. About an hour later (I guess) a barking dog woke me. I was awake, and curious, and snuck down to the living room to see how my Sox were doing.
It was close. I got sucked in. It reminded me of when I was a kid and had to go to bed, but I’d strain to stay awake trying to hear how the Sox were doing when my Dad was listening on the radio or watching on the TV. I was trying to stay awake, trying to keep the TV down low.
It was a pretty good battle, with the Sox holding a 4-3 leading going into the 9th. A one run leading going into the 9th inning will make any Sox fan nervous, even on opening day, no matter how good the bullpen is. But this Sox team had a good bullpen AND a ton of offense. They scored four in the 9th to take the second game 8-3. They were headed back to Fenway up 2-0 in the series, and I was headed to bed around 2am, knowing I’d be worthless in the office the next day.
The 3rd game of the Series was on Friday, October 8. I managed to watch a short bit of the first inning on the small TV in the exercise room at work. Unfortunately, all of us from work had a retirement dinner to go to that evening — watching would be impossible. Being a techno-geek, I set up my phone to get text messages of the score. Unfortunately, there was one guy who was TiVo-ing the game and didn’t want to know anything at all about it, so I had to be very poker-faced when my texts would come in.
All of the angst was for naught though, because by the time the dinner was over, the Sox had been way ahead, given up a grand slam to Vlad, and were tied going into extra innings. So it was into the car for the ride home, and on went Castiglione and Trupiano.
I didn’t get far from the restaurant before David Ortiz, “Big Papi” came up in the bottom of the 10th.
The first pitch went into the Monster seats and it was over. The Sox were headed back to the ALCS and I was headed home on Friday night with a couple of days to contemplate who would be our opponent!
To be continued….