The calendar says September, but it feels like March.
Like the exhibition season.
You cough up a 6-2 lead to the Yankees and, well, so what? Bret Saberhagen pitched well. Steve Avery sinks to new depths and, well, so what? He won't be here next year anyway. Jimy Williams doesn't pinch-hit for Scott Hatteberg against Mike Stanton with the go-ahead runs on base and two outs in the eighth and, well, so what? We need to find out if Hatteberg can hit lefties.
It's just like the exhibition season. The wins and losses don't matter. You fixate on the good and ignore the bad and talk yourself into believing that things are moving forward. And who knows? Maybe they really are.
But September baseball is one of the joys of my life, and it's such an empty feeling when the games are meaningless. I figure that in my 34 years as a fan, the Sox have been truly alive in September 13 times ('67, '72, '74, '75, '77, '78, '81, '86, '88, '90, '91, '95 and '96) and on the outskirts 4 times ('79, '82, '89 and '93). That means that 17 times, or exactly half of my seasons, September hasn't meant anything. This is one of those 17 seasons.
It felt it last night. The game didn't really mean anything to the Yankees, either, since the only team in their time zone in the wild-card race, Anaheim, is not only incapable of putting together the kind of streak needed to put pressure on the Yanks, but is incapable of winning a game. As a result, they played last night with one main hope: that Dwight Gooden would pitch well enough to be entrusted with the No. 4 rotation slot in the playoffs. He didn't. So even though the Yankees won, they lost. And since the Sox were concerned mostly with Saberhagen, even though they lost, they won. Such is life when you're playing out the string.
It's a shame, because what a time this could be. The memories are obvious (the season-ending sweep of the Twins in '67) and the not-so-obvious (a great diving catch by Rick Miller to save a victory over the Tigers in '72), exciting (Jeff Stone's improbable game-winning hit against the Blue Jays in '90) and mundane (clinching the division in '88 at 1 a.m., when Oakland beat Milwaukee). You play all season to set the stage for this final month, and it feels so, well, hollow when the curtain comes down early.
My favorite pennant race? 1988. The background: The Sox, distracted by the Wade Boggs/Margo Adams nonsense, stumble through the first half of the season in a stupor under John McMamara and hit the All-Star break a game over .500. During the break Adams goes on a TV talk show and tells the world that Boggs would set up his teammates in compromising sexual situations and then burst in and take their pictures as a means of blackmailing them into silence about his affair with Adams; he called it the Delta Force. (After the news breaks, one of the beat reporters tells me he now understands why Boggs once raced into a writer's hotel room with a camera while a group of media people were playing cards. "He must have gotten the room number wrong," the reporter says.) A furious Jean Yawkey fires McNamara on the spot, replaces him with Joe Morgan, and the Sox streak back into the race by winning 12 in a row and 19 of 20. The Sox slowly pull away from the pack in late August and early September and are four games in front of New York when the Yankees come to town for a four-game series right around this time of year.
1988, of course, was the 10-year anniversary of you-know-what, and Yankee Nation thought it was kismet that the Yanks were coming to town for another four-game series, with a chance to pull into a first-place tie. "The Boston Massacre Part II!" they cackled, and the cackling got louder when the Yanks won the opener on Thursday night. WPIX was the Yankees' main television outlet back then, televising far more games than it does now, and I thought Phil Rizzuto and Bill White had some sort of royalty agreement that paid them X amount of money every time they uttered "1978" on the air.
The cackling got softer when the Sox won Friday night. It got softer still when the Sox won Saturday afternoon. You could barely hear it when the Sox crushed the Yanks on Sunday afternoon and sent them limping out of town six games in arrears. We laughed and danced and hooted and hollered at the Yankees that day, convinced we'd driven a stake through their hearts and ended the talk of 1978 once and for all.
But then the Sox lost two of three in Toronto, and the lead was back down to four when Boston arrived in New York on Friday night for a three-game series. White and Rizzuto resumed their 1978 chant, speculating that the Sox' throats were parched and their hands were sweaty at the prospect of the Bronx Bombers breathing down their necks -- because, after all, remember what happened in '78? -- and a full house in Yankee Stadium took up the case. The Yanks swatted Bruce Hurst all over the Bronx that night, building a 9-5 lead after six innings, and the crescendo was building. With two outs, someone hit a fly ball to left field . . . and Rickey Henderson made one of his snatch catches for the third out, as the noise level rose to volcanic levels.
People asked me why I reacted so violently this winter and spring when Henderson was rumored to be coming to Boston. That very catch -- that arrogant, lack-of-respect, hot-dogging snatch catch for the third out of that inning, with the Yankee hordes screaming for Red blood -- may be why. I began screaming and throwing things around the house, and when I calmed down I thought, you know, it's really not healthy to get so emotionally worked up about something like this.
Then the Sox got a run in the seventh. They got two in the eighth. They put the go-ahead runs on base in the ninth. Up stepped pinch-hitter Spike Owen. And he poked a seeing-eye single through the infield, putting the Red Sox ahead.
I screamed again, this time for joy, and slid across the living room in delight. Owen clenched his fist and shook it happily toward his teammates. The Sox players were on the top step of the dugout, jumping and high-fiving and waving. The stadium rocked with noise again, but this time from the 20,000 or so Red Sox fans in attendance. It was glorious.
When it was over, the Boston TV stations hustled their mini-cams down to the corridor leading to the Red Sox clubhouse. The players were whooping and clapping and celebrating as they raced through the doors, and Bob Stanley bellowed, "That's a ripper! Rip 'em! Yeah! Rip their hearts out!"
It doesn't get any better than that.
The delightful coda was written the next afternoon, when George Steinbrenner went on the WPIX pregame show to concede the race. He was interviewed by White, who insisted on sticking to the party line. "The Red Sox have to be thinking about 1978," White said to George, who shifted uneasily and said something to the effect, well, the '78 Yankees were a special team and the '88 Yankees haven't shown that kind of grit and determination. (Or, I wanted to add, that kind of talent.) "But the Red Sox have to be worried about the Yankees roaring up behind them," White persisted, and I laughed out load. The teams had just played five games in the span of a week, and the Sox had won four of them. Yeah. I'm shaking.
The Yankees won Saturday, but all the pretense ended with a 6-0 Boston victory on Sunday afternoon. The baseball equivalent of spiking the ball in the end zone occured when Lee Smith struck out Henderson -- looking -- for the final out. 1978 was buried, once and for all. Justice does triumph.
That sort of drama is what makes September baseball so wonderful.
That's what we're missing these days.
I suppose it wouldn't be special if it happened every year. Still, walking back to the car through the nippy September air last night, knowing I'd attended my final night game until 1998, I couldn't shake the emptiness.
Maybe next year. And why not? Saberhagen pitched well, and Avery won't be here, and . . .
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