Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [56]
After Boston took an early lead, the game looked as good as over given the way Rocket was throwing. I left in the third inning. My softball team was playing that evening, and it was vital that I return home in time for the first pitch. A butcher sponsored our team. He paid us in steaks.
It was 250 miles to Craftsbury and I had only three and a half hours to cover the distance. I lined the dashboard with autographed pictures of me in my Red Sox uniform. These were Get Out of Jail Free cards, to be handed out to any highway patrolman who might flag down my car for speeding. Worked every time.
I followed the game on the radio. The Blue Jays rallied against Clemens for a tie, but just as I turned out of Boston, Tom Brunansky hit a home run to put the Sox ahead. A few innings later, Tom hit another homer to increase his team’s lead. Spooky. Brunansky had come to the Red Sox in a trade with the Minnesota Twins earlier in the season. He played right field. Babe Ruth’s old position.
My car rumbled through Franconian Notch along a foliage dense road that brings you through New Hampshire into Vermont. I listened as Toronto tied the Sox and put the go-ahead run on base. The broadcast faded into white noise. The mountains in this region rose so tall and thick they silenced the radio transmission out of Boston; I scrambled to find another station carrying the game.
Twenty minutes passed before I could barely make out the voices of the Red Sox announcers through the static of WTIC out of Hartford. No idea where the score stood or which team was batting. I stopped the car and shoved my ear tight next to a speaker just in time to hear an announcer yell, “It’s a high fly ball out to deep left field . . . way back . . . will it go? . . . Yes! . . . it’s out of here! . . . unbelievable! Brunansky has hit his third home run and . . .”
The world went mute. I sat alongside the road for five minutes, staring at nothing. Un-fucking-believable was right. We exorcise the Curse of the Babe in the morning and that very afternoon the guy playing his position hits three home runs to help Boston win this important ballgame. A player who wasn’t even on the team at the start of the season? Who would believe it?
It got better. The following Wednesday Clemens pitched again, this time against the Chicago White Sox. A Boston victory would clinch the division title. In the top of the ninth inning, Red Sox closer Jeff Reardon arrived on the mound with his team ahead 3–1. He retired the first two batters, but Sammy Sosa chopped a clean single through the infield, and Reardon hit Scott Fletcher to put the tying run on base. My old Tiburones teammate Ozzie Guillen walked up to the batter’s box.
Reardon poured two quick strikes past him. Then he threw a fastball that moved away from the left-hand-hitting Guillen but stayed up over the plate. Ozzie hit the ball solidly, high and far down the right field line. Brunansky had not expected the slightly built shortstop to pull the ball with so much authority. He had been playing Guillen toward center. Tom sprinted far across the Fenway outfield. As he neared the ball, he stumbled to his knees and slid over the grass. Double. Tie score, with the potential winning run in scoring position. Except Guillen’s hit never made the box score. Somehow Brunansky had kept his glove open and upright and the ball nestled into its webbing for the game’s final out. The Red Sox had won the division championship.
They failed, however, to advance to the World Series. The Minnesota Twins beat them in the playoffs. “Damn,” I said to one of my neighbors, “those witches balled it up. They only asked for the Babe to let Boston win the American League East rather than the World Series. Typical Red Sox fans, afraid to demand total victory.” I was joking. This was one ballplayer who did not believe in fate or God or magic or talismans or any other