Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The Red Sox have done the impossible. Now they'll try to do the unthinkable. Plus: The Astros can sneak into the World Series.
Oct 20, 2004 | So I've been out of touch for a week. I see the Yankees and Red Sox are going to a seventh game. I miss anything good?
I kid!
The Red Sox are just making everybody look like monkeys, not least the Yankees, but also all of those fools who wrote the Bostons off over the weekend when they fell behind 3-0 in the American League Championship Series. "The Red Sox, down 2-0, lost a disaster of a game to the Yankees Saturday, 19-8," wrote one maroon, "effectively ending that series and handing the Yankees their 40th A.L. pennant."
On Tuesday the Sox did something no other major league team has ever done, winning their third straight and forcing a Game 7 after falling into a 3-0 hole. They won the first two Sunday and Monday in Boston by erasing a late deficit against Mariano Rivera and winning in extra innings.
They did it Tuesday in New York behind seven strong innings from Curt Schilling, whose ankle was bleeding through his sock because it was sewn together before the game. The ankle, not the sock. And I don't mean that in some sort of figurative sense. I'm talking needle and thread, skin and bone, go ahead, Doc, I'm ready.
Boston got the winning runs on a three-run homer from Mark Bellhorn, who'd been looking to that point like he couldn't hit a beach ball off a tee.
For their next trick, the Red Sox will win a game while juggling flaming bicycles.
You're going to want to skip ahead two paragraphs now if you're squeamish. Schilling, the Red Sox ace, has a torn tendon sheath in his right ankle, which allows the tendon to move around freely and painfully, which prevents him from pushing off his back foot as he pitches.
The injury led to a Game 1 disaster in which he gave up six runs in three innings on the way to a 10-7 Yankees win. All week the Sox medical staff had been talking about custom-made boot devices, high-top shoes, things like that, but ended up -- last chance to skip ahead! -- sewing the skin of Schilling's ankle to the bone, so it could hold the tendon in place.
Schilling gave all the credit to God afterward, and that's as good a theory as any. But if there are higher powers, they usually seem to be working against the Red Sox, so something might be afoot.
Tuesday night there were not one but two bizarre plays that went in the Yankees' favor, the kind of crazy events that fit right into that mental file every Sox fan carries around labeled "Curse." Both times, the umpires confabulated, cogitated, roller skated and debated. And both times they overturned the call, favoring the Red Sox. And both times they were right.
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