Hoo boy, sorry it's been so long,
but school is winding to a close, and you know how that is. Preparing for finals, and panicking over finals, and soon enough taking finals, and then moving out, which is evil in its own right, especially when you don't live in-state. My friend Sam, who I'm always bugging about baseball and whatnot, got to leave already, because the Michigan art school, of which I am sadly not a student, likes to taunt me. And she left before the snow came. Seriously, snow? When baseball's already started? Just all kinds of wrong.
So, uh, today the Red Sox lost to the Devil Rays for the second night in a row, with Schilling on the mound this time, and does anyone else find this worrisome? Just a smidge?
And the Tigers game was cancelled due to snow, which is equally fucked-up.
And Mark Mulder threw a complete game for the Cards-- 10 innings of complete game.
And Derek Jeter got his Gold Glove from a midget, and Jaret Wright sucked so hard he could almost be called a black hole.
And Tim Hudson won and his team gave him all kinds of run support.
And Nomar tore his groin all to shit, and I saw the replays and they gave me shivers it looked so painful. And Bob Ryan says it might be steroid disintegration, and I honestly don't know what to think.
And Roger Clemens is fat and old, but after starting 4 games, with 28 innings pitched, Roger Clemens has a 0.32 ERA, which is like better than God's ERA if God was pitching for the Houston Astros.
And I feel bad for not posting in a while, so have some writin' business.
Disclaimer: These are works of fiction. They are in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between these fictional stories and the people or organizations they mention. They were not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of these stories: they are solely for entertainment. And again, they are entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
FOOTBALL
The team debuts these new jerseys, alternate, black with blue numbers. It's good for business, Mooch carefully explains, the team gathered skeptically around the fold-out table. And black is a scary color, it'll make them look more intimidating to other teams. Mooch wants Kevin and Roy to model the jerseys at the press conference, and Shaun Rogers hoots about this and declares them to be 'Catwalk Lions' for the rest of the year.
"Catwalk Lions! Catwalk Lions!" the team chants, gleefully derisive, and Kevin glances desperately at Roy, but they can't say no to Mooch about this, not when he already seems so pained about the whole thing. Roy looks down, picks up the black jersey, making eye contact with no one, and mutters, "OK".
The press conference is horrible, everyone staring at them and cameras flashing and Roy desperately wants a ball in his hands. It's fine if this stuff goes on when he's got a ball to hold or a helmet dangling from his hand, fingers coiled in the facemask like a penalty, but today he's just supposed to stand there and let everyone look at his jersey, so he folds his hands behind his back awkwardly and shifts his weight, face hot, but thank god he's dark enough that the cameras can't tell if he's blushing.
Kevin is better at this stuff, but only a little. When they ask him what game he wants to wear the jerseys to, he says, "the Superbowl," and everyone in the room laughs appreciatively. Roy can tell that Kevin is uncomfortable, though, speaking like he's miles underwater and skittering his eyes to the left of everyone who tries to talk to him. At least he made the reporters laugh. When they ask Roy what he thinks about the black jersey all he can manage is a weakly enthusiastic, "Great!" Kevin shuffles his cleats and edges a little closer to Roy's side, bumping shiny black-clad shoulder pads.
Mooch takes the podium to say something about the intimidation factor, and all the reporters turn their faces, lenses, microphones that way. With everyone distracted Kevin surreptitiously reaches out and snags Roy's hand, glove-wrapped fingers nudging into the spaces between Roy's own. Roy rubs his thumb over Kevin's, he can't quite feel the exact shape of the joints through two layers of gloves, but that at least is familiar.
Mooch puts on a fake smile for the media and talks about 'fresh looks', and at the back of the room, momentarily forgotten but not for long, wearing ridiculous black and blue shirts, Kevin squeezes Roy's hand. Roy squeezes back. Humiliation is a little easier to take when it's shared.
BASEBALL
"all you had to do was take a look at the sofa at the entrance of the room, where the ill Mueller was again lying down with a pale look on his face." from this.
Bright lights, and sharp movements, and Bill Mueller squeezes his eyes closed, tries to block out the jarring sights and sounds of pregame preparation. He should be at home, with his wife rubbing his back soothingly, or he should be up, tying his cleats and kissing the photo of his kids in his locker for good luck. But he's here, on the couch in the clubhouse, the side of his face red and lined from the striated fabric covering when he'd been lying on his side, sickly pale white on the rest. He can't play, and he can't stay away, so he screws his eyes shut and groans quietly. He wraps his arms around his chest to hold the shivering in and wrestles briefly with another bout of nausea.
A cool hand alights on his forehead, broad and thick but light as infield dust. "You're burning up," a voice murmurs disapprovingly, somewhere far above him. "Go home, Billy."
"Can't," Mueller whispers, moving his head as little as possible to minimize painful jarring, eyes still tightly closed. "Game. Never... never home. For games."
A sigh floats through the air above him, and then silence. A few moments later the broad hand returns, placing a cold, wet washcloth on his forehead and eyes, smoothing it gently. The hand rests briefly in his hair, feathering through it, then lifts away, and Mueller can hear the team jostling and tromping as they all file out of the clubhouse, up the stairs, into the tunnel to emerge into the sunlight. He lets the cool wet of the washcloth soothe his aching head, and dozes.
Terry Francona comes down into the clubhouse halfway through the game and wakes Mueller up, appalled that he came to the park at all today, forces him to go home and get some real rest. Mueller calls his wife to come pick him up, doesn't feel quite up to driving, and scrunches a slightly damp and warm washcloth between his hands. He doesn't remember his dreams, he never remembers his dreams but now he doesn't remember most of the day either, really, but the little square of white terrycloth makes him feel safe and comfortable and watched-out-for, so even though he has no idea why, he folds it up carefully and tucks it under his sweatshirt, inside his tight under-tshirt, soft against his heart.
At home he falls into lightly fevered dreams, filled with Fenway cheers and brilliant catches at third base and bright-eyed catchers who tuck him into bed at night with a gentle hand and a soft kiss.
The game today is cancelled because of snow, of all retarded things, but Farnsworth drives determinedly to the park anyways. No little snow is going to keep him from the weight room, no matter how unseasonal. He's gripping the wheel a little too hard, hitting the brakes a little too forcefully every time he needs to stop, but the team has that kind of record, and he really feels very proud and restrained about it all.
The weight room, surprisingly, is not empty. Mike Maroth is straining cheerfully away at one of the machines, drawing the bars together in front of his face to work his shoulders and upper back, the weights lifting from their high brick pile and clinking back down again. He smiles and jerks his head at Farnsworth in acknowledgement, then goes back to bobbing his head in time with the music piping from his headphones, eyes contentedly closed, mouth open with the weights down, lips pursing to force his forearms together and raise them up, clink clink.
Farnsworth studies Maroth narrowly. Maroth is one of those guys who never seem bothered by things like a 7-10 record or a one-run loss. He shrugs and smiles and goes home to his wife, whom he loves, and his small son, whom he adores. He works hard to pitch well and keep himself in shape but isn't a fanatic about it. He's eminently sane and stable.
Farnsworth is eminently insane and unstable, but he knows something about people. Everyone has a little spot of crazy in them. Everyone. Farnsworth likes to find everyone's little spot of crazy and draw it out of them, but so far he hasn't been able to find Maroth's. He stares at Maroth for another long minute, arms folded over his chest, tshirt so tight that it might as well be sprayed on, shorts baggy and down to his knees, basketball shorts, but still not baggy enough to hide the flexing muscles of his legs.
Maroth lets the weights drop and removes his headsphones, takes a drink from the waterbottle at his side. "We suck," Farnsworth announces, once he knows that Maroth can hear him.
Maroth looks up, startled. "We don't suck," he says, in tones of great surprise.
'We're under .500. We suck," Farnsworth insists, leaning on the wall, otherwise not changing his position. "We lost to the Twins and the Royals the same, we definitely suck."
"You don't know suck," Maroth says. He gets up and walks up to Farnsworth, grabbing his wrists and leaning in. His eyes are a little dark and crazy, his voice shaky and urgent. "Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. We're doing fine. We have a good team. You don't know what it's like to suck. You don't know suck at all."
Farnsworth raises a skeptical eyebrow and Maroth leans in further, pinning Farnsworth's wrists to the wall. "You. You weren't here in 2003. Don't even talk to me about sucking." In 2003, Farnsworth suddenly remembers, the Tigers had the worst record in baseball, very nearly the worst in baseball history. In 2003, Mike Maroth had 21 losses. Maroth is probably right here, probably Farnsworth will never have that many chances for wins or losses in a season, probably he knows nothing about sucking that badly.
Right now, though, Maroth is inches away from Farnsworth's face, mad as hell and not caring about the proximity. So Farnsworth kisses him. Mike Maroth, good husband, good dad, good team player, kisses him back, more fiercely than the swirls of snow batting the windows, more intensely than the wind slicing through jeans and jackets outside.
It looks like Maroth's little bit of crazy has been found.
It’s happening again.
This thing, see. Where he can’t hit.
The ball, heretofore his best friend in the whole wide world besides his bat and his glove, has not been cooperating. The ball is not talking to the bat. The ball is doing silly, unnatural things in the air in an attempt to get away from the glove. The ball, Alex grumpily thinks, has a bit of the dog in it lately.
He stands in the batting cages below Yankee Stadium, where it’s cool and dim and a little damp. The pitching machine whirs, clicks, fires an unassuming little sphere of white rawhide at him. He takes an enormous cut at it and just barely nicks a rounded edge, deflecting it only minutely. The bat, in his hands, feels like a cold wet noodle. He chokes up on it, grimly, and resumes his stance. Whir. Click. Another enormous cut, only this time he misses the ball completely and twirls halfway around before he can come down off his heels and regain his balance. “You little BITCH!” he screams in the general direction of the offending ball.
Slow, ironic applause comes forth out of the murky area behind the cages. Alex slumps over and nudges the button to turn off the pitching machine, leans on his bat, and glares. Tino keeps applauding, grinning a bit. “Shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, buddy,” he says, mirth barely contained behind his twinkling eyes, “you’re not really that little a bitch.”
Alex contemplates making the argument that he was talking to the ball, not himself, but he knows that with Tino it would be a waste of time. He doesn’t like Tino. He doesn’t like Tino at all. Tino is loved by the fans. Tino is loved by the front office. Tino is a Yankee hero who has already earned his pinstripes. Tino has a lot of inside jokes with Derek Jeter, and Tino can make Derek laugh with ease. Alex has already noticed that Derek is laughing more in these first few weeks than he did for most of last season.
No, Alex does not like Tino Martinez one bit.
-------------------------------------------------
So the Red Sox have their home opener, and it doesn’t really bear thinking about.
They were just going to hang out in the clubhouse until the gaudy celebration was over, throw wadded-up towels at Andy Phillips and Bubba Crosby sitting in the corner, pale and about as rookie as you could get on this creaky old team, listen to Bernie tune his guitar and Posada argue on the phone in Spanish with his wife.
But Derek grouped them all together before the game and solemnly stated that word had ‘come down’ (which meant Steinbrenner) that they were supposed to watch it all from the dugout, because it would look too cowardly otherwise. So they had to sit up there, elbows on knees and chins in hand, watching each and every one of those happy-go-lucky cantering idiots dance up and down with a shiny brown box in their grubby little hands.
Then of course there was the whole parade of old guys, uniforms in varying stages of bagginess, and the raising of the bright red flag above that awful, awful green wall, and everyone hugging each other and generally being sickening about it all. Derek and Torre shot them all tag-team dirty looks until they started applauding when the flag went up. By the time they were introduced and trotted out onto the field (to immense boos, with the exception of Mariano, which Alex quite frankly didn’t find funny at all) no one was in any frame of mind to play a game.
At least, Alex wasn’t. And he guessed that Randy wasn’t either, from the way he was grimacing on the mound and hanging balls over the plate, pressing his lips together until they turned white when Doug Mirabelli, the backup catcher (the backup! For godssake, the freaking backup) sent the ball back out of the park, but Alex knew better than to say anything between innings, when Randy sat towering and alone on the bench, a thin whip of away gray darkened to black by the dugout roof shadows, tangling the laces of his glove with his long fingers, counting balls and strikes and hits and runs.
Alex struggled at the plate, the ball still not talking to his bat, but it’s not like that was anything to be ashamed of today, with the knuckleballer up there in as fine a form as he’d ever been in. Nothing the pitching machine threw ever danced like that, and Alex watched another ball dust by the head of his bat, heard the call from the umpire, the derisive roar from the crowd, and headed back to the bench.
He sat down next to Derek, who had popped out with a towering fly ball, and turned to commiserate, but Derek was leaning away, his head angled in toward Tino, hands twisting to explain some finer point of bat handling.
Tino’s eyes flicked up and met Alex’s, briefly, over the top of Derek’s head. Tino looked away, but let his arm, which had been resting along the shelf behind them, drift down over Derek’s back, his elbow crooking and his hand lying lightly on Derek’s neck.
Alex went out to third base and promptly dropped the ball that would have saved them the inning, the ball that broke open the game for the Red Sox to score and score and keep on scoring all the way to 8.
He squeezes his eyes shut, trapping his gum between his molars and his cheek, hearing the jaunty “Thank-you A-Rod” chant snapping crisply through the Boston air, and wonders if that ALCS will ever go away.
---------------------------------------------------
That’s not the thing, though. The part where they lose the game, the Red Sox home opener, that was almost OK. Painful, embarrassing in the way it happened, but on some level Alex can accept it. He believes that the game works its own history out in the end, which is why he believes that he, the best player in the game, is destined to win a World Series, many World Series, with this, the best of teams. Just, next year. But in any event the first Red Sox championship home opener since 1919 is a history all its own, and in a detached way Alex can see that it’s only right that they should win it.
No, what really stuck in the mind was what happened afterwards.
After the game no one wanted to stick around, no one wanted to even look each other in the eye. Torre said a few words about how well they had behaved themselves and how positively this reflected on the Yankee club, and then the team scattered.
Sorry kids, but nothing longer/better until school lets out, probably.
So, uh, today the Red Sox lost to the Devil Rays for the second night in a row, with Schilling on the mound this time, and does anyone else find this worrisome? Just a smidge?
And the Tigers game was cancelled due to snow, which is equally fucked-up.
And Mark Mulder threw a complete game for the Cards-- 10 innings of complete game.
And Derek Jeter got his Gold Glove from a midget, and Jaret Wright sucked so hard he could almost be called a black hole.
And Tim Hudson won and his team gave him all kinds of run support.
And Nomar tore his groin all to shit, and I saw the replays and they gave me shivers it looked so painful. And Bob Ryan says it might be steroid disintegration, and I honestly don't know what to think.
And Roger Clemens is fat and old, but after starting 4 games, with 28 innings pitched, Roger Clemens has a 0.32 ERA, which is like better than God's ERA if God was pitching for the Houston Astros.
And I feel bad for not posting in a while, so have some writin' business.
Disclaimer: These are works of fiction. They are in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between these fictional stories and the people or organizations they mention. They were not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of these stories: they are solely for entertainment. And again, they are entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
FOOTBALL
The team debuts these new jerseys, alternate, black with blue numbers. It's good for business, Mooch carefully explains, the team gathered skeptically around the fold-out table. And black is a scary color, it'll make them look more intimidating to other teams. Mooch wants Kevin and Roy to model the jerseys at the press conference, and Shaun Rogers hoots about this and declares them to be 'Catwalk Lions' for the rest of the year.
"Catwalk Lions! Catwalk Lions!" the team chants, gleefully derisive, and Kevin glances desperately at Roy, but they can't say no to Mooch about this, not when he already seems so pained about the whole thing. Roy looks down, picks up the black jersey, making eye contact with no one, and mutters, "OK".
The press conference is horrible, everyone staring at them and cameras flashing and Roy desperately wants a ball in his hands. It's fine if this stuff goes on when he's got a ball to hold or a helmet dangling from his hand, fingers coiled in the facemask like a penalty, but today he's just supposed to stand there and let everyone look at his jersey, so he folds his hands behind his back awkwardly and shifts his weight, face hot, but thank god he's dark enough that the cameras can't tell if he's blushing.
Kevin is better at this stuff, but only a little. When they ask him what game he wants to wear the jerseys to, he says, "the Superbowl," and everyone in the room laughs appreciatively. Roy can tell that Kevin is uncomfortable, though, speaking like he's miles underwater and skittering his eyes to the left of everyone who tries to talk to him. At least he made the reporters laugh. When they ask Roy what he thinks about the black jersey all he can manage is a weakly enthusiastic, "Great!" Kevin shuffles his cleats and edges a little closer to Roy's side, bumping shiny black-clad shoulder pads.
Mooch takes the podium to say something about the intimidation factor, and all the reporters turn their faces, lenses, microphones that way. With everyone distracted Kevin surreptitiously reaches out and snags Roy's hand, glove-wrapped fingers nudging into the spaces between Roy's own. Roy rubs his thumb over Kevin's, he can't quite feel the exact shape of the joints through two layers of gloves, but that at least is familiar.
Mooch puts on a fake smile for the media and talks about 'fresh looks', and at the back of the room, momentarily forgotten but not for long, wearing ridiculous black and blue shirts, Kevin squeezes Roy's hand. Roy squeezes back. Humiliation is a little easier to take when it's shared.
BASEBALL
"all you had to do was take a look at the sofa at the entrance of the room, where the ill Mueller was again lying down with a pale look on his face." from this.
Bright lights, and sharp movements, and Bill Mueller squeezes his eyes closed, tries to block out the jarring sights and sounds of pregame preparation. He should be at home, with his wife rubbing his back soothingly, or he should be up, tying his cleats and kissing the photo of his kids in his locker for good luck. But he's here, on the couch in the clubhouse, the side of his face red and lined from the striated fabric covering when he'd been lying on his side, sickly pale white on the rest. He can't play, and he can't stay away, so he screws his eyes shut and groans quietly. He wraps his arms around his chest to hold the shivering in and wrestles briefly with another bout of nausea.
A cool hand alights on his forehead, broad and thick but light as infield dust. "You're burning up," a voice murmurs disapprovingly, somewhere far above him. "Go home, Billy."
"Can't," Mueller whispers, moving his head as little as possible to minimize painful jarring, eyes still tightly closed. "Game. Never... never home. For games."
A sigh floats through the air above him, and then silence. A few moments later the broad hand returns, placing a cold, wet washcloth on his forehead and eyes, smoothing it gently. The hand rests briefly in his hair, feathering through it, then lifts away, and Mueller can hear the team jostling and tromping as they all file out of the clubhouse, up the stairs, into the tunnel to emerge into the sunlight. He lets the cool wet of the washcloth soothe his aching head, and dozes.
Terry Francona comes down into the clubhouse halfway through the game and wakes Mueller up, appalled that he came to the park at all today, forces him to go home and get some real rest. Mueller calls his wife to come pick him up, doesn't feel quite up to driving, and scrunches a slightly damp and warm washcloth between his hands. He doesn't remember his dreams, he never remembers his dreams but now he doesn't remember most of the day either, really, but the little square of white terrycloth makes him feel safe and comfortable and watched-out-for, so even though he has no idea why, he folds it up carefully and tucks it under his sweatshirt, inside his tight under-tshirt, soft against his heart.
At home he falls into lightly fevered dreams, filled with Fenway cheers and brilliant catches at third base and bright-eyed catchers who tuck him into bed at night with a gentle hand and a soft kiss.
The game today is cancelled because of snow, of all retarded things, but Farnsworth drives determinedly to the park anyways. No little snow is going to keep him from the weight room, no matter how unseasonal. He's gripping the wheel a little too hard, hitting the brakes a little too forcefully every time he needs to stop, but the team has that kind of record, and he really feels very proud and restrained about it all.
The weight room, surprisingly, is not empty. Mike Maroth is straining cheerfully away at one of the machines, drawing the bars together in front of his face to work his shoulders and upper back, the weights lifting from their high brick pile and clinking back down again. He smiles and jerks his head at Farnsworth in acknowledgement, then goes back to bobbing his head in time with the music piping from his headphones, eyes contentedly closed, mouth open with the weights down, lips pursing to force his forearms together and raise them up, clink clink.
Farnsworth studies Maroth narrowly. Maroth is one of those guys who never seem bothered by things like a 7-10 record or a one-run loss. He shrugs and smiles and goes home to his wife, whom he loves, and his small son, whom he adores. He works hard to pitch well and keep himself in shape but isn't a fanatic about it. He's eminently sane and stable.
Farnsworth is eminently insane and unstable, but he knows something about people. Everyone has a little spot of crazy in them. Everyone. Farnsworth likes to find everyone's little spot of crazy and draw it out of them, but so far he hasn't been able to find Maroth's. He stares at Maroth for another long minute, arms folded over his chest, tshirt so tight that it might as well be sprayed on, shorts baggy and down to his knees, basketball shorts, but still not baggy enough to hide the flexing muscles of his legs.
Maroth lets the weights drop and removes his headsphones, takes a drink from the waterbottle at his side. "We suck," Farnsworth announces, once he knows that Maroth can hear him.
Maroth looks up, startled. "We don't suck," he says, in tones of great surprise.
'We're under .500. We suck," Farnsworth insists, leaning on the wall, otherwise not changing his position. "We lost to the Twins and the Royals the same, we definitely suck."
"You don't know suck," Maroth says. He gets up and walks up to Farnsworth, grabbing his wrists and leaning in. His eyes are a little dark and crazy, his voice shaky and urgent. "Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. We're doing fine. We have a good team. You don't know what it's like to suck. You don't know suck at all."
Farnsworth raises a skeptical eyebrow and Maroth leans in further, pinning Farnsworth's wrists to the wall. "You. You weren't here in 2003. Don't even talk to me about sucking." In 2003, Farnsworth suddenly remembers, the Tigers had the worst record in baseball, very nearly the worst in baseball history. In 2003, Mike Maroth had 21 losses. Maroth is probably right here, probably Farnsworth will never have that many chances for wins or losses in a season, probably he knows nothing about sucking that badly.
Right now, though, Maroth is inches away from Farnsworth's face, mad as hell and not caring about the proximity. So Farnsworth kisses him. Mike Maroth, good husband, good dad, good team player, kisses him back, more fiercely than the swirls of snow batting the windows, more intensely than the wind slicing through jeans and jackets outside.
It looks like Maroth's little bit of crazy has been found.
It’s happening again.
This thing, see. Where he can’t hit.
The ball, heretofore his best friend in the whole wide world besides his bat and his glove, has not been cooperating. The ball is not talking to the bat. The ball is doing silly, unnatural things in the air in an attempt to get away from the glove. The ball, Alex grumpily thinks, has a bit of the dog in it lately.
He stands in the batting cages below Yankee Stadium, where it’s cool and dim and a little damp. The pitching machine whirs, clicks, fires an unassuming little sphere of white rawhide at him. He takes an enormous cut at it and just barely nicks a rounded edge, deflecting it only minutely. The bat, in his hands, feels like a cold wet noodle. He chokes up on it, grimly, and resumes his stance. Whir. Click. Another enormous cut, only this time he misses the ball completely and twirls halfway around before he can come down off his heels and regain his balance. “You little BITCH!” he screams in the general direction of the offending ball.
Slow, ironic applause comes forth out of the murky area behind the cages. Alex slumps over and nudges the button to turn off the pitching machine, leans on his bat, and glares. Tino keeps applauding, grinning a bit. “Shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, buddy,” he says, mirth barely contained behind his twinkling eyes, “you’re not really that little a bitch.”
Alex contemplates making the argument that he was talking to the ball, not himself, but he knows that with Tino it would be a waste of time. He doesn’t like Tino. He doesn’t like Tino at all. Tino is loved by the fans. Tino is loved by the front office. Tino is a Yankee hero who has already earned his pinstripes. Tino has a lot of inside jokes with Derek Jeter, and Tino can make Derek laugh with ease. Alex has already noticed that Derek is laughing more in these first few weeks than he did for most of last season.
No, Alex does not like Tino Martinez one bit.
-------------------------------------------------
So the Red Sox have their home opener, and it doesn’t really bear thinking about.
They were just going to hang out in the clubhouse until the gaudy celebration was over, throw wadded-up towels at Andy Phillips and Bubba Crosby sitting in the corner, pale and about as rookie as you could get on this creaky old team, listen to Bernie tune his guitar and Posada argue on the phone in Spanish with his wife.
But Derek grouped them all together before the game and solemnly stated that word had ‘come down’ (which meant Steinbrenner) that they were supposed to watch it all from the dugout, because it would look too cowardly otherwise. So they had to sit up there, elbows on knees and chins in hand, watching each and every one of those happy-go-lucky cantering idiots dance up and down with a shiny brown box in their grubby little hands.
Then of course there was the whole parade of old guys, uniforms in varying stages of bagginess, and the raising of the bright red flag above that awful, awful green wall, and everyone hugging each other and generally being sickening about it all. Derek and Torre shot them all tag-team dirty looks until they started applauding when the flag went up. By the time they were introduced and trotted out onto the field (to immense boos, with the exception of Mariano, which Alex quite frankly didn’t find funny at all) no one was in any frame of mind to play a game.
At least, Alex wasn’t. And he guessed that Randy wasn’t either, from the way he was grimacing on the mound and hanging balls over the plate, pressing his lips together until they turned white when Doug Mirabelli, the backup catcher (the backup! For godssake, the freaking backup) sent the ball back out of the park, but Alex knew better than to say anything between innings, when Randy sat towering and alone on the bench, a thin whip of away gray darkened to black by the dugout roof shadows, tangling the laces of his glove with his long fingers, counting balls and strikes and hits and runs.
Alex struggled at the plate, the ball still not talking to his bat, but it’s not like that was anything to be ashamed of today, with the knuckleballer up there in as fine a form as he’d ever been in. Nothing the pitching machine threw ever danced like that, and Alex watched another ball dust by the head of his bat, heard the call from the umpire, the derisive roar from the crowd, and headed back to the bench.
He sat down next to Derek, who had popped out with a towering fly ball, and turned to commiserate, but Derek was leaning away, his head angled in toward Tino, hands twisting to explain some finer point of bat handling.
Tino’s eyes flicked up and met Alex’s, briefly, over the top of Derek’s head. Tino looked away, but let his arm, which had been resting along the shelf behind them, drift down over Derek’s back, his elbow crooking and his hand lying lightly on Derek’s neck.
Alex went out to third base and promptly dropped the ball that would have saved them the inning, the ball that broke open the game for the Red Sox to score and score and keep on scoring all the way to 8.
He squeezes his eyes shut, trapping his gum between his molars and his cheek, hearing the jaunty “Thank-you A-Rod” chant snapping crisply through the Boston air, and wonders if that ALCS will ever go away.
---------------------------------------------------
That’s not the thing, though. The part where they lose the game, the Red Sox home opener, that was almost OK. Painful, embarrassing in the way it happened, but on some level Alex can accept it. He believes that the game works its own history out in the end, which is why he believes that he, the best player in the game, is destined to win a World Series, many World Series, with this, the best of teams. Just, next year. But in any event the first Red Sox championship home opener since 1919 is a history all its own, and in a detached way Alex can see that it’s only right that they should win it.
No, what really stuck in the mind was what happened afterwards.
After the game no one wanted to stick around, no one wanted to even look each other in the eye. Torre said a few words about how well they had behaved themselves and how positively this reflected on the Yankee club, and then the team scattered.
Sorry kids, but nothing longer/better until school lets out, probably.