Ballgame's Points

Sox-Yanks and 24 Points

Have times ever changed. Tonight the Red Sox and Yankees renew their rivalry on ESPN while the two hour season finale of “24” runs simultaneously on Fox. If this were three years ago I would be beside myself. I would be angered at the level of my own excitement, because, of course I would be mired in a serious conundrum.

24 or Sox-Yanks? Jack or Pedro? Kingsley or Jeter? Since this kind of dilemma occurred annually from 2003-05, I got used to biting the bullet and taping 24, because Sox-Yanks was just too riveting to miss.

These days the “rivalry” is watered down to the point where one run games are the anomaly as opposed to the norm, and the singular buzz that used to surround every series ceases to be. Sure, they still attract wild amounts of fans and media and play the occasional fantastic game. For the most part though, the matchups have assumed the feeling of just another baseball game, and not yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Red Sox and Yankees. There hasn’t been a brawl since ’04, hasn’t even been a game so induced with emotion and passion that Derek Jeter has seen fit to charge into the stands to procure an out.

Simply stated, there hasn’t been a general, steadfast refusal to lose on the part of the players. That goes for both sides. Just look at recent history. Last year the Red Sox allowed the Yankees to come into Fenway in the middle of August in a pennant race, and disrobe them. Five straight? Excuse me? Then at the beginning of this season the Yankees watched, wide-eyed, as the Red Sox came from behind in three straight games at Fenway before getting smacked down in two of three the next weekend at the Stadium.

It’s almost as if the rivalry has turned into a give and take of touché. Humiliated at Fenway? Props Yanks. Toyed with at Yankee Stadium? Too-freakin-shay Sox.

Sorry but this would have never happened in the ’03-’05 heyday because those teams so mutually abhorred the prospect of defeat at the expense of the other that they would scratch and claw with everything they had to avoid that outcome. During that period if you took a sample size of any 12 consecutive games one team would have six wins and the other would have six wins. Game times would average almost five hours. The games themselves would average a good deal more than nine innings. Box and line scores would be irrelevant. Hell, there was only so much Sportscenter could do. Unless you were a part of it, the Sox-Yanks experience, you couldn’t do it justice. There was no such thing as the casual or outside observer; the magnitude of the thing wouldn’t allow it.

It used to be the same with 24. From 2002-04 every Tuesday night from 9-10 pm was specially reserved for another sixty-minute slice of Jack Bauer’s harrowing day. The audience was niche and the plots were taboo. The humanity of Jack was still a concept and not a punchline. The twists were unforgettable and the endings were groundbreaking. The purpose of the show was to present an adversarial point of view and run with it, even walk the fine line of subversion. It was timely, relevant, and realistic in a grisly way only achievable post-9/11.

Above all though, it was novel. No longer. Like anything in the entertainment realm, once it became too widespread it was doomed. Doomed to be ruled by the dollar and not the novelty. And let’s face it, when the first three seasons revolve around an elaborate assassination plot, a cohort of oil giants using Islamic extremists to detonate a nuke in LA to boost business, and the dispensing of a gruesome and deadly virus on innocents, there’s only so much horror to explore.

Then there’s Jack. Originally a Federal Agent-turned man apart, the character has become so banal that there are actually betting lines on the over/under on the number of his kills in any given episode. What used to be a unique narrative about a man struggling to salvage a few ions of humanity while fighting evil has turned into the Jack Bauer power hour. The questions surrounding season finales used to be along the lines of how is Jack going to save his wife and daughter? Or how is Jack going to prevent a school full of children from being attacked? And most importantly, will the hour end with Jack’s death?

Three seasons later, I’ve stopped asking those questions. Jack won’t die because Fox won’t let him. He’s too lucrative. Not to mention so uniquely lethal. Tonight, the question is something like how many Chinese and/or Russians and/or family members is Jack going to off in his latest blaze of glory? This is the question I ask myself, and in the same breath, who’s going to win, Red Sox or Yankees? On both accounts am I eager to discover the answer? Of course. Will I watch and be entertained? Naturally.

But will it ever be like it the old days again? With 24, not a chance. The show is now just another franchise, so if you want a real taste of it buy the DVDs of any or all of the first three seasons. The verdict is still out on Sox-Yanks because we do have a-now-three-years-pending ALCS rubber match to tackle, but that’s a long ways off.

In the meantime I’ll stake my rep on “over 11” for Jack tonight.’

Magic Sox Points

Okay, I’ve held off long enough. It’s time to write my “Red Sox are really freaking good” column. So here goes…

It’s May 14 and the old town club has an eight game lead over that team bombing in the Bronx. The good guys are currently on pace to win 112 games, and they just walked off at Fenway for the first time this season in most emphatic fashion.

And I missed it.

Being a Sunday game that was initially billed as Josh Beckett’s chance to stick his name next to Babe Ruth’s in the record books, this was the one that all of Red Sox Nation was tuned into.

Everyone except moi. At the precise moment when Julio Lugo was sliding into first base I was on a Long Island Railroad train returning from covering NCAA Lacrosse.

No worries though. In the words of the legendary-Tony Montana: “Isssoh-kay.”

In the two minutes or so that the train was underground in Brooklyn I received a barrage of texts and voicemails, and I pretty much got the gist. With a game like that, though, you really had to have watched it to capture it. In other words I couldn’t write about the game and offer a whole lot to my passionate and knowledgeable Sox-readership.

So in place of filling you in on my experience watching “Baseball Tonight” after the game (which was AWESOME), I will instead take you back to the last time the Sox overcame a five-run deficit in the ninth inning, because I was there.

April 10, 1998. Home opener against the Seattle Mariners. I was in the right-center field bleachers with my mom. The Red Sox were down 7-2 heading into the last of the ninth and Fenway had emptied. But I knew something most didn’t.

The worst closer the Red Sox ever had, Heathcliff Slocumb, had finally been dealt in 1997. While he was traded for two unknowns named Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe (a whole other column in itself), the Nation was both ecstatic and relieved just to hear he was out of town for good. I happened to know where the trade had spit him out, and to my delight on that fateful afternoon at the ballyard, he popped up in the most glorious of places: the Seattle bullpen.

With the bleachers almost barren he was fortunate enough to have one obnoxious little 14-year old boldly reminiscing about days past while he attempted to get loose on a brisk April afternoon turning to dusk.

To this day I still don’t know why Lou Piniella made the decision to bring Slocumb in for the ninth. But if Sweet Lou is anything, he’s a manager who’s not afraid to throw a player to the wolves if he feels like he’ll learn something from it. He probably calculated that a five-run lead at Fenway on Opening Day was the perfect combination of leeway and pending-disaster for him to get a legitimate look at his new “closer”.

What resulted was a complete catastrophe as Slocumb took the mound with no control and even less composure. He scattered a few singles around a few hit batsmen without recording an out. I’m pretty sure he hit Nomar to force in a run, making the game 7-5 with still nobody out and Mo Vaughn on deck. By this time the undersized concourses and slim alleyways were more populated than the cramped seats in the old ballpark. People were literally trying to cram their way back in.

Lou then pulled the plug on Heathcliff (and his career). He summoned Paul Spoljaric who promptly gave up a mammoth-walk off grand slam to the “Hit Dawg”, which soared over my left shoulder and disappeared into the right field grandstands.

To my knowledge there is no YouTube clip of this home run, but there should be. And should it surface you will see a brief shot of a kid jumping onto the fence between the visitors bullpen and the bleachers, hands violently waving over his head, as the ball carries into the blue wood-paneled seats in right.

And if someone ever tracks down the Channel 56 news reel from that night, amid the bedlam in the tunnel underneath the stadium a skinny kid in braces will appear from the left and in the next shot will have a mic in his face, belting out some version of: “I LOVE HEATHCLIFF!!!! THANK YOU HEATHCLIFF!!!!!! YOU’RE THE BEST!!!!!!!!”

I look back at that day as a defining moment. I grew up watching and loving the Red Sox, but that game marked the first time when I convinced myself that “this is the year”. The Pedro-acquisition had certainly helped reinforce that belief, but it was Mo Vaughn who made me really, truly believe.

Coming back to the present there’s no way anyone within the Nation would classify Sunday’s surreal victory as an illuminating, perception-altering moment, because the whole “this is the year” thing simply doesn’t apply anymore (see: 2004). Neither does one ridiculous comeback give off the collective impression that the ’07 Sox are suddenly the comeback kids (again, see: 2004). That’s the whole purpose of a “precedent”.

2004 and precedents aside, this 2007 Red Sox team is rapidly turning into something special, just not in the way we were expecting.

What if I had told you in March that on May 14, 1) Manny would be hitting .250, 2) J.D. Drew would have 12 RBIs…in 34 games, and 3) Dice-K would have an ERA of nearly five. Now would that be something you might have been interested in? I think not. In fact if you were privy to that info before the season started all you would’ve been interested in would be showing up at Scott Boras Headquarters with a blowtorch. But I digress.

Yes, Manny is still Manny. Dice-K is still getting acclimated, and is a self-proclaimed slow-starter (a phrase he now knows in multiple languages since meeting Manny). And Drew, well, Drew still gives as much of a hoot when he’s sucking as he does when he’s productive. Which is to say either way he doesn’t seem to care too much, so at least we don’t have to worry about this slump getting him down.

Point is, maybe we should all take a page from J.D.’s book of caring, because who really gives a crap about stats when the Sox are 25-11, eight games up, and only gaining steam? Not I.

All we should care about is that this team is gelling and it’s already adopted an identity, something I didn’t think would be possible to even start fathoming until mid-summer. But it’s happened, and it’s happened without some of the big-money new guys contributing much on the field. That’s fine by me because they are clearly chipping in what’s necessary for this team.

For Dice, and J.D., and even Julio Lugo, the numbers will come in time. (The Sox play 81 games at Fenway, remember?) All we need to concern ourselves with right now is that these guys are having fun, playing great baseball, and could care less about where they stand statistically in the league rankings.

Throw in a game like Sunday at the Fens and that’s when you know it’s a good time to be a Red Sox fan.