Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 11

In today’s edition, Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball baffled the Yankees and the Red Sox struck the first blow by taking Game 1 at Yankee Stadium.

On the morning of Oct. 8, 2003, Game 1 of the American League Championship Series between baseball’s most bitter rivals, the front page of the New York Daily News - the front page, not the back page which was usually reserved for sports hyperbole - contained only this: A picture of Babe Ruth with the simple headline “No Way.”

The inference was as clear as it was provincial: The Yankees had lorded over the Red Sox for more than 80 years, ever since the fateful day in January 1920 when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees for the princely sum of $125,000 and, as generations of Red Sox fans came to believe, birthed the Curse of the Bambino.

Since that most famous of baseball transactions, the Yankees had won 26 World Series titles and the Red Sox had won none. So, pray tell, why would the tabloid mavens at the Daily News, or anyone else for that matter, believe that 2003 was going to be any different? The Yankees always won, the Red Sox always lost, that’s just the way it was and would be in the week-plus to come.

The Boston Globe let their graphic artist have a little fun - not on the front page but on the cover of the sports section - with a caricature of George Steinbrenner in a Darth Vader costume and Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein wielding a Luke Skywalker-like light sabre with the headline and summary: “Red Sox Duel the Yankees for AL Sovereignty - The greatest rivalry in the baseball galaxy is in full force with young Theo Epstein’s charges against the troops of the imperious George Steinbrenner.”

The inference was also just as clear as it was provincial: Boston fans and media were going to continue playing up Red Sox president Larry Lucchino’s now infamous, life-of-its-own preseason branding of the Yankees as the Evil Empire, and leaning into the hope that now was the time for the perennially redheaded stepchild Red Sox to slay the beast from Gotham.

“We still refer to them as the Evil Empire from time to time and we have some fun with that,” Lucchino said a few hours before Yankee ace Mike Mussina delivered the first pitch of arguably the most anticipated ALCS in history. “There’s an intense rivalry between the cities, between the teams, between the front offices, there’s no question about that. But that’s now background to the main event. It is poetic that it comes down to the Nation against the Empire. I’ll refrain from saying the obvious, but I think we know whom The Force will be with.”

Of course, he didn’t refrain at all. He said it, and it was absolutely delectable. If not for the fact that the Chicago Cubs - who had an even longer World Series drought than the Red Sox that dated back a decade further to 1908 - were in the NLCS against the Florida Marlins trying to reverse their own sad and fatalistic destiny, all eyes in the baseball world would have been on this Yankees-Red Sox Armageddon. As it was, most still were.

One thing was made undeniably clear as the big crowd filed into Yankee Stadium on an unusually balmy October Wednesday night. The Red Sox did not fear the Yankees one bit, and the shitty history that had dragged their franchise down for so long meant nothing to this team of carefree personalities.

“I’m not really a big believer in the Curse of the Bambino,” Red Sox manager Grady Little said. “I don’t think we’re battling the Curse of the Bambino here. We’re battling the New York Yankees, and this group of renegades that I’m putting out on the field, they don’t care. They care about their Harley Davidson’s running good enough that they won’t run off the Tobin Bridge over there in Boston, and playing baseball. We don’t put a whole lot of efforts concerning ourselves with the Bambino.”

The mood was certainly different in the home clubhouse. The Yankees had the confidence of the forever favorite, firm in their belief that they were the better team and would prove it, but they also had to shoulder the weighty burden of Steinbrenner’s relentless expectations which, because the opponent was Boston, were cranked up even higher. “For us,” the Boss said, “winning isn’t the only thing. It’s second to breathing.”

If true, Steinbrenner and his team needed oxygen masks after the opener when the Yankees flailed helplessly at Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball while Boston’s bashers launched three home runs off Mussina in a 5-2 victory that stunned a disbelieving crowd.

“The philosophy of the Boston Red Sox is that our offense is so good that if we get a good pitching performance we’re going to be tough to beat,” said Todd Walker, who joined David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez in the homer hitting club. “Good pitching beats good hitting, I guess that’s the saying, but I think we’re an exception to the rule. We have nine guys up and down the lineup. We’re so relentless that in our case maybe great hitting beats great pitching.”

In this game, the Red Sox had both.

Wakefield was masterful as his knuckler was floating all over the place and the Yankee bats never found it. “You’re hoping that they just tumble,” said Joe Torre. “But when you see it moving downward, you just hope (a batter) catches one.”

Wakefield, the longest-tenured Red Sox player, pitched six scoreless innings during which he gave up just two hits, singles by Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui in the second inning. Thereafter, he retired 14 straight batters until the bottom of the seventh when he walked the first two men, Jason Giambi and Bernie Williams, so Little took him out.

Down 5-0 at the time, hope rose in the stadium when Posada greeted reliever Alan Embree with a double and Matsui hit a sacrifice fly to make it 5-2. But Embree got Aaron Boone and Nick Johnson to end the inning and then Mike Timlin and Scott Williamson worked perfect eighth and ninth innings to close it out.

“It’s tough, because you don’t really have a game plan,” Derek Jeter, who went 0-for-4, said of the unpredictable nature of knuckleballs. “You can’t really say, ‘Let’s wait for this pitch that goes this direction.’ He doesn’t even know where it’s going. He had a good knuckleball today. You tip your cap to him.”

While the Yankees offense was shut down, the Red Sox did what they had been doing all year, and naturally, the man in the middle of it all was Ortiz. If it hadn’t already become abundantly clear during his first regular season with the Red Sox that Ortiz was going to become a human torture chamber that Yankees pitchers would have to endure for the next 14 years, Game 1 was merely the latest reminder.

He began the onslaught of Mussina in the fourth when he followed Ramirez’s leadoff infield single on a tapper Mussina failed to handle with a towering home run into the upper deck in right. To that point Ortiz had been 0-for-21 in his career against Mussina, on top of the fact that before his Game 5-deciding RBI double against the A’s, he had been 0-for-16 in that series.

But after falling behind in the count 0-2, he worked an eight-pitch at bat before Mussina finally made a mistake and Ortiz did not miss for what became the first of his 17 career postseason homers, five of those coming in 2003 and 2004 against the Yankees. “That was the pitch of the game,” Posada said. “It changed the game.”

Ortiz had 60 plate appearances against the Yankees in the regular season and the result was 18 hits and five walks for a .327 average and .383 on-base, six homers, 14 RBI and an OPS of 1.029. He killed the Yankees, and he seemed hellbent on continuing that destruction.

“That felt great, especially coming off Mike Mussina,” Ortiz said. “He’s tough to hit. Did I know I was 0-for-21? You’re not going to forget something like that. I had just been swinging at a lot of bad pitches against him. I can’t tell you why I do this against the Yankees. I’m just out there trying to see the ball. They have some of the best pitchers in the league.”

“David is the MVP of the league,” Ramirez said. “If not for David Ortiz, we wouldn’t be here. He gets a big hit all the time.”

Boston tacked on two more runs in the fifth, solo homers by Walker and Ramirez. Walker’s was controversial because it sailed to the right-field pole and was touched by a fan. Right field umpire Angel Hernandez ruled it a foul ball, but home plate umpire Tim McClelland overruled him and said it was a home run.

Three batters later, Ramirez hit an opposite field blast to right to make it 4-0, and then in the seventh against Jeff Nelson, Ramirez walked with two outs, Ortiz was hit by a pitch, and Kevin Millar singled home the final run.

“You don’t pitch well, they can beat you up and they did,” Torre said. “A number of times this year when we didn’t pitch well, they have let us know about it. We are going to have our work cut out for us.”

As Millar said, “We don’t need to make a statement to the Yankees; they know who we are.”

NEXT WEDNESDAY: After a shaky start, Andy Pettitte righted the ship and went on to shut down the Red Sox as the Yankees pulled even in the series with a 6-2 victory.