Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 32

In today’s edition, David Ortiz delivered yet another dagger to the Yankees, ending an exhausting, exhilarating Game 5, and now the Red Sox were officially a threat to pull off a historic comeback as the ALCS shifted back to a leery Yankee Stadium.

David Ortiz’s fisted, broken bat blooper hadn’t even landed safely on the grass in front of Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, but the Red Sox were already piling out of their dugout to celebrate yet another momentous, come-from-behind, season-saving victory.

With speedy Johnny Damon at second base and running with the crack of the bat, Williams fielded the ball after it bounced a couple times and just started jogging forlornly toward the visiting dugout at Fenway Park because there was nothing he could do. Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS was over, and this 5-4 Yankees loss made it official: They were in trouble.

As the exhausted sellout crowd, having endured 14 innings and nearly six hours of unrelenting tension, summoned the collective energy to jump up and down, hug and high five each other, and chant “Papi! Papi! Papi!” the series had suddenly taken a dark turn for the Yankees.

The Red Sox were still trailing the series three games to two, but there was an unmistakable feeling that they were actually the team in the drivers’ seat now. It didn’t even matter that if they were going to pull off their historic comeback they would have to win twice more at Yankee Stadium. It felt like nothing was going to slow this train down.

“Sure,” Joe Torre said, “the momentum is on their side. We have a lot of intensity on both sides of this thing, and it takes on a life of its own. Each game is a series in itself. These last two games have proven that. These ballclubs both want it badly.’’

Wars have been won in less time than it took to play the longest game in postseason history at five hours, 49 minutes. Hell, wars had been won in less time than it took to play the previous longest game in postseason history - Game 4 the night before which lasted five hours, two minutes. Pitch clock? No, baseball never needed a pitch clock, not at all (sarcasm, folks).

“It’s been three days,’’ the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez said, “and it feels like we’ve been here a month.’’

Still, as interminable as these never-to-be-forgotten games were, they were also among the most searing in the sport’s history. At least that’s what Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, beside himself with joy in the victorious clubhouse, was saying.

“I’ll take nominations, and I might be in sort of a haze, but I think that was one of the greatest games ever played, if not the greatest,” Epstein said. “These last two games are worthy of these teams. To tell you the truth, though, it’s not a big surprise that we’ve done this. The aberration was what happened the first three games. This is what we are as a club. This team wasn’t ready to go home.’’

That much was becoming exceedingly clear. Remember, the Red Sox went into the series as the favorite, and it was shocking how the Yankees had dismantled them in sprinting out to their 3-0 lead. The last two games, as Epstein alluded to, were much more like what everyone expected.

Having won them both, the Red Sox became just the third team to force a Game 6 after losing the first three games. And there was every belief in the Red Sox clubhouse that they were going to become the first team ever to force a Game 7 after being down 3-0, and the first team ever to win a series after being down 3-0.

“We are not supposed to win,” said Damon. “So the pressure is on them. They have to beat us. If not, history will be set.”

The only guy who didn’t seem overly confident about that happening was the one guy who had made it possible for the Red Sox to even be in this position. And that was Ortiz’s point; he couldn’t keep doing it alone.

“Somebody else is going to have to step up,’’ he said. “It’s always me lately. That’s fine, but if we’re going to beat the Yankees, somebody else has to do it. Not me, not all the time. We can’t win that way, not against the Yankees. If we keep playing that way against the Yankees, they’re going to beat our asses. We’ve been playing the game stupid, you know? We got so many opportunities to win that game, and we just didn’t execute. Stupid, man. You can’t play like that against the Yankees.’’

Well, he made a few good points in there, yet they still won.

After jumping on Mike Mussina for two runs in the first inning, one scoring on a single by Ortiz, the Red Sox left the bases loaded when Bill Mueller struck out and that seemed like a golden opportunity lost.

Williams homered off Pedro Martinez leading off the second, and the score remained stuck on 2-1 through five innings as the Red Sox managed just three hits. And then in the sixth, the Yankees made their move, getting to Martinez as they had been known to do.

Martinez allowed singles to Jorge Posada and Ruben Sierra and then with two outs he made a terrible mistake by plunking weak-hitting Miguel Cairo with a pitch to load the bases. That brought Derek Jeter to the plate - probably the last man Pedro wanted to see - and sure enough Jeter came through with a massive hit, lining one down the right-field line for a crowd-silencing three-run double to put the Yankees up 4-2.

Mussina then worked a 1-2-3 sixth and after he gave up a double to Mark Bellhorn in the seventh, Tanton Sturtze and Tom Gordon were needed to negotiate the rest of the inning with Gordon inducing Manny Ramirez to hit into a double play.

Finally in the eighth, the Red Sox woke up and of course, Ortiz was the alarm clock. He homered off Gordon, then Kevin Millar singled and Trot Nixon walked so Torre turned to Mariano Rivera and put the game, and the series, in his usually reliable hands. Instead, for the second night in a row Rivera could not get it done as he allowed a tying sacrifice fly by Jason Varitek.

“I wish I would have been able to hold that lead,” Gordon said. “It just didn’t go my way.”

Who knew there were still six innings to go?

The Yankees had men on second and third in the ninth but Cairo popped out against Keith Foulke; the Red Sox had a man on third in the 10th but Varitek popped out against Paul Quantrill; the Red Sox had first and second with one out in the 11th but Esteban Loaiza got Orlando Cabrera to hit into a double play.

By then, with both bullpens tapped out, it had become an unlikely duel between Loaiza and Tim Wakefield. Wakefield, of course, was flirting with the horrible possibility of becoming the losing pitcher for a second consecutive season in the game that eliminated Boston from the postseason.

“I just tried to keep us in the game as long as possible,” said Wakefield, who finished off eight straight scoreless innings for the Red Sox bullpen. “I didn’t know how many innings I would be able to go. After the (13th) inning, they asked me how I felt and I said, ‘I’ll give you what I got.’”

Loaiza was just looking to salvage something, anything, from an utterly miserable two-plus months in pinstripes.

Loaiza was the pitcher the Yankees received when they dealt disappointing Jose Contreras to the White Sox at the trade deadline. He had gone 21-9 with a 2.90 ERA and finished second in the Cy Young balloting in 2003, losing out to Toronto’s Roy Halladay, but had struggled in 2004 so the teams came to an agreement that both men would benefit from a change of scenery. Heading into his free agent walk year, it hadn’t worked for Loaiza, or the Yankees.

He made 10 appearances and couldn’t get anybody out, pitching to a bloated 8.50 ERA, basically the equivalent of Brian Cashman’s 2022 acquisition of Frankie Montas, minus the known injury. Torre had only used Loaiza once to this point in the postseason, a two-inning outing in Game 4 of the divisional series against the Twins where he gave up no runs but four hits.

Yet against the fearsome Red Sox, Loaiza looked like the Cy Young runner-up and gave the Yankees a chance to win. “I think nobody thought I was going to do as well as I did,” Loaiza said, and he was right.

Unfortunately, the Yankees’ bats refused to support him. Case in point, the 13th when Varitek nearly handed the Yankees the game because he couldn’t catch Wakefield’s knuckleball. Gary Sheffield reached first on a passed ball while striking out, and after Hideki Matsui forced him, he moved to second on a passed ball. An intentional walk to Posada was followed by a third passed ball, but Sierra - who had three hits in the game - struck out to kill the inning.

Loaiza kept mowing down hitters, but finally in the 14th, two strikeouts and two walks brought Ortiz up for his walk-off moment, though it sure didn’t take a moment. The two men battled for 10 spellbinding pitches, Ortiz fouling off five before finally flaring the ball into center.

“He was throwing some unbelievable stuff tonight,” said Ortiz. “He threw me some pitches I was just trying to foul off to stay alive.”

Ortiz stayed alive, and so did the Red Sox, at least for another night.

“Every time you just say, almost in the back of your head, gosh, it’s physically impossible for him to do it again,” said Red Sox first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz who had been Ortiz’s teammate for five years in Minnesota at a time when he wasn’t nearly the hitter he had become in Boston. “It’s just not that easy. To continually do it night in and night out, it’s ridiculous. It’s a freak of nature.”

“The way he’s going, there might be a nice monument for him around here some day,’’ Damon said.

The guy who would eventually get rewarded with his own monument at Yankee Stadium, Jeter, could only lament another blown opportunity to stick a fork in the Red Sox.

“I’m sure they’re feeling pretty good about themselves,’’ said Jeter. “If they didn’t win, they were going home. They did exactly what they wanted to do. But we put ourselves in a good position. We put ourselves right where we wanted to be. The last two games, it just didn’t happen. We just didn’t win the game. Close doesn’t count. It’s a tough loss but we have to play again soon so you forget about it. Nothing surprises me at this point. Something always seems to happen.”

As the fans filed out of the ballpark, thousands of them altered their “Papi!” with a delicious twist to Yankee Stadium’s “Who’s your daddy?” taunting of Pedro.

“Who’s your Papi?” they chanted.

“That was phenomenal, and one of the best at-bats I’ve ever seen to end it,” Epstein said. “Loaiza was throwing nuclear stuff out there and locating. But David was so locked in, and to foul all those balls off the way he did and then to hit that ball to center was remarkable.”

NEXT WEDNESDAY: With his ankle throbbing and bleeding through his sock, Curt Schilling dominated the Yankees and the Red Sox evened the series at three games apiece.