Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 34

In today’s edition, the Red Sox capped off the greatest comeback in MLB history by blowing out the Yankees in Game 7 to win the 2004 ALCS.

On the night of Nov. 4, 2009, Johnny Damon came hustling around to score on a Hideki Matsui single - off fading Phillie Pedro Martinez, by the way - and when he crossed the plate the Yankees had a 4-1 lead over Philadelphia in Game 6 of the World Series.

That run would prove to be the winner as the Yankees went on to a 7-3 victory, securing their 27th and still last world championship, their first in the brand new Yankee Stadium.

Perhaps it was then, and only then, when Damon was finally forgiven for the hell he had wrought five years earlier in the old Yankee Stadium on the never-to-be-forgotten night of Oct. 20, 2004.

Damon had shocked the world when he left the Red Sox after 2005 to sign a free agent deal with the Yankees just months after he said he would never play for the Yankees. Funny how four years and $52 million changes a man’s perspective though, so Damon cut his long, flowing hair and shaved his bushy, Jesus-like beard to comply with the cleanly-shaven corporate look of the Yankees.

His personal grooming habits changed, but his game did not and he proved to be the same catalyst at the top of the Yankees order that he’d been in Boston as he played his ass off on his way to four excellent seasons in pinstripes. The Yankees may not have won the 2009 World Series without Damon, whose brilliant at bat in the ninth inning of Game 4 when he singled on the ninth pitch, then stole second and third before scoring the winning run on an Alex Rodriguez double turned the Series in New York’s favor for good.

But Yankees fans have long, long memories and nothing short of that World Series title was going to ever give Damon absolution for the role he played in helping Boston crush New York in the historic seventh game of the 2004 ALCS.

He opened that dreadful night with a first-inning single off Kevin Brown and trotted home on David Ortiz’s two-run homer. And if there was any doubt regarding how impossible it was going to be for the Yankees to stop the runaway train that the Red Sox had become, it evaporated in the second inning.

That’s when the Red Sox forced Brown out of the game with the bases loaded, and Damon greeted reliever Javier Vasquez with a grand slam into the upper deck in right to make it 6-0. Though there were still nearly eight innings left to be played, the game was over, everyone knew it, and once the 10-3 victory was official, the Red Sox became the first team in baseball history to rally from down three games to none to win a postseason series.

“We’re idiots, but we’re experienced enough idiots to know how to get out of this hole,” Damon said.

And then they did it with one performance that was better than the previous, then another, and finally, another.

“We were down 3-0 and lost that Game 3 the way we did,” said Tim Wakefield. “In Game 4 we were three outs from the end of the season. To win two marathon games and then two more at Yankee Stadium, it is beyond tremendous. I know the fans stuck around through tough times. I know the people on this team weathered a lot. But to bring home the American League championship is beyond tremendous.”

Unlike his counterpart, George Steinbrenner, Red Sox owner John Henry usually kept a fairly low profile, but there he was amidst the wet and wild celebration in the visiting clubhouse, a place where so few opponents had enjoyed a night quite like this, speaking glowingly of his team.

“How can this not be one of the greatest comebacks in the history of sports?” Henry said as he reveled in the moment of having finally defeated his arch rival, Steinbrenner. “This team loves each other so much. They want to win so badly for one another and they wanted to win so badly for these fans. There’s no way you can do this unless you have incredible heart.

“We were in this room a year ago and it was heart-wrenching to come five outs away from going to the World Series. The very next day we set about - you could call it an arms race with the Yankees - to have determination to get back here and win. And this is what it took. It took Curt Schilling. It took Keith Foulke. And it took a hell of a lot more than that. It was 25 guys pulling together through 12 innings and then 14 innings and then two big wins at Yankee Stadium.”

What had been somewhat unusual about the miraculous Red Sox rally is the lack of a role Damon had played in it. After a season in which he’d hit .304 with a .380 on-base percentage, 20 homers, a career-high 94 RBI and 16 stolen bases, Damon had typically been in the middle of everything. That had continued in the three-game sweep of the Angels in the ALDS when he went 7-for-15 and scored four runs.

However, before his leadoff single in Game 7 he was 3-for-29 in the ALCS with two walks, an RBI and three runs scored. “As Johnny goes, we go,” Terry Francona said, even though that hadn’t been the case.

For his part, Damon never lost faith, not in himself, certainly not in his teammates. All year long, same as in 2003, he had been instrumental in keeping the Boston clubhouse light and airy, a place where tension went to die. The Red Sox might have been the only team who could have pulled this off because of the way they went about their business, never seeming to buckle when the pressure was enormous.

Even in 2003, look what it took for the Yankees to finally win the ALCS, a home run by Aaron Boone in the 11th inning of Game 7 on a knuckleball thrown by Wakefield that happened to not knuckle.

“After we were down 3-0 we didn’t panic,” said Damon, who later in the game added an exclamation point two-run homer off Vasquez, giving him a three-hit, six-RBI night. “We were joking about packing up our things, kind of playing devil’s advocate by thinking of the worst things possible and making sure the good things happened.

“To do this against the Yankees in their ballpark is definitely a very special feeling. We knew we had a good team, but pulling off four in a row against the Yankees, we proved to the world that we’re the better team. America wants the Red Sox. I think with the kind of team we have, the loosey-goosey attitudes, the fun personalities, I think America wanted the Red Sox, and that’s exactly what they’re going to get.’’

And you wonder why Yankees fans needed all that time to warm up to Damon after he changed sides?

Polling fans as they were leaving the stadium, the Daily News found plenty plenty of shock, anger and despair over what had happened over the course of four awful Yankees days. One fan called it “the biggest choke job in American sports” and another said “We’ll hear about it forever.” And still another who said, “I can now go on with my life. The Red Sox beat the Yankees.”

Funny, but it was sort of the same for Red Sox fans in that many had waited all their lives just for this moment, beating the Yankees, and now they could go on with the rest of their lives, though a World Series title in the coming days would make it all the more sweeter because of, you know, that whole 86-year drought. One of those was the team’s 30-year-old wunderkind general manager, Theo Epstein.

“We did this for all the great Red Sox players who never found a way to beat the Yankees,” he said. “The ‘49 team with Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky. The ‘78 team that should have won the playoff game. For our team last year that should have won and gone to the World Series. I can’t really put this in historical terms, but it’s taken a long time to beat the Yankees. Our hats are off to them, a class organization, from Steinbrenner to the 25th guy on their roster, and especially (Brian) Cashman.

“But this was for all those great Red Sox teams of the past. This is for them. We talked about it last year, when we lost. We said we felt like we were going in the right direction and were going to win a World Series, but it’s incredible that a year later, we have a chance to come back to Yankee Stadium for a chance we might not have again, and win a Game 7.”

Of course, it had been Kevin Millar four nights earlier who had said this was imminently possible. “Don’t let us win this one,” he said before Game 4. But the Yankees allowed that to happen, and suddenly the door was open a little more than a crack. Soon it was open a little more, and a little more, and then on this night it was blown right off the hinges as the Red Sox crashed through with all their bluster and goofiness and, yeah, talent.

“How many times can you honestly say you have a chance to shock the world?” Millar said. “It might happen once in your life or it may never happen. But we had that chance, and we did it. It’s an amazing storybook.”

It was, but there was still one more amazing chapter to write.

NEXT WEDNESDAY: The Curse of the Bambino is officially exorcized as the Red Sox rolled past the Cardinals to end their 86-year World Series drought.