Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 8

In today’s edition, for one day, Fenway Park tabled its hatred of former Red Sox great turned traitor Roger Clemens, and showered him with love in what we all believed was going to be his last pitching appearance in Boston.

Never mind that as it turned out, this was not the last game Roger Clemens would ever pitch at Fenway Park.

In this moment, on the afternoon of Aug. 31, 2003, at 41 years old with a contract expiring at the end of 2003, the usual throaty sellout crowd stuffed into the tiny bandbox had every reason to believe that in the bottom of the seventh inning, Clemens had thrown his final pitch in Boston.

You can say many things about Boston sports fans - and believe me, I have - but you can never deny their passion for their teams, nor their appreciation for greatness and historic significance. And that’s why, as soon as Clemens handed the ball to Yankees manager Joe Torre, put his head down and began the trek to the visiting dugout, the Fenway faithful stood as one and gave Clemens, who used to be one of their own, a heartfelt ovation.

And after he had reached the dugout and began receiving congratulations for what would soon become his 100th career victory at Fenway, the scoreboard displayed the following message: “We congratulate Roger Clemens on a Hall of Fame career. We’re proud and grateful of the 192 victories he brought to the Red Sox.”

The noise only grew louder, so at the urging of bench coach Don Zimmer, who himself once cashed Red Sox paychecks as a coach and later manager, Clemens stepped back onto the field and removed his cap, the one with the interlocking NY, and waved it several times.

“Zim said they’re standing, and Joe said to go on out there,” Clemens recalled after the Yankees’ 8-4 victory which enabled them to win yet another series against the Red Sox, this one pushing their lead in the AL East to 5.5 games with a month left in the regular season.

It was quite a scene, especially given the man who was the subject of all that adoration. Rarely has there been a professional athlete who went from being more beloved by a fan base to more hated than Clemens. He literally transformed from the greeter at heaven’s door to the gatekeeper in hell once he made the decision to leave the Red Sox and sign a free agent contract with the AL East-rival Blue Jays.

Oh, but then it got so much worse. After two Cy Young-winning seasons in Toronto, he moved on to the hated Yankees. The Yankees! The ultimate betrayal, even though Clemens hadn’t made that choice; he was traded to New York in a deal that sent David Wells to the Blue Jays.

Once he committed the mortal sin of donning the pinstripes, and then had the gall to help the Yankees win the World Series in 1999 and 2000, the vitriol spewed in his direction by Red Sox Nation would have made inmates at Rikers Island blush.

That was the type of animosity the fans reigned down on Clemens just three months earlier when he took the mound at Fenway trying to win his 299th career game. There was no standing ovation and curtain call that day, just an angry mob exiting the place when he succeeded.

While all was not forgiven, and probably would never be forgiven, for these few hours on this day, the fans shelved their invective-laced loathing and gave him his due for the 382 starts, the 192 victories, the 2,776 innings, the 3.06 ERA, and the 2,590 strikeouts he had given to them across 13 star-crossed seasons in the Hub.

Clemens wasn’t the only Yankee moved by what happened. Aaron Boone, the Yankee third baseman, had goose bumps on his arms during the ovation. “As players, we try - especially here - to just focus and play the game, to stay in the moment,” Boone said. “But, this one time, I wanted to step back and appreciate what was happening out there. It was pretty special.”

Torre, who never shied away from shedding a tear, admitted to misting up as it was all happening.

“That standing ovation was a classy thing to do,” Torre said. “The fans here are passionate. That’s why they’ve booed him so often. But they knew they were witnessing something special this afternoon. They gave him that kind of ovation because this is where he started, where he showed the kind of career he was going to have.

“When Mel (Stottlemyre, the Yankees’ pitching coach) brought him in from the bullpen (for the start of the game), he said the fans were very different. Usually, they give him a hard time out there. Today, they were wishing him well. He wanted to leave this field with a real good memory. It felt good to be able to be here to witness it.”

What also impressed Torre was that Clemens - who occasionally got too amped up in emotional situations (Mike Piazza and Game 2 of 2000 World Series comes to mind) - was able to deal with it and dial in a strong performance. He certainly wasn’t vintage Red Sox Rah-jah as he was charged with four runs on six hits and two walks, but it was good enough for the victory because he was backed by a 10-hit Yankee assault primarily against Tim Wakefield and Scott Sauerbeck.

Six Yankees reached base in the top of the first and three of them scored on RBI singles by Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Boone. The teams swapped two-run rallies to make it 5-2, and then the Yankees blew it open with three in the seventh. They loaded the bases with one out but seemed destined to come away empty handed when Sauerbeck got Hideki Matsui to hit a grounder to first. Kevin Millar fired home for a forceout, but then catcher Doug Mirabelli tried to throw it back to Millar to complete a 3-2-3 double play and the ball sailed into right field which allowed Nick Johnson and Williams to score.

Clemens left with that 8-2 lead, but two of the three men he allowed to reach base in the bottom of the seventh came home when Bill Mueller greeted reliever Antonio Osuna with a two-run single. Things then got sticky in the ninth when Boston loaded the bases against Jeff Nelson, so Torre called on Mariano Rivera - who he was hoping to give a day off - and Rivera struck out Nomar Garciaparra on four pitches to end it.

After getting hammered 10-5 in the Friday night opener which cut their lead to 3.5 games, the Yankees rebounded to win the last two.

“We’re in better shape than we were when we got here,” said Derek Jeter, speaking of the division race and not of his own health which wasn’t great as he left this game with a rib cage injury that would knock him out of the lineup for a week.

“You get beat up when you come here because there’s so much emotion and you play so hard,” Torre said. “To win two of three after losing Friday is huge.”

Since their last visit to Fenway a month earlier, the Yankees played very much like they did at the start of the season when they won 20 of their first 24 games. After losing on July 27 in Boston, the Yankees went out to Anaheim and gained some revenge on the team that in October 2002 had ended their streak of AL pennants at four. They swept a three-game series against the defending World Series champion Angels by the cumulative score of 16-3.

Later, they won seven straight over the Orioles and Royals which gave them a 7.5-game cushion, but when the Red Sox hammered Jose Contreras in the opener, they had chopped four games off the lead and would have Pedro Martinez starting the middle game on Saturday.

When Contreras was throwing his warmup pitches before the bottom of the first inning, the ballpark sound system was playing the theme song from “Cheers” and the words “where everybody knows your name” took on new meaning. Everyone in Boston knew Contreras’ name after the way he spurned the Red Sox for the Yankees at the 11th hour, and make no mistake, the Red Sox took glee - just as they had in his first appearance against them on May 20 - in lighting him up.

Handed a 2-0 first-inning lead on a two-run double by Matsui, Contreras gave up three in the bottom half, the big blow a two-run single by Bill Mueller. And after New York went back up 5-3 in the top of the fourth on a three-run double by Boone, Contreras faced four men and got none of them out.

By the time Torre rescued him, he’d allowed a single to Trot Nixon, a tying two-run homer to Mueller, he walked Jason Varitek and gave up an RBI double to Gabe Kapler. Jeff Weaver came on and the final run on Contreras’ record scored on a sacrifice fly that made it 7-5. Weaver later got tagged for a pair of home runs in the fifth and sixth by David Ortiz and Garciaparra to close out a long, ugly night.

“Today was not my day,” Contreras said through his interpreter, which had to leave reporters wondering exactly when it had been Contreras’ day. “I really didn’t have good control and every time I was in the strike zone, it was up.”

Now the Yankees had to deal with Pedro for the third time this season. Yet, somewhat amazingly, the Yankees went on to win the game and this time, the loss went on Pedro’s ledger. Like Contreras, Pedro could not deal with prosperity. Garciaparra’s two-run triple keyed a three-run first-inning outburst against Andy Pettitte and Fenway was jumping.

However, after two easy, scoreless innings, Pedro just lost it. He gave up two runs in the third, and after Ortiz got one of those back with a solo homer, Pedro had nothing in the fourth. He threw 33 pitches and gave up three runs on five hits including a solo homer by Posada and RBI singles to Enrique Wilson and Johnson.

Manager Grady Little, knowing Pedro had been sick the week before and was still not 100 percent, decided to lift him at the start of the fifth, ending a day in which he threw 87 pitches and allowed five earned runs on nine hits with just three strikeouts.

“It was a struggle from the time he started,” catcher Jason Varitek said. “Obviously, he was not very sharp, and he didn’t get away with anything. Any mistake got hit.”

That was also a fate that befell the next three Red Sox pitchers as Bronson Arroyo and Alan Embree combined to give up three runs in the eighth which sure proved pivotal because Boston got to Rivera in the bottom of the eighth. Just like Pedro often struggled against the Yankees, so, too, did Rivera against the Red Sox.

Jeff Nelson loaded the bases and Rivera was called on to put out the fire. Instead, he threw a gallon of gasoline on it as Dave McCarty lashed a two-run double and back-to-back walks forced in a run that got Boston back within 8-7 before Rivera whiffed Mueller to end the rally.

In the ninth, it was Byung-Hyun Kim to the rescue for the Yankees as he gave up a single to Matsui and a two-run homer to Posada that made it 10-7, and that’s where it ended after Rivera closed it out with an easy ninth for his 30th save.

“This could be the biggest game of the year, basically, because we fell behind Pedro, and then what happened in the eighth inning,” Torre said. “We got beat up last night, we’re playing the team trying to catch us, and we want to prove we’re worthy of where we are. They’re a good team. They battled. They’re very resilient. They keep coming at you.”

Brian Cashman, breathing a sigh of relief outside the visiting clubhouse, said, “We want to add to our lead, rather than hold onto our lead.”

And that’s what Clemens helped the Yankees do the next day.

NEXT WEDNESDAY: Bernie Williams hit a huge home run that helped the Yankees avert a sweep in the final regular-season series with Boston that would have really tightened the AL East race. Joe Torre, perhaps caught up in the emotion of it all, said it was the most significant regular-season win to date in his eight-year tenure with the Yankees.