SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Published: October 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com
Just when the Red Sox believed they were secure in the saddle with an ace named Schilling, here came the Yankees' Murderers' Duo of Mussina and Matsui.
Just when the Yankees thought were breathing easy in the Bronx, here came the Red Sox, then a desperate call for their main man, Mariano, accompanied onto the mound last night by an invisible teammate named Mystique.
It was as if a lightning bolt had struck, at the moment when the public-address announcer Bob Sheppard, upon introducing the Yankees' pitchers, added, "And en route to Yankee Stadium, No. 42. ..." Who could possibly know how desperately the Yankees would need him?
By the time Mariano Rivera returned from his sad trip home to Panama and came through the players' gate at 8:53 p.m., the Yankees had two runs on the board. By the time he appeared for hugs in the bullpen and a roar from the crowd, Hideki Matsui had driven in four of his five runs and the Yankees had chased Curt Schilling for a 6-0 lead. By the time Rivera was on in the eighth with the tying run at third to save a 10-7 victory, he was, against all odds, the coolest man in a stadium that was an emotional wreck.
This wasn't the way it figured to be, not against Schilling and not after the Yankees' lead had grown to 8-0, with Mike Mussina pitching six and two-thirds perfect innings. "It was like it was too good to be true," Joe Torre said, after the Red Sox rallied with five runs in the seventh, two more in the eighth. Rivera's longest day - beginning with a funeral for two relatives who died last weekend in a swimming pool accident - became another late night at the office.
"I'm tired," he said, "but my mind kept going."
After a Florida exhibition for which tickets were scalped at wallet-emptying prices and after 19 regular-season confrontations that were hyped to head-spinning proportions, the Yankees and the Red Sox got down to the business of a postseason conflagration to prove once and for all which of these bitter rivals had the better off-season. Yankees-Red Sox is a year-round blood sport now that doesn't even pause for holiday reflection. Last October's epic Game 7 gave way to the dueling bartering and bank accounts that commenced with the Red Sox' Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Arizona to land Schilling. It concluded in February, with the Yankees' lifting of Alex Rodriguez off the baseball hot stove just after Boston believed it had acquired his rich services for dessert.
The Red Sox armed Schilling with a lucrative contract extension, and he was every bit the ace they needed to survive as a wild card. A-Rod and his buddy, Derek Jeter, formed a potent left side of the infield worth more than $400 million. As Schilling took the ball for Game 1 and as Rodriguez trotted out to his adopted third-base position and symbol of sacrifice, the series had already been stamped as a referendum on those two headline transactions.
The timeline of the trades, unfortunately, doesn't support the hypothesis that the Yankees set up themselves up for their ultimate humiliation, losing to the Red Sox for the first time in a postseason, by pursuing the more glamorous A-Rod instead of the rotation anchor they lacked - at least until Mussina made Moose-meat out of the Red Sox with a performance that until the seventh inning could only be described as Cowboy Up, Cowboy Down.
The Yankees, meanwhile, were on Schilling from the outset, chasing him after 3 innings and 58 unconvincing pitches. He said the ankle he tweaked recently kept him from driving off it, and now the Red Sox need a commanding effort tonight from Pedro MartÃnez in front of 55,000 people who believe they're his daddy.
Schilling had one-hit the Yankees over seven innings last month. Around New York, you almost could smell the fear of him as the Red Sox rolled into town after sweeping the Angels. You could almost hear George Steinbrenner sharpening his tongue and his ax for his general manager, Brian Cashman, in the event Schilling dominated his $180 million masterpiece.
Had the Yankees been willing to surrender Alfonso Soriano, Schilling might very well have been a Yankee. Had the players' union signed off on a restructuring of A-Rod's deal, he would have been with the Red Sox. Thanks to modern economics, Jerry Seinfeld likes to say that we're all rooting for laundry. True enough, these teams have turned over enough players the last two years to field a 40-man roster, but some things never change, and Rivera in October is one of them, even under the most dire of personal circumstances.
"I had 24 players that were waiting for me," he said after a hellish day and a five-hour journey. "I had a job to do." He retired Kevin Millar with two out and the tying run at third in the eighth. He faced the tying run with two on and one out in the ninth. As if scripted by Yankee-Red Sox lore, there stood Bill Mueller, whose game-winning homer off Rivera in Boston last July may have saved the Red Sox' season. Mueller bounced back to Rivera, into a double play.
The Red Sox made it fun, crazy, scary. But in the end, there was Rivera, punctuating a defeat that began with Schilling, Boston's supposed sure thing. There was Yankee mystique, stamped all over another postseason night to remember. All said and done, it's still not clear if a stain dating back to 1918 comes out in this wash.
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