Fever Pitch

It was the best of times, it was... Oh, hell, it was the best of times. There has never been an off-season like it.

We got the best starting pitcher available. We got the best reliever available. We got a new manager, who arrived with the requisite optimism and was characterized by the aforementioned best available starter as impossible to dislike.

(Was ever a manager of any franchise anywhere set up so neatly? Terry Francona may be as likable as Curt Schilling says he is. He certainly has a pleasant smile, and during his job interviews, he apparently wowed Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino, John W. Henry, and everybody else who either owns or works for the team. But Francona's winning percentage during the four years in which he managed the Phillies was .440. Epstein et al. fired a manager who had presided over 188 wins in two years and cajoled the Red Sox to within five outs of the World Series. If the '04 Sox don't win the World Series, they will have failed. Failed. Failed. Failed. Amiability and a thorough familiarity with the glyphs of stats guru Bill James will count for nothing.)

Which is not to suggest that this marked-down bargain of a team (at least by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's standards) must fail for lack of management. It could fail because so many of the guys who hit well last season have been waking up at 4 a.m. all winter, certain in their bones and blood that they will never hit that well again. It could fail because Pedro Martinez and Schilling combine to win 46 games and none of the other pitchers wins as many as eight. Or it could fail because the Sox front office, mad as Midas for ever more revenue, insists on pushing ever more rows of preposterously expensive box seats in toward both base lines, until Major League Baseball finally orders the forfeit of all Boston home games because there's just flat out not enough room left to play.

Any or all of the above might be better than winning. Because though Boston fans say they want the Sox to reign as world champions and may even believe it, that outcome would likely bewilder rather than delight them. Were the Sox to win the World Series, it's cliche-easy to imagine the heartening spectacle of overturned and burning cars, the liberation of all the beer in Brighton, tear gas and arrests from Kenmore Square to Kennebunkport — developments of that nature. But doesn't it seem more likely that fans (as well as those who weren't aware that they were paying attention) would tremble in the scary novelty of this... this... winning, and that they'd wonder how they were supposed to make sense of the next day that would dawn — that day upon which they would have no new pain to embrace, nobody to blame?

Which reminds me: How, exactly, did Tim Wakefield escape Bucknerization after he gave up the home run that beat the Sox in October to Aaron Boone, a defensive replacement who understood so little about what it means to be a Yankee that he ignored his contract and played winter basketball, tore up his knee, and blew millions of dollars? This, of course, cleared the way for New York to acquire that shortstop/third baseman who was, briefly, the captain of the Texas Rangers.

But I digress. The idea here is to embrace the grand, unlikely spectacle that has constituted the hot-stove league just past and to understand the delights and damage of the last few months in the context of both the singular history of the little ball club that couldn't and the future it will build.

And so, again, this off-season was the best of times, especially for those of us who are fans of marvelous stories and who regard the local ball club as a blessing primarily because of its inexhaustible capacity to generate them. Because we also saw the Sox offer Manny Ramirez to any team willing to assume his contract (and fail to divest themselves of him), then attempt to acquire the best player in the game, and then watch helplessly as said player became a Yankee — a magnificently ironic development after Boston's front office had pursued Alex Rodriguez enthusiastically and publicly enough to insult the guy who's been the club's shortstop and franchise player for the past half-dozen years.

ike every Red Sox failure since the dawn of the dead-ball era, the botched deal was at once simple and marvelously complicated. And when that deal failed to go down, Sox general manager Theo Epstein quietly turned his attention to putting competitive team on the field in April, secure in the knowledge that the acquisition Schilling had already spurred a record burst in season-ticket sales. Would that the same could be said of his colleagues and co-conspirators in The Greatest Deal Never Made. Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino blasted the players' union as obstructionist. Fair enough. That's what management does. Owner John Henry went one leap further. "I'm not a labor lawyer," he told the Globe, "but from my standpoint an American, I have a hard time understanding the reasons for killing this deal."

While it may be difficult for a man paying his utility infielders millions of dollars for summer work to comprehend why the merry lads should need a union, to imply that their organization is un-American bespeaks an exquisitely uninformed view of US (as in American) labor history in general as well as an ignorance the rules prevailing during the first three-quarters of a century of Major League Baseball, wherein management's contempt for the players was thorough and, according to the owners' pals in Congress, right and proper as well. In his windy, winter contention, Henry sounded more like a contemporary of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner whose penuriousness helped provoke the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, than a 21st-century mogul who's already on his third team. Henry, like any number US presidents and CEOs, may not like unions, but to suggest that, as "an American," he can't understand the presence, necessity, and function of the Players Association merely demonstrates that Henry doesn't understand what Steinbrenner has no trouble comprehending, namely that if you want a player badly enough, you pay the going rate for the guy.

What other off-season has featured denunciation of the Players Association and the blasting of the once and current shortstop's agent as a hypocrite by the Sox owner, the acquisition of players who may have impact Schilling and closer Keith Foulke may have, the anticipation of the arrival of a quarter-billion-dollar infield asset, and then the grotesque surprise that came when the Sox learned that the man they'd been assured would be the captain and shortstop of the Texas Rangers would be playing third base for New York? We could almost be forgiven for failing to notice that over the weeks of baseball promises broken and surprises sprung, the Patriots enjoyed a pretty fair run.

None of this is to suggest that other Sox offseasons haven't been studded with great expectations and greater stories. In October 1975, a Sox team rich primarily in promise very nearly snatched the World Series away from one of the most thoroughly stacked baseball aggregations of all time. When the Sox almost sent the Cincinnati Reds home second best, there was every reason to carry into that New England autumn the conviction that the young, confident, and thoroughly entertaining Sox would win a World Series in short order — especially because the Yankees had struggled through one of their two-manager years and finished an unpromising six games over .500.

But the following season Boston endured a two-manager summer of its own, and the team built around that promising nucleus (and the grim, albeit barren determination of Carl Yastrzemski) never got any closer to the series than the pitch Mike Torrez threw to Bucky Dent at the end of the end of '78. Then came the several years during which the aging nucleus got hurt, began grumbling, and earned the "25 players, 25 cabs" designation, until finally all of the fish jumped out of the bathtub, and eventually Bill Lee was traded for spite and ballast.

The winter following the 1986 season was good fun, too. Optimistic fans could conclude that the team that several times came within one unhittable strike of winning the series in the sixth game and led in the seventh as well would have a fair shot at success in the spring. But according to the estimable Peter Gammons, even before they began preparing for 1987 in Florida, the players were looking over their shoulders.

"[Bill] Buckner did point out that [Bob] Stanley wasn't covering first when [Mookie] Wilson's grounder went through his legs," Gammons wrote in Sports Illustrated. "For his part, Stanley took some off-season shots at [manager John] McNamara's decision-making process, and the pitcher's wife, Joan, was quoted as saying that Rich Gedman 'blew it' because he had failed to stop Stanley's inside pitch to Wilson. Roger Clemens, the Boston starter, publicly wondered why McNamara took him out of the game with a 3-2 lead after seven innings, and [Don] Baylor privately seethed at not being used. 'All season long we won as a team, and as soon as we lost, some of the guys started pointing fingers,' says Baylor."

t least some of the above sounds familiar. The '03 Sox made it to within five outs of qualifying for the series. This is a long way from winning it, as the '03 Yankees will acknowledge. Still, it was a fine ride with all the cowboying up and the lucky video and various other foolishness that hadn't surfaced at Fenway since the rally caps. The nonsports columnists, editors, and ombudsmen don't write about the game unless the stretch run of the local lads has reminded them that Baseball Is Life and banished all concern for the ticket gouging that is unlawful as well as ticket gouging that is not. They all wrote about what a jolly lot the '03 Sox were and what a lift they'd given us in this uncertain time of alerts blinking from orange to yellow and back again like traffic signals.

But the plots of the stories here are never simple, so simultaneously we got Kevin Millar, the rally video star himself, waxing enthusiastic about Alex Rodriguez and thereby bruising the feelings of Nomar Garciaparra, who, we learned, had earlier characterized the Boston media as "evil." We got Garciaparra interrupting his honeymoon to phone the sports talk-radio guys and express his dismay that the Red Sox front office had romanced Rodriguez after Garciaparra had been not only dependably snatching up ground balls on ownership's behalf but had been comporting himself as an acceptable citizen as well, which, in the world of professional sports, qualifies one for beatification, if not nomination to the Hall of Fame. Remarkably, we did not get Mia Hamm's reaction to her new husband's curious decision to make that phone call from their honeymoon suite, but that will come, no doubt, in time.

So will the answers to whether acquiring Schilling and Foulke will not only make up for the club's failure to acquire Alex Rodriguez but also carry Boston to a championship. Because it's the Red Sox, the certainty of folly and failure swims in the lane beside eternally springing hope, and who knows which of them will win by a touch? It's almost irresistible to answer, "Only those who've been paying attention." Schilling is 37 and coming off a year when he got hurt and won eight games while losing nine. In Oakland, Foulke could pitch brilliantly, night after night, without drawing undue attention to himself. How many people would have noticed if he'd failed? The writers and fans in his new place of employment are notorious for noticing everything and making up stuff when there's nothing to notice. Ask Matt Young. Fair or not, the speculation that Foulke will never be comfortable enough to perform well here began before he'd even signed on, and the first time he blows consecutive saves, the rage and then resignation born of the certainty that we've been duped again will surprise and perhaps dismay him.

Or maybe he'll mutter a curse, spit in the dirt, and save the next dozen games he's given the opportunity to save. Maybe Schilling will turn out to be no further over the hill than was that guy Clemens when he was 37.

None of which would alter the twisted presence of Alex Rodriguez in New York.

hey play the games so we can find out. But finding out, which is enough in some places, is not enough here. Here the finding out comes with stories — even myths — that would have no resonance elsewhere: the barkeep who shut off the TV and said in the dumb hush that followed the last out, "The sons of bitches killed our fathers, and now they're coming after us." That's said to have happened in Connecticut after the '78 playoff game against the Yankees, but it doesn't matter, does it? It could have happened in '67, or '75, or '86, or '03.

But communal myths and the inclination to take Boston losses personally notwithstanding, all Red Sox fans are not the same.

John Updike and Roger Angell are among the most accomplished writers of our time. They are Red Sox fans. Donald Hall's achievement as a poet is exceptional and enduring, and he is a Red Sox fan. One afternoon at his farmhouse in New Hampshire, Hall spoke with real agitation about how frustrating it had been to watch the Sox fritter away game 6 in '86, not only because of what was actually happening but because the picture on his TV was so snowy that he couldn't be entirely sure that he was seeing what he was afraid he was seeing.

But the sodden clowns who rip their shirts off in the April and October winds, paint their heaving, hairy bellies red and blue, spill beer onto their neighbors, vomit ferociously onto their shoes, and regard "Yankees suck!" as all you know and all you need to know... well, they are Red Sox fans, too.

Do the sages and the chanters and all those who fall between them have anything in common? Perhaps only the conviction that they are special in their suffering. If the Red Sox don't win the World Series fairly soon, the team will not have won in the lifetime of anybody. People who root for such a team can, perhaps, lay claim to a kind of distinction. That may be what holds together what has only quite recently become known as Red Sox Nation, whether the citizens acknowledge it or not: not passion, not even suffering, but membership in a fraternity/sorority of loss wherein the only sure thing besides the loss itself is the mad, self-centered, but finally gratifying conviction that the failure is directed personally at each of them and that it will come with a story worthy of a long, long line of such stories.

One of the more recent begins "What was Grady Little thinking?"

On one level the answer is simple: "I'm going to leave the best pitcher I've got right where he is, and he's going to pitch us to the World Series, and after we've won that, let's see those smiling liars upstairs figure out how to fire me." Or less likely but more fun because more perverse: "I'll fix the front office for not expressing confidence in me. I'll leave this exhausted multimillionaire out here until his arm falls off, if that's what it takes, and they can whistle for their rings."

In fact, almost certainly Grady Little was thinking the same thing that Bob Stanley was thinking before it all came down around his ears in game 6 of the 1986 series. "I was thinking how great it was going to be to be on the mound when we won," Stanley said with a shrug years later.

Stanley, of course, would merely join a long list of would-be heroes. In the 1948 playoffs, Sox pitcher Denny Galehouse never should have been allowed out of the clubhouse. Bill Lee shouldn't have tried to slip a second Epheus ball past Tony Perez. Mike Torrez should have taken Bucky Dent more seriously. Carl Yastrzemski should have waited for a better pitch. Calvin Schiraldi never should have been allowed out of the bullpen. Bill Buckner should have been in the dugout, watching Dave Stapleton field a routine ground ball. Roger Clemens should have been encouraged to grow up before he found work with the Yankees. Pedro Martinez should have told Grady Little he was tired. Jason Varitek should have told Grady Little Pedro Martinez was tired. Grady Little should have recognized that Pedro Martinez was tired. And, of course, if John Henry really wanted Alex Rodriguez, he should have been willing to pay for him.

But a couple of floors below the level where the cheap opinions circulate, down there with all the other convictions we ignore so we can get through the business and pleasure of the day, lurks the aforementioned truth about fans hereabouts: They're better off if the Red Sox don't win. Because each year some team wins. Some years lately it's the Florida Marlins, which pretty much proves that you don't always have to earn victory with patience and suffering. Other years it isn't, which proves that the distinction is fleeting, even if you do earn it.

But the point is that the list of teams that have won the World Series within anybody's memory is long, and the list of teams that have failed to win the World Series because of circumstances so bizarre that nobody could have invented them is very, very short.

Boston fans are not rooting for a team that's cursed. They are rooting for a team that's blessed, if they'd only see it — a team better than any other at generating the sort of tales the ancients used to tell one another around flickering fires — not easy tales of annual triumph but long, episodic, sustaining stories of struggle, promise and promise subverted, frailty, cowardice, terrible surprise, failure, and loss; in short, tales of each of us and of all of us.

Can Schilling win? Can Foulke save? Will Garciaparra transcend the bruised ego or sulk like Achilles in his tent? Will fly balls landing around Manny inspire in him even less interest than they did last season, now that he's learned that the Yankees wouldn't take him for a crummy 20 grand? Will A-Rod hit .250 against the rest of the league and .700 against Boston?

These are intriguing spring questions. With luck, we'll see the answers to them take shape slowly, in complex, implausible patterns, over the course of the summer meant for discovery. And if we're blessed again, the great delight for a fan of worthy stories will be delayed until autumn, when we'll learn, deliciously, how it'll happen this time.

Bill Littlefield hosts National Public Radio's Only a Game on WBUR. His most recent books are a children's novel, The Circus in the Woods, and Fall Classics, a collection of the best writing about the World Series, which he edited with Richard Johnson.