So I cued up some good CDs and made the three-and-a-half-hour run from our little town in western Maine to Boston, pumping up for the drive into the city by playing Elvis’s “Baby, Let’s Play House” and “Mystery Train” at top volume about nine times, and do I succeed in spraying my fresh can of Whip-Ass on the Red Sox? I do. Sort of. We lose the middle game, 9–2 (the Sox commit a numbing four errors), but Pedro wins on Friday night and Schilling wins on Sunday when the Red Sox bounce back from a 3–0 deficit. Pedro’s eighth win; Curt’s tenth. The former was a totally righteous 12–1 drubbing shortened by thunder and lightning in the eighth inning.

The best thing about the weekend is that my youngest son came up from New York to share the Sox with me. These were his first Red Sox games of 2004, his first regular-season games in two years. It was great to be with him, swapping the scorebook back and forth just like old times, catching up on what we’ve been doing. Stewart O’Nan joined us on Saturday and that was good, too—it made an essentially boring game fun—but there was something especially magical about just the two of us. One of the things baseball is made for, I think, is catching up with the people you used to see all the time, the ones you love and now don’t see quite enough. In our family, baseball and swapping scorecards—sometimes bought from a vendor outside the park, sometimes from one in the concourse, sometimes a homemade job scrawled on a legal pad—have always been a constant. I’ve got a drawer with almost thirty years’ worth of those things saved up, and I could tell you what they mean, but if you’ve got kids, you probably know what I’m talking about. When it comes to family, not all the bases you touch are on the field.

The Yankees, thrifty baseball housekeepers for sure, are busily sweeping up the Mets in a Sunday day-night doubleheader, which means we’ll go into our final series of the month with the Bombers five and a half games back. Not an enviable position, but one we’ve been in before.

* * *