Sometimes it’s fun to puzzle out backwards what happened, but even a box score is cold matter, a map to treasure already dug up. Stanley Kubrick, insulated in his compound in the English countryside, used to have an assistant here in the States tape the playoffs and World Series so he could devour them at his leisure, and while I admire Kubrick’s taste (and appetite), watching a game that’s long been over, and watching alone, seems to leach the immediacy from what is essentially a shared experience. Ideally, I want to be at the game, reacting to every pitch and situation as part of the loud, honest-to-God crowd; short of that I’ll join the far-flung (and far from imaginary) audience all across New England watching Don and Jerry or listening to Joe and Troop or Uri Berenguer and J. P. Villaman, knowing that when David Ortiz cranks one, citizens of the Nation—from the capital of Fenway to the borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and the Dominican—are hollering like idiots the same as I am. A box score or even a decent recap can’t show me what kind of location Lowe has, or how much of a lead Dave Roberts is getting. I need to see it now, before what happens happens.

So this is limbo, not knowing anything until it’s already over (and even then not knowing the results from Anaheim or Oakland). All I can say, today, is that in mid-August we’re solidly in the wild-card race, and possibly in the lead, and that, from all evidence, as a team we’re having the exact same problems we had two months ago—the same problems, really, we had last year.

August 17th

August 17th

I need to go back to the Garciaparra trade again, and it probably won’t be for the last time. It’s going to be one of the big Red Sox stories of the year, certainly the big story if this wounded, limping, patched-together team[38] doesn’t make postseason (or even if it does but doesn’t advance).

When we got Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in return for Nomar, we were assured by management that this was a lot more than trade-mania, the equivalent of the crazy buying that goes on at the annual Filene’s Wedding Sale. We were “plugging defensive holes.” In addition to that, Cabrera’s .246 batting average was deceiving; he was “a doubles machine.”

Right, and we won in Vietnam; mission accomplished in Iraq.