SOMEBODY GOT-TA PAY

October 5th/ALDS Game 1

Twenty minutes before game time, the Sox announce their ALDS roster. Youk, Mientkiewicz and Leskanic made the squad. Mendoza and McCarty didn’t.

I try to take a nap before the 4:09 EDT start of the first Division Series game out in Anaheim and can’t do it. I’m not really surprised. Too many butterflies. That may sound stupid, but I’d argue there’s nothing stupid about it at all. The hell of spectating—a thing I’ve had to rediscover during several Octobers (although never enough)—is that when it comes to baseball, spectating is all I can do. The script is out of my hands.

Instead of a nap I settle for a brisk walk. I’ve got a bad hip as a result of an accident, but I ignore its protests of this unwonted late-afternoon exercise. My youngest son rescues me before it can really start to bellow, picking me up in his Jetta and taking me back to the house, where we settle with sodas, pizza, cookies and a homemade scorecard. Owen also has a crossword puzzle in which he tries (with varying degrees of success) to bury himself, admitting he can barely bring himself to watch the Angels bat, especially after the Red Sox secure a slim one-run lead on a suspect Manny Ramirez double (an E-5 Figgins on my pizza-besmirched scorecard) followed by a scratch David Ortiz single.

As it turned out, Owen and I didn’t have to worry,[66] although the game remained close until the top of the fourth, and twice in the early going the Angels jockeyed the tying run into scoring position. Then, in the aforementioned fourth inning, Boston staged one of those multirun outbursts that characterized so many of their wins in August and September.Ortiz walked; Millar hit him home with a moonshot to left; Varitek singled; Orlando “I Know Every Team Handshake in the Universe” Cabrera walked; after Bill Mueller struck out, Gabe Kapler hit a single to short left field. Bases juiced, one out, Johnny Damon at the plate. And here’s your play of the game, brought to you by Charles Scribner’s, the publisher that made New York famous.

Johnny Damon, who hits Angels starter Jarrod Washburn about as well as toads do algebra, directs a seemingly harmless ground ball to Chone Figgins, a utility fielder today playing third for the Halos. Figgins double-pumps, then throws the ball to a location somewhere between home plate and the guy selling Sports Bars in the box seats to the left of the Angels’ dugout. Varitek and Cabrera score. One batter later, Manny Ramirez goes pega luna for the first time in the Series (but not, one hopes, for the last). It’s great, but by then the game is essentially over.