Closers blow saves; that’s just a fact of baseball. Yankee fans will say that Mariano Rivera doesn’t, but here’s proof—-again—that it doesn’t matter if you’re Mo or John “Way Back” Wasdin or the old Derek Lowe or Eric Gagne or Eck in his prime. Closers blow saves. You just hope they aren’t important ones. Like Game 7 of the World Series. Oh, sorry, Mo.

September 18th

For our publicity mission to Yankee Stadium (where the only sellouts are the players), I wear my Bill Mazeroski jersey. On the train down, I sit beside an older Yankee fan wearing a Yogi Berra cap. As you’ll remember, Yogi was playing left that fateful October day in Forbes Field and watched the Yanks’ hopes fly over his head and over the wall. The guy next to me doesn’t recognize the jersey, and I think—perhaps uncharitably—that being oblivious of history is a luxury we, as Sox fans, can’t afford.

Later, at the Stadium, in response to the chant “Nineteen eighteen,” I turn around and bellow “Nineteen sixty.”

And—I swear to God—one kid says, “What happened in 1960?”

September 19th

The first game of this series was a pulse-pounder which the Red Sox won in their last at-bat. In yesterday’s, played under swag-bellied gray skies and in a drizzle that had become a steady rain by the seventh, the Yankees really won it in the first, when they tacked a five-spot on the tragickal Mr. Lowe, to the joy of the not-quite-full Stadium. (Not to say the relief.) They added four more in the second and were off to the races. By then Mr. Lowe was gone, suffering from a tragickal blowe to the ankle, inflicted by ye olde horsehide sphere. It was, we are told, his earliest exit from a game in five years. I wasn’t terribly surprised at how poorly he performed. Mr. Lowe is simply having one of Those Years.

As for the Yankees…well, they seem to be making a kind of goal-line stand: This close and no closer, with the this close part being two games. At one point in yesterday’s game it was 13–0 bad guys, and the mostly unremarkable Yankee hurler Jon Lieber took a no-no deep into the game, before David “I Love It When You Call Me Big Papi” Ortiz hit a home run to break up that nonsense.