I went to a women's college. I had a friend there who was also a baseball fanatic, though her team was the Padres. She was, however, willing to accept the possibility of rooting for the Sox, especially granted that the Padres were having a bad year.
We got a group together at one point, took the commuter rail into the city, took the T around to Fenway. The game was going to be the oakland Athletics against the Boston Red Sox. And Roger Clemens was on the mound for the Sox.
I've never been one who parsed names and statistics with the facility of any nine-year-old with a baseball card collection. I forget the names of people I know, let alone ballplayers I've never met. But I knew the name of Roger Clemens. Roger Clemens was the Red Sox to me. Roger Clemens stood at the right hand of the baseball gods. I was going to see Roger Clemens pitch.
I probably still have, somewhere, the program where I scored that game. (I score every baseball game I go to, a tradition that started with the very first minor league game I attended. In this case, I was getting curious looks over my shoulder from people who weren't sure what the arcane markings I was making meant. I gave brief lessons. Between plays.) I knew more names on the A's than I did on the Sox - my brother was an A's fan, and most of our baseball discussions were him parsing statistics for Oakland.
The game started slowly for Roger - after two innings, the A's had posted two runs. However, after that, he hit his stride, and didn't give up a single hit, though he might have allowed a walk; I don't recall. In the seventh, the score was 4-2 for the Sox, and I was beginning to feel hope that there was a chance for a little payback for that sweep of the pennant that the A's had inflicted on me, that had my brother utterly intolerable.
It was time for the part of the A's lineup that I truly feared - the heart of their lineup, not the top - the part that my brother was prone to gloating over. In those years, I feared the A's at least as much as I feared the Yankees. And Roger didn't come out again. A new pitcher came out.
I looked up at the board for the new guy's stats. I don't remember who he was, where he came from, anything of significance about him, other than the dreadful notation on the board: "IP:0.00". The boy had never put the ball over the plate in the majors. And McGwire was on deck. McGwire and Brosius and Giambi, oh my!
The game went downhill from there. After nine, it was 5-5. And into extra innings it went. It might have been ten, eleven, twelve - I don't remember how many extra innings it went. I remember that we lost the game. I think the score was 7-6. I was sort of in shock. I wished with all my heart that Roger had stayed long enough at least to keep McGwire from hitting the ball. Or that a different pitcher had relieved him. Anything but what actually happened.
It was with that on my mind that I watched Roger take the mound at Fenway again in Game 3 of the '99 ACLS, in pinstripes. Would Roger have stayed with the Sox if he hadn't sat down in the seventh to watch someone else lose the game for him? It wasn't the only time it happened. Would the Sox have found the Series if Roger had stayed and kept playing, pitched games where there were whole stretches of innings that not a one of his opponents saw first?
I'm not going to fault Roger for wanting his World Series ring. After all, every player in baseball wants a World Series ring. What I can fault him for is swearing up and down that, if he were to leave Boston, he'd want to go to the Astros, closer to home, and that he wouldn't take the mound at Fenway as an enemy. Or for getting himself traded to the Yankees to ride to the Series on their coattails. A lifetime's crowning achievement - yes. Certainly. But to get that ring by joining up with a team that borders on the inevitable? Now he knows what it feels like to be a Yankee, he says, without putting in the years of work with the Yankees that make the Yankees the Yankees. The win, the ring, isn't everything. It isn't much of anything - the game's the thing.
I could forgive him leaving, even though he was the Red Sox of my childhood. But to see him step out onto the field at Fenway, doff his Yankees cap, and grin at the crowd he had abandoned... I cannot.
It must have been very disconcerting for Roger to come back to Fenway in the ACLS. After all, this was the crowd of loyalists who stood behind him through all his greatest years, cheered him on, hissed the managers when they pulled him in the late innings to put in a kid who'd never seen the majors to face off against McGwire. But we aren't Clemens fans. We're Sox fans. We have the Sox in contention, and going to be in contention for a few years - without Roger. We don't need him anymore, and we feel lied to, abandoned, betrayed.
Are there kids in New York who watch the games thinking, "Roger Clemens is pitching. Roger Clemens stands at the right hand of the baseball gods"? Do the fans of New York lay their hearts at his feet the was the fans of Boston once did? It seems to be a lot to lose, to get that World Series ring. I wouldn't have done it. But I'm not out on the mound and staring down the guy at the plate. I believe in loyalty - and I believe in the Sox.
And granted all that, I, not without wistfulness and regrets, must join the Fenway Faithful and sing:
Now Pedro. Pedro Martinez stands at the right hand of the baseball gods....
Brief historical note: After discussing this game on and off, I have actually learned which actual game I'm talking about. It was played on 18 May, 1996. There were two relief pitchers between Clemens and Garces, who took the loss.
Thanks to Cliff Otto for looking it up for me.