I can't get over this Pedro Martinez business.
29 innings, 38 strikeouts, 4 walks, 2.17 ERA. Allahu Akbar.
Not that they were relying on him especially heavily last night, as Mientkiewicz hit a grand slam(!), Beltran had a 3-run bomb, and the offense generally beat on Ol' Al Leiter like the proverbial redheaded stepchild.
But still, it looked like his days of fanning 11-plus per nine might have passed. His 11.79 mark at this point in the season is tops in the NL and second only to the One in Minnesota. Just as encouraging, his average start has lasted slightly over 7 innings while not exceeding 100 pitches (100.0 exactly). This is damn exciting stuff.
Of course he knows it, too. What were his thoughts on last night's performance?
"The game is pretty much over the line when they see a pitcher like me with such a big lead," Martinez said. "They're going to try to swing and make something happen. So I made good pitches."
That's right. This is a league game, Smokey.
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It was a true thrashing, the team from out of town (Pennsylvania or Connecticut, I forget where) putting a beating of LAPD-style ferocity on the local favorites. The home coach’s kid on the mound was getting sunburnt on the backs of his ears from the scoreboard lighting up behind him and, in the press box, where I dutifully scribbled notes and formulated stimulating narrative ledes, the curmudgeonly scorekeeper was grumbling loudly for the hook.
Harwich, Massachusetts. July 29, 2001. Had the terrorist alert level necessitated by the events six weeks later been in effect then, and been used to describe hangovers instead of the security threat, my condition that day would have been plaid.
With some time between games — a regional tournament for 12-year-olds on the road to Williamsport generally allows some interbellum hot-dog munching, sunscreen reapplication, and letting younger siblings on the field to toddle the bases — I took to Rte. 28, seeking more pressing matters and perhaps a bit of liquid sustenance.
The bar’s name is long forgotten, and hugely inconsequential, but when I posted up with my fake ID (Matt McDonald, Wakefield, Nov. 11, 1978) and a Budweiser to catch the first few innings of the Sox, it became one of those indelible moments of fanhood. For the longest time — forever really — these moments served as oases in the vast Sahara of futility, little islands of hope and joy before trekking onward, carefully skirting the stinking carcasses of the Mike Torrezes and Terry Cooneys and Grady Littles.
That desert is gone now, swallowed resolutely by a tsunami victorious. But that hot day down the Cape, the fact that Nomar was coming back stoked the glowing embers of pennant fever. Number 5 dropped one into the seats in center in his third at-bat, and the washed-out boozehounds in that roadside tavern with the dirt parking lot pounded their fists on the bar and called for more. Somewhere down the road, the 12-year-olds were warming up for the next game, but I stuck fast, easing off the beers a little bit because I was going to have to return to the press box, and that scorekeeper looked like he knew a thing or two about what day drinking smelled like. But with Dave Cone on the hill and a streaking Sox team having enjoyed the return of Bret Saberhagen two days before, the Sox had an aura of the impossible come true about them.
And Nomie punctuated it in the eighth, bases loaded, two-run single up the middle that put the Sox up 4-3 over the White Sox. In the afterglow of Papi’s unreal clutch hits and Schilling’s guts and all the Pedro foolishness since, Nomar’s stature in this town and around the game in the late-90s, early-Aughts is obscured. But Boston fans weren’t alone insisting that he was the best of the Big 3, and anyone who told you that someday Orlando Cabrera would be a significant — and inarguable — upgrade would’ve gotten slapped across both sides of the face and kicked (twice with each shoe, just to even things out). Even the most incorrigible homophobes allowed themselves a blush of pride at having that stacked shortstop on the cover of SI, even if those traps seemed a little hefty for a guy who was good-field/no-hit coming up from Pawtucket to unseat Johnny Val.
The Sox swooned shortly after that and two weeks later I was sitting on my back porch reading the paper when my buddy Nolan called with news that Jimy had been canned. Carl Everett imploded and the Sox executed their classic late-summer fade that inked the death certificate of Joe Kerrigan’s career and sent Dan Duquette to community theater auditions, a painful postcareer self-parody that makes the last scenes of "Raging Bull" seem feel-good. Later, there would be the second foul ball theory, how a mystery shooter behind the grassy knoll in Fort Myers fouled a ball off Nomar’s leg, then the artless, "Nobody wants to ---cking play here" remark, then Mia-gate ("Thanks, beautiful"), with the happy couple kicking the soccer ball around in Fenway Park while the tears were still drying and Aaron Boone barely having crossed home plate.
And now he’s tripping out of the batter’s box, enough of a past icon to warrant top billing on SportsCenter and the reawakening of admiration for a guy who could go hard into the hole, kick that leg up, and whip over to Mo Vaughn or Mike Stanley over at first, then jack an 0-2 slider into the net, before they put seats there. No at-bat antics have been copied like that since Babe Ruth pointed to centerfield. Even Derek Jeter aped him, in that heartwarming 1999 All-Star Game, which Nomar started thanks largely to the ballot-stuffing efforts of one Tim Grassey, CHS sophomore.
The Cape Cod team got killed that Sunday and I had to scrape together the second game's early-inning details from the begrudging scorekeeper and his meticulously kept book, but I filed my story on time. And, driving back to the ballpark I beeped my horn and yelled his name, and everyone alongside Route 28 would wave back and know who I was hollering about, and how I felt.
No more; there’s new reasons for shouting.
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