by David Ortiz
It didn’t seem necessary as we cruised through six innings. We led 6–1, and there was no reason to think we’d blow a lead like that in the final three innings. But the Angels got to us in the top of the seventh. They forced us to use four pitchers in the inning, with their biggest hit being a grand slam from league MVP Vladimir Guerrero. His slam tied the score at 6. For a while, it looked like the Angels were going to take the lead in the top of the ninth. They loaded the bases with one out against our new, dominant closer, Keith Foulke. He got out of the jam with consecutive strikeouts. We went quickly in the ninth, so it was on to extra innings.
In the bottom of the 10th, the Angels had gone to their fourth pitcher of the night, a 22-year-old kid named Francisco Rodríguez. He was a talented pitcher, an All-Star, and had one of the highest strikeout rates in baseball. For some reason, I saw the ball well when I faced him. I knew that if I came up against him in the 10th, he’d be taken out and Angels manager Mike Scioscia would likely bring in a lefty to deal with me. Rodríguez gave up a leadoff single to Johnny Damon, but he followed with getting Mark Bellhorn to ground out and surprising Manny with strike three looking.
I was up next.
Just as I’d thought, Rodríguez was removed from the game and replaced by the Angels’ Game 1 starter, left-hander Jarrod Washburn. I’d gone back and forth with Washburn over the years. I considered him a power lefty in the sense that although he was consistently between 92 and 94 miles per hour on his fastball, I felt like he threw a heavy ball. He seemed to throw a lot of fastballs that would tail away from me, on the outside of the plate. So, as my friend Dennis was encouraging me to hit and the fans along the lines were rhythmically banging the green walls in anticipation of something big, I made up my mind. As soon as I saw Washburn emerge from the bullpen, I knew I was right. I was going to look for a pitch away and drive it.
With certain pitchers I’ve faced over the years, I just feel confident that I’m going to do some damage. A few of them, like my boy David Wells, are friends of mine. Kevin Brown was someone I felt that way about. And so was Washburn. My confidence level was already high because of the season I’d had, and the atmosphere at Fenway pushed it somewhere else. I’ve always been amazed at people who criticize baseball players for showing emotion, especially in playoff games. What do they expect when every move you make is with the game on the line? You’re a competitor. You want to be successful for your team and your city. You’re not supposed to respond when everyone is losing their minds in the stands, to the point where you really can’t hear anything?
Why not?
I wasn’t going to overthink anything against Washburn. I was sticking with my plan. He threw what I expected him to, and I instantly recognized the rotation of a fastball fading away from me. The only thing I didn’t predict was that the ball caught slightly more of the plate than Washburn wanted. I was relaxed as I put a good swing on it, and I knew it was gone as soon as I made contact. It soared toward and then over the Green Monster, and all those individual conversations I mentioned merged into a mass of sound. I lifted my right hand into the air and kept it that way for a while as I rounded the bases. My teammates were at home plate waiting for me, and we all celebrated with group jumping and hugging, with the plate underneath us somewhere.
It didn’t seem like any fan left the park. I could hear some of them yelling and some of them trying to sing along to “Dirty Water,” the Fenway anthem after wins. My favorite line in there is “Boston, you’re my home!” That’s exactly what it had become for me. I thought Pedro had lost it that day in the Dominican when, outside of a restaurant, he cheered when I told him that I had been released by Minnesota. He explained later that he was excited because he knew I had a chance to play with him in Boston. I spotted Pedro as I stood on the field after the walk-off, and there was a wide smile and pure joy on his face. He was right. This was better than anything I’d experienced in baseball. We had won the game and the series, and now there was just a short wait for what I’d planned an entire year for. I knew we’d have another chance to take on the Yankees for the pennant, and here we were. I was certain that it wouldn’t end like it had the previous season.
I enjoyed everything about playing in New York. It was abnormal, but in a good way. There were more lights and cameras than normal. More broadcasters and reporters, speaking English and Spanish, asking more questions than normal. There were more people in the park, which could seat 20,000 more fans than Fenway. As a left-handed hitter, I imagined what it would be like to play half of the games with a fence so close in right field, just over 300 feet away.
All around us in the stands were famous actors, rappers, and entertainers. And across from us on the field was a team of remarkable players who I knew even then would be in the Hall of Fame one day. Derek Jeter. Mariano Rivera. Alex Rodriguez. Gary Sheffield. Mike Mussina. The manager, Joe Torre, would be a Hall of Famer too. I loved the history of the park, and even the sound of it. The public address announcer was a man named Bob Sheppard. I’d never seen him, but from his voice I pictured him as a precise, elegant gentleman in no hurry to get anywhere. I couldn’t get enough of the entire production. I loved the competition between us and the Yankees, but I can’t lie and say I didn’t also love all the attention. I counted on it. I felt stronger knowing that I could help my team win a game while everyone in the world, it seemed, was watching.
Despite my affection for New York, we couldn’t get out of there quickly enough after the first two games of the championship series. In Game 1, we learned just how bad Schilling’s ankle was. He didn’t look like himself in the opener and lasted just three innings. Baseball writers from around the country reported that he needed surgery. Baseball commentators suggested that the potential loss of Schilling for the series would be too much for us to overcome. In Game 2, Pedro pitched well. The problem was that the Yankees’ starter, Jon Lieber, pitched one of the sharpest and most consistent games of his life. Our offense, the best in baseball, was held to a run.
I didn’t detect any fear or doubt from my teammates. We were going back to Fenway, where we didn’t just win games—we wore people out there. We won more than two-thirds of our home games, and I think our family approach had a lot to do with it. It wasn’t just the players. Tiffany had dozens of best friends among the players’ wives and girlfriends and used to call Trot Nixon’s wife, Katherine, a saint. Tiffany knew that if we weren’t hanging out with Pedro and his family, Johnny Damon and his wife, Michelle, were likely doing something for the team at their house. There was Jeanna Millar, Dawn Timlin . . . so many great families. We were together all the time, and I think that closeness put the focus on fun and kept us out of any long-term arguments or any other foolishness. Any kind of foolishness going on with the team was by design; I guess that’s why one of our nicknames was “The Idiots.”
I knew we’d score some runs and get back in the series. But on one of the strangest nights of my career, the opposite happened. And I’ll admit it: I was crushed. Game 3 had begun as if it would turn into one of those classics that’s decided in the ninth inning. Or extra innings. Instead, it was probably over in the fifth, when the Yankees led 13–6. Maybe we knew we couldn’t win it in the seventh, when it was 17–8. At the end of the night, it was New York ahead by the embarrassing score of 19–8.
Listen, I don’t care what anyone tells you now. When you’re down three games in a best-of-seven series with the Yankees, you’re not thinking, Hey, we’re going to come back and win this shit. That’s fiction. They had put up fireworks the game before with 19 runs, and it was our third straight loss to them. I’d be a straight-up bullshitter if I told you I was thinking we could win the series. I wanted to play the game the right way and not get swept. They had just kicked our ass, and they were an incredible team. They had a lot of confidence in themselves. I didn’t see any reason to say they were going to collapse and we were going to come back. The only person who said that was my friend Kevin Millar, but of course he would say that
—Millar doesn’t have a brain.
Seriously, as we headed to Game 4 at Fenway, we didn’t want to leave the fans with this thought of us. Not only did I know what our fans would say about us if we got swept, I knew what would be said to them by New Yorkers. There were New Yorkers and Yankees hats all over Boston. If we allowed the Yankees to send us home, at home, their smirks would be there permanently. There would also be more changes. More trades. More negative commentary about baseball in Boston and doubts about our ability to win a World Series in our lifetimes.
We did a good job of keeping some drama in the series. It was competitive in the bottom of the ninth in Game 4, but we trailed by a run, 4–3. The Yankees brought out their weapon, the opponent I respected the most in my career: Mariano Rivera, who had saved 53 games in the regular season. I thought he was brilliant, and that had nothing to do with his saves or his sub-two ERA. He threw one pitch, a cutter, over and over, and yet hitters couldn’t figure him out. My batting average was okay against him, but I never felt that I crushed any of his pitches. He could make your life miserable.
The sellout crowd at Fenway was standing when Mariano began the ninth by pitching to Millar. I’ve known Millar since we were both in the minors, and I can tell you he’s been a comedian his entire life. He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in baseball. But he knew baseball, and he could be businesslike when he needed to. I loved his approach against Mariano. He worked a leadoff walk, which allowed us to bring in pinch-runner Dave Roberts. Roberts was a fast and daring base runner, and as soon as he got on the field, he started distracting Mariano by taking a huge lead. When he decided to run, it seemed he would get to second easily. But the catcher, Jorge Posada, made a great throw to second. Anyone else on our team probably would have been out. Roberts, though, slid his left hand into second base just before Derek Jeter made a swipe at him for the tag.
Safe.
The crowd had been with us all night, and now they were louder than they had been in that series clincher against the Angels. They wanted so much right there, and we could all feel it. It all came down to one thing: they were tired of being embarrassed by the Yankees. That was true of this series, the 2003 series, the 1999 series, and all the way back through history. I wanted to give them something special, but first we just needed to push across a run. Bill Mueller was at the plate, and he singled up the middle to bring home Roberts. It was 4–4 and we had a chance.
I could have broken that tie with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth. Mariano was a master, and I could feel that he had me off balance. He got me to pop up to second, and that threat was over. I knew if I could get another opportunity, we’d win it. I respected so many of their pitchers, but I knew Mariano wouldn’t be in the game my next at-bat. I liked my percentages against anyone who wasn’t him.
In the 12th inning, that man turned out to be Paul Quantrill.
He was the perfect example of why I stayed up late at night in the off-season, thinking about pitchers. I had watched a lot of video on Quantrill, who had pitched for Boston years before and who had one of the toughest pitches to identify in the game. It was a front-door sinker, and he’d gotten me out with it before. Nasty pitch. It starts off coming right at you, and you think it’s going to hit you. If you don’t know the pitch, you’ll give up on it. But if you anticipate it, you know it comes toward you and then sinks back over the plate. What makes it even trickier is that some pitchers throw a cutter with that same action. So it’s easy to get confused and think the cutter is the sinker. That’s an easy way to get jammed and pop up.
I had seen that video, though, and I didn’t remember Quantrill ever throwing me a cutter. I was sitting sinker. As I went to the plate, with Manny already on first, I was thinking, Come on, give it to me. I didn’t want to just make contact. My mentality was that I needed to hit it out. He threw that front-door sinker and I was ready for it. Kind of. The pitch he threw was excellent. It started more inside than I thought it would, so for a split second it gave the illusion of hitting me. Then, although I knew it was coming back over the plate, it came back more inside than middle. I was fortunate, though. I got ahold of the pitch, and as it flew over the outfield and into the right-field stands, I was immediately grateful for the payoff of hard work. I knew I could do something like that again, and so could my teammates. Finally, it was a real series.
The next day I recognized our team again. We were The Idiots. We were laughing and telling jokes. I noticed the difference in our attitude from the moment I walked into the park. I think there was relief that we weren’t going to get swept, but there was no satisfaction in winning just a game. If the Yankees were going to win the series, at least we could stop them from celebrating on our field. It was on, and you could feel it even with the National Anthem. Our fans were even more intense than the night before, and that had been the wildest crowd I’d ever seen and heard.
In the eighth inning, we were in a similar position as the night before. This time we trailed 4–2, and I was facing another former Red Sox pitcher: Tom “Flash” Gordon, one of the most difficult relievers to plan for. He had a fantastic breaking ball that went twelve o’clock to six o’clock, a big looper that messed with your timing. And if you looked for it too much, Flash threw a 97-mile-per-hour fastball that could shut you down. We battled in the eighth until I got a hitter’s count and guessed that he would have to throw me a fastball. I hit it over the Green Monster to make it 4–3, and Jason Varitek hit a sacrifice fly to tie it at 4.
The score stayed tied for hours—literally. When we got to the 14th inning, the game, amazingly, had passed the five-and-a-half-hour mark, and I was facing a pitcher named Esteban Loaiza. The two teams had used 14 pitchers in the game. Anyone who stayed in the park or stayed up to watch the game on TV could feel the desperation. Down 3–1 in the series, we were feeling desperate for obvious reasons, but the Yankees were feeling it too, and they probably shouldn’t have. They had control of the series. But as the game extended past midnight and they saw our fight, I think they started to get nervous about what they had awakened. The next night in New York I would see those nerves, and it would be because of what happened in that 14th. With Manny and Johnny Damon on base, I worked Loaiza for a game-winning single.
My teammates swarmed me again, just as they had at the end of Game 4. Friends of mine and media members alike wanted to know what I was feeling. Nervous? Excited for the pressure situation? Neither. I was 28 years old, and we were playing the Yankees for a chance to go to the World Series. I felt blessed to be a part of it. I just wanted to return to New York.
As we prepared for Game 6, I looked at the Yankees and saw that they didn’t have that superhero pose that they usually had in the dugout. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. They were tight. And we knew that feeling because we’d had it ourselves from the middle of Game 3 until the final out of Game 4. Now, before the start of the sixth game, we felt that we were ahead in the series although we were down three games to two.
Positive things started to happen for us, beginning with Schilling, who probably shouldn’t have been pitching. He’d torn tendons in his right ankle, and the medical team had done what it could to stabilize them. But the fix was temporary, and you could see the blood seeping through his right sock as he stood on the mound. He picked us up more than I or anyone else dreamed he would, and after seven miraculous innings in which he gave up a single run, we were in position to be where we were the year before: in New York for a chance to win the pennant.
In New York, I decided that everything didn’t have to be like the previous year. Then, I’d managed just two hours of sleep as I locked myself in my Times Square hotel room and refused to relax. Not this time. A few of my friends were in town, and after the game we went for a late-night meal in Queens. We went to Café Rubio, ordered all sorts of delicious Dominican food and red wine, and sat in a private room in the back.
We were having a great time, telling stories, laughing, and drinking. It was start
ing to get late, and one of my boys suggested that we leave. I guess I had been enjoying myself more than I thought, because I was tipsy. As I walked through the restaurant I saw a few Yankees fans sitting near the front who recognized me and playfully teased me in Spanish.
“Estas borracho?” they asked, laughing.
They wanted to know if I was drunk.
“How are you supposed to be ready for Game 7 when you’re here like this?”
We exchanged a few one-liners, and then I pointed to the big-screen TV on the wall.
“I want you guys to be here tomorrow to watch the game,” I told them. “I’m going to hit a home run.”
They laughed and said they’d be there, and we left. They didn’t realize that I always felt at ease against Kevin Brown, the Game 7 starter. They didn’t know how relaxed our team was. And as I’d see myself before the start of the final game, they didn’t know just how uncomfortable the Yankees were with the position they were in. I have a friend who works for a Spanish-language newspaper in New York, and he had gone to the New York clubhouse a couple of hours before first pitch.
“You guys are about to whup that ass tonight,” he told me.
I asked him why he put it that way.