THANK GOODNESS FOR ANGELL'S IN AMERICA:

GONE SOUTH: In a last surprise, the young Marlins are champs. (ROGER ANGELL, 2003-11-17, The New Yorker)

It comes to a seventh game—could anyone have doubted it? This will be the twenty-sixth time the Red Sox and Yankees have faced off this year—a record for any two teams in the annals—and while there have been stretches when the latest renewal held all the drama of a couple of cellmates laying out a hand of rummy, this is another killer dénouement. For all we know, it’s up there with the 1978 Bucky Dent playoff and the DiMaggio late return of 1949. There’s a wired, non-stop holiday din at the Stadium, which dies away only with the first intensely watched pitches. Everything matters now. Clemens is back and so is Pedro—but this Roger appears frail and thought-burdened. The No. 2 Boston batter, Todd Walker, raps a safe knock after a ten-pitch at-bat, and Nomar Garciaparra lines out hard to right. An inning later, Kevin Millar singles, and Trot Nixon, from his flat-footed left-handed stance, delivers a businesslike homer into the stands in right: his third two-run job in the post-season. With two out, the bearded, dad-like Jason Varitek doubles into the right-field corner. Johnny Damon’s grounder looks like the last out but—geez!—third baseman Enrique Wilson mishandles the ball and his throw pulls first baseman Nick Johnson off the bag, as Varitek turns the corner and scores. It’s 3-0, and when the teams change sides the Stadium has gone anxious and pissed-off conversational: fans up and down the stuffed tiers complaining to their seatmates or sending the bad news home on their cells, with gestures: . . . plus Wilson is in for defense, right? . . . our only chance was stay close to goddam Pedro.

Martinez, for his part, survives some first-inning wobbles and is soon in rhythm: the stare-in from behind his red glove, the velvety rock and turn, and the strikes arriving in clusters. After each out, he gloves the returning ball backhand, and gazes about with lidded hauteur. No one else in the world has eyes so far apart. The Yanks go down quickly again, and we’re at the top of the fourth—and the startling sound, it’s like a tree coming apart, of Kevin Millar’s solo shot up into the upper-deck left-field stands. Clemens, down 4-0 and almost helpless, gives up a walk and a hit-and-run single to Mueller and departs, maybe for the last time ever. A ten-year-old Yankee fan I know named Noah has by this time gone down on his knees on the concrete in front of his seat near first base, hiding his head. [...]

Now, a month later, a little of New England’s pain and anguish may have dispersed, helped along by the Yankees’ loss in the World Series and that late footage of Derek Jeter, still with his cap and spikes and wristbands on, sitting disconsolate in front of his Stadium locker a full hour after the Yanks’ elimination.

Grady Little has been let go, and the Red Sox have offered waivers on Manny Ramirez, hoping to trade him and his twenty-million-dollar-a-year contract for new pitching. If you want to tap into the Sox fans’ psyche now, you have to consult a new Web site, www.redsoxhaiku.com, where it comes in eloquent triplets:

Bright leaves falling. Clear
Blue sky. Frost at dawn. Autumn.
Red Sox lose again.

Or:

Buckner or Little
It doesn’t really matter
Someone will f[oul] up

And:

Hey, wait till next year:
Every eighty-six years
Like clockwork. Go Sox.

Joe Torre, who called the Red Sox the best team his Yankees had faced during his eight-year tenure as manager, was short of a haiku by a beat or two in the interview room just before that seventh game, but also on target: “This really is fun, but you don’t know it’s fun until it’s over.”

For Angell fans--which includes anyone who likes baseball and can read--the haiku section here is inevitable, his column on the '86 debacle having had a palindrome for its title: Not So, Boston.

As if being able to get this essay on-line weren't treat enough, The New Yorker has dipped into its unparalleled archives to give us this one too, Four Taverns in the Town (Roger Angell, 1963-10-26, The New Yorker):

Already, two weeks after the event, it is difficult to remember that there was a World Series played this year. It is like trying to recall an economy display of back-yard fireworks. Four small, perfect showers of light in the sky, accompanied by faint plops, and it was over. The spectators, who had happily expected a protracted patriotic bombardment culminating in a grand crescendo of salutes, fireballs, flowerpots, and stomach-jarring explosions, stood almost silent, cricking their necks and staring into the night sky with the image of the last brief rocket burst still pressed on their eyes, and then, realizing at last that there was to be no more, went slowly home, hushing the children who asked, “Is that all?” The feeling of letdown, of puzzled astonishment, persists, particularly in this neighborhood, where we have come to expect a more lavish and satisfactory autumnal show from our hosts, the Yankees, the rich family up on the hill. There has been a good deal of unpleasant chatter (“I always knew they were really cheap,” “What else can you expect from such stuckups?”) about the affair ever since, thus proving again that prolonged success does not beget loyalty.

By choice, I witnessed the Los Angeles Dodgers’ four-game sweep at a remove—over television in four different bars here in the city. This notion came to me last year, during the Series games played in Yankee Stadium against the San Francisco Giants, when it became evident to me that my neighbors in the lower grandstand were not, for the most part, the same noisy, casually dressed, partisan, and knowing baseball fans who come to the park during the regular season. As I subsequently reported, a large proportion of the ticket-holders appeared to be well-to-do out-of-towners who came to the games only because they could afford the tickets, who seemed to have only a slipshod knowledge of baseball, and who frequently departed around the sixth or seventh inning, although all of last year’s games were close and immensely exciting. This year, then, I decided to seek out the true Yankee fan in his October retreat—what the baseball beer commercials refer to as “your neighborhood tavern.” I was especially happy about this plan after the Dodgers clinched the National League pennant, for I well remembered the exciting autumns here in the late forties and the mid-fifties, when the Dodgers and the Yanks, both home-town teams then, met in six different Series in what seemed to be a brilliant and unending war, and the sounds of baseball fell from every window and doorway in town. Those Series were a fever in the city. Secretaries typed only between innings, with their ears cocked to the office radio down the hall, and if business drew you reluctantly into the street (fingering your pool slip, designating your half inning, in your pocket), you followed the ribbon of news via elevator men’s rumors, snatches of broadcasts from passing taxi radios, and the portable clutched to a delivery boy’s ear, until a sudden burst of shouting and laughter sucked you into a bar you were passing, where you learned that Campy or Duke had parked one, or that Vic Raschi had struck out Furillo with two on.

New England remains very much like it was in days of yore, at least as regards Red Sox baseball. At work, on the night shift, we all had the Sox-Yankees games on the radio and random shouts and groans would arise from scattered cubicles. After the 7th we all breathed a sigh of relief that Pedro was gone and I left, figuring I could stop and get milk and eggs and still make it home before the bottom of the 8th. The FoodStop clerk, of course, had the radio on too and as he rang me up the announcers mentioned how Pedro was really laboring now.

Me: "What the Heck? Didn't they yank him?"

Clerk: "Believe me, you don't wannna know..."

Got back in the car and listened to the rest of the inning on the way home, swearing at Grady Little. The Wife was still up, watching the game, but shut it off because she knew what was coming and couldn't stand to watch. Smart woman, the Wife.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 18, 2003 9:06 AM