Sports

Attention Yankees! “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over!”

The 2004 American League Championship Series, featuring the Red Sox Nation versus the Evil Empire was such a historical event, I had to write about it.  Without that victorious run to glory, who knows what would have happened in 2007.  Now for the story.

The Yankees’ decision to have the great Yogi Berra on the receiving end of the ceremonial first pitch before the start of the 2004 ALCS Game 7 was no afterthought.  As any self-respecting baseball buff already knows, this rivalry conjures up more than its share of past heroes, villains, scapegoats, demons, ghosts, and curses.

One way to have superstition on your side is to bring in one of the men who contributed significantly to the Yankee dynasty of the past, hoping that some of that magic will find its way to the current crop of stars who are burdened with extending that dynasty.

What the Yankees really needed to do, however, was to remember one of Yogi's most quoted lines: "It ain't over 'til it's over."  Never in baseball's history was that statement more true than when the Yankees had a three games to zero advantage against the Boston Red Sox.

At that point in time, I am willing to bet that every member of the Yankee organization thought that this championship was safely in the bag.  After all, how could the Red Sox possibly win four games in a row, with the last two to be played in the House That Ruth Built? Surely the Yanks would get at least one win somewhere along the way, and though they might never admit it, more than a few Boston fans felt the same way.

When the Sox were one inning away from defeat in Game 4, it was certainly beginning to look like "déjà vu all over again."  But when the Sox gallantly rallied to win in extra innings, it was beginning to look like "the future ain't what it used to be."

For those of us who have suffered with the Red Sox for more years than we care to admit, one thing we have learned the hard way is that a baseball game is never over until the final out. For the Yankee players and fans, which have been blessed with an avalanche of championships during their storied history, this is a lesson that is very hard to swallow. They are not used to losing and they certainly never expected to lose this time halfway through the series.

For that reason alone, it was perhaps supremely fitting that the biggest sports meltdown ever would happen to them in their own ballpark against the very team they want to beat the most.  This has a way of taking monster egos making monster salaries and giving them a raw taste of what can happen when arrogance by one team is overcome by the sheer desire and grit of another.

Before the ALCS started, I predicted the Sox would win in six games. Admittedly I had no clue and I would have been exiled from home if I hadn't given the winning edge to the Sox. But I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I didn't have my doubts after the Sox failed to show up for Game 3, figuratively speaking of course.

It seemed like every man the Yankees sent to the plate was getting on base, and that the great Babe himself was helping them to swing the bat.  I only had to think back to the prior year to recall that Aaron Boone, an improbable hero by most accounts, had lifted a ball over the fence after the Sox had squandered a "comfortable" lead late in the game. I had seen this before.  With the Red Sox, no lead is ever comfortable.

In the greatest World Series of all time, I watched two of the best teams in history battle for seven close games until the Big Red Machine put the final nail in the coffin of the Red Sox. That was 1975 and the players' names still ring in my ears.  For Cincinnati: Rose, Bench, Perez, Geronimo, Griffey, Concepcion, Morgan, and Foster. For Boston: Yastrzemski, Burleson, Evans, Petrocelli, Lynn, Fisk, Carbo, and Tiant. There are too many great ones to list them all here (and we’ll never know how things would have turned out if Jim Rice hadn’t been injured).

It was heartbreaking to lose that series which made it all the more difficult to watch again in 1986. No matter how loyal a Sox fan you are, deep down in the pit of your stomach is this gnawing ache that tells you something horrible will eventually happen to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Do I even have to mention that dribbler through Buckner's legs when we were one pitch away from breaking the curse?

We Boston fans are surely gluttons for punishment. Here we were again, going into the World Series the week before Halloween with all the ghosts and goblins of Series past swirling through our heads.  Our team of self-proclaimed "idiots" might remind us of the misfits that Pappy Boyington led into aerial combat as commander of the Black Sheep Squadron of World War II fame. Under Boyington, these men accomplished things that most of them never thought possible.

With all that unforgettable history behind them, this Red Sox team proved that they could do something that few thought would be possible. Rather than succumb to baseball's most dominating franchise ever, they picked themselves up and set out to do something that no team had ever done before. That kind of spirit, confidence, and attitude is not easy to teach; it has to come from within. If these guys truly are idiots, then we surely need to rewrite the dictionary.

"If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be." Who knows what Yogi meant by that quote. In a perfect world, the Red Sox would finally win the World Series during my lifetime and forever exorcise The Curse of the Great Bambino. But the more I think about it, the more I conclude that ending my lifelong Red Sox misery now would give me nothing to look forward to in the future.

Misery loves company, and I can't imagine not talking about the Red Sox the same way we have for the past 86 years.  In a couple of weeks we just might have to call them World Champions. That would take a long, long time for me to get used to.

---Writer’s Note: Who knew they would sweep that World Series and then win it all again only three short years later?

Freelance Writing by Michael Sanibel ^SM —  Freelance Writer