Around The Horn

It’s January 8th. It’s been snowing hard all day here in Vermont, and the daylight began to fade in mid-afternoon behind the snow-thickened atmosphere. A good day for baseball, I thought. How better to chase the glooms of a cold winter day than with the Boys of Summer, in crisp, white uniforms, playing on a sunny emerald field?

I found the tape I had in mind: May 3, 2003. Pedro starting for the Red Sox v. Rick Reed for the Twins, at Fenway. I’d been at Fenway that very day to witness the game in person, but had not seen the taped broadcast. I remembered that it had been a beautiful day, sunny and relatively mild. Pedro had pitched a complete game – one run on four hits and twelve strikeouts. I remembered how we had stood and chanted his name: “Pedro! Pedro! Pedro!” and had screamed our throats raw with each successive strikeout, as he walked with calm confidence – head high, shoulders back – to the dugout at the end of each inning. Nomar had had a couple of hits, including one in a wild seven-run sixth inning.

So I put on this tape to chase the winter blues. But as it went on, the sadder and sadder I became.

Leave it to a Red Sox fan to get depressed while watching a game My Boys won on a sunny spring day. Only a Red Sox fan could be fully aware that her team has just won the World Series, and still be depressed.

It’s not the World Series win that has me down. How could it be? It’s what I’ve wanted so badly for just about my entire life. I’m not sad for what we’ve won. I’m sad for what we’ve lost.

Let me put it another way. I’ve always been a baseball fan, a Red Sox fan, but when I was a kid, we almost never saw games on TV. This was years before the advent of satellite dishes and we lived beyond the reach of cable. We almost never got the games on the radio, here where the mountains play havoc with AM signals. I was a baseball fan, but of the casual variety.

The strike of ’94 (which began the day before my birthday) turned me off. Though the Sox won the division in ’95, they were wiped out early in the playoffs. Then, in 1997, something happened.

Nomar.

The young skinny guy with the funny name burst upon the stage at Fenway and galvanized imaginations of Sox fans everywhere. He could hit, field, run and throw, hit for power and steal bases. He tore up the league and won Rookie of the Year.

Pedro arrived in time for the next season. Pedro, the little slip of a man who could snap his slender body like a whip and throw lightning.

Nomar and Pedro breathed life into my flagging interest in baseball. Here, finally, were two guys who could do it all. Here was hope again – two real, tangible, engaging reasons for Sox fans to hope. Both were signed for a long spell; surely with these guys at the core of the team, good things would happen.

These names, these faces, became as regular and familiar as the seasons. Turn on the TV in February, and there were Pedro and Nomar and Tek and Lowe, the hot Florida sun on them as the sweated through PFP and infield drills, and split-squad games in Fort Myers and Jupiter and Dunedin and Tampa.

They were so familiar: Nomar’s lean face lit by his endearing inverted smile; the shape of Pedro’s long fingers as they demonstrated his change-up grip. Nomar, making in impossible off-balance throw from deep short to just nip the runner at first. Pedro’s face contorted as he put all his lean strength into a pitch. Nomar’s tug-tug-tap-tap as he watched the pitcher look in for the sign, his quick swing, and toss of the bat to the right as he dug for first, running out—what? A home run? A grounder to second? A gapper to left-center? He ran out every play. I can just see him now, leaning as he took the turn around second, sliding into third, safe on a triple to the Triangle.

Pedro, his face stern and humorless as he looks in to take the sign from Tek, then his body whips the ball forward, and the batter, mistaking the change-up for a fastball, swings almost before the ball gets there. Amidst a shower of cheers, Pedro walks with proud dignity to the dugout and points to the sky in silent, eloquent thanks.

They were not stern and serious all the time; both could be seen talking and laughing in the dugout, particularly Pedro, who delighted in antics to entertain his teammates, dancing and fooling around. Once he was being such a pest that his teammates tied him to a post in the dugout and even taped his mouth shut.

They were both so familiar, and had meant so much to their teammates, and the fans, and the city. Now both are gone.

Regardless of the circumstances of their departure, and regardless on which side of those particular debates the fans came down, those two men at one time were everything to Sox fans. It was reassuring to see #5 step in, and tug-tug-tap-tap with runners on base, innings running short, and a game to win, the Fenway Faithful roaring “Nomaaaaah!” There was magic in those wrists and that quick eye, magic enough to see the pitch, and hit the ball just so, to send it where the fielders weren’t standing. It was reassuring to see #45 on the mound with a slim lead to protect, knowing there was guile in his mind and magic in that arm and those long fingers, magic enough to make the ball spin just so and miss the bat.

So Nomar showed a disturbing predilection for getting hurt. But did he ever play as if he were bored, as if the game meant little to him? Did he ever fail to try? Did he ever show disrespect for the Game, his teammates, the fans? He made errors, but often his mistakes were the result of trying too hard, of not playing it safe. Can we fault him for that?

So Pedro was arrogant and outspoken. So are movie stars and politicians and CEOs and middle executives. Once in a while he let his emotions run away with his common sense. So he was human. In recent years his pitching was a little erratic, his record not as stellar, but given a little run support, much of the criticism leveled at him would never have been spoken (or perhaps even conceived).

Neither one was perfect, and by the time Pedro left not even the staunchest fan could deny that he was no longer the pitcher he had been in ’99 and ’00. Everyone could see that Nomar’s range, in his final games with Boston, was limited by his nagging foot injury, but his bat was as quick as ever; in just over 30 games with the Sox, his batting average was .321 – very respectable.

Now both play for other teams, in another league. They’ll face each other as adversaries now; maybe Nomar will get a hit off Pedro; Maybe Pedro will strike out Nomar on three pitches. But whatever they do on a field now, it’s of no consequence to the Red Sox. The Boston front office has done its work with a marked lack of sentimentality, which, I suppose, is as all businesses operate.

Being a fan, however, is all about sentiment. It’s about staking your heart on the actions and fortunes of a group of men playing a game. I, for one, can’t root for a team and not root for the players, not welcome them into my heart. I’ve rooted for the Red Sox for a long time, and seen players come and go, familiar faces replaced by newcomers who become dear to me, and those faces and names replaced in time. I knew that Pedro and Nomar would eventually be replaced by new guys, younger guys – but I had hoped, in my sentimentality, that they would stay in Fenway home whites until they retired from the game, circling the warning track like Yaz, departing but at the same time staying.

One of the last things Nomar said before catching a plane to Chicago that traumatic evening in July was, “They can take the shirt off my back, but they can’t take away my memories.”

Likewise for this fan. These were the two players who brought me back to baseball, who ignited my interest and made me into a more impassioned and informed fan than I had ever been. They can trade Nomar and let Pedro walk, and take down their images in the ballpark, and move their formerly treasured numbered jerseys to the bargain bin in the souvenir shops, but they can’t erase the images from my mind, or devalue what these players meant to me. Baseball came back to life for me through them, and that can’t be traded away.

Annie