The Yankee Years Part 16

"I'll tell you exactly what I said," Torre told him. "If it's short term, I want you. If it's long term, I want him, because he's younger. But I've always respected you. As the opposing manager you scare me when you get to the plate. So if I feel that way, then I want you on my side. I'm telling you exactly what the conversation was. Whether you choose to believe it or not is up to you."

"Okay," Sheffield said. "I'm committed."

Sheffield instantly became a different player. That same night he whacked four hits, including a home run, and drove in six runs. The outburst started a 17-game stretch in which Sheffield hit .406 with seven home runs and 24 RBIs. It was cla.s.sic Sheffield. His mood and his production could turn in an instant.

"It happened that night," Torre said. "It was like he turned it on. And he told me, 'Don't worry. I'll deal with everything.' Because if you notice, he never charges the mound or anything like that. He takes it out on you on the field. But that night in Baltimore, all of a sudden he started becoming a player and a ferocious. .h.i.tter and a gamer. He played hurt, did all that stuff."

Sheffield was the fulcrum of a punis.h.i.+ng offense that led the league in home runs and walks and finished second-to the Red Sox-in runs. By the end of the season Torre had stacked the top of his lineup with a devastating run of All-Star hitters: in order, Jeter, Rodriguez, Sheffield, Matsui and Posada. Giambi sometimes cracked the lineup, though he was a sh.e.l.l of himself, having missed half the season largely due to a benign pituitary tumor.

The Red Sox, however, could match the Yankees' thunder, and then some. They outscored the Yankees by 53 runs over the course of the season. Their biggest advantage, though, came from pitching. Boston's staff was the third best in the American League. New York's staff ranked sixth.

For a second straight year, the Red Sox and Yankees were on a collision course to meet in the American League Champions.h.i.+p Series. The Yankees dismissed the Twins in the Division Series in four games. The Red Sox flicked aside the Angels even more handily, taking three straight from them. The New YorkBoston rivalry was the epicenter of October baseball yet again, just as it had in 2003, although this time it would be as much about the previous November and December as anything else. The Yankees would try to beat Boston without a single lefthander in their rotation, or anyone in their rotation with pure strikeout stuff against a power-packed lineup. The Red Sox were fortified by Schilling, one of the best big-game pitchers in baseball, who was the grand prize for having outflanked the Yankees in November. Schilling had been everything the Red Sox had hoped, winning 21 games for them and fronting a remarkably strong and durable rotation. Schilling, Martinez, Lowe, Wakefield and Arroyo did not miss a turn, taking all but five of Boston's 162 starts.

The Yankees once commanded postseason series because they were so deep in starting pitching. By the 2004 ALCS, those days were over. The Red Sox had flipped the table on the Yankees. They had the superior pitching. The rivalry was about to take a turn of legendary proportions.

End of the Curse

The YankeesRed Sox rivalry may have been the best thing to happen to baseball, but both managers came to loathe it.

Each time the Yankees and Red Sox would play one another, even in April-h.e.l.l, even in spring training- spring training-there was an Armageddon quality to the proceedings. Baseball never was designed to be like this, not until October, anyway. The sport took great pride in the sheer volume of the season; "a marathon," as the players proudly liked to call it. But every game between the Yankees and Red Sox brought an NFL-like urgency to every game, every inning, every pitch. It ran counter to everything Joe Torre and Terry Francona tried to impress upon their clubs, knowing the wisdom of keeping their team on an even emotional footing. After just about every time the Yankees and Red Sox were done with one of these series, either Torre would call Francona or Francona would call Torre.

"Are you sick of this yet?" Torre would say.

"I'm glad it's over," Francona would say.

"You and me both, pal," Torre would reply. "See you in about six weeks."

Torre and Francona shared not only a unique vantage point to the rivalry, but an honest friends.h.i.+p. Torre had played with Francona's father, former big leaguer t.i.to Francona, and had recommended Francona for his first managing job with the Phillies to Philadelphia general manager Lee Thomas.

"I played with Terry's dad so I felt a closeness to him for that reason," Torre said. "I can still think of him as a kid. And I remember recommending him to Lee Thomas. Terry knew baseball, he was cerebral, and he wasn't showy. He was just a basic, good baseball person."

Torre and Francona believed that the whole YankeesRed Sox dynamic had grown so big and so emotional that the managers dreaded it.

"It would wear you out," Torre said. "We had a common bond, because we both would feel the same way. We're both going through the same pressures. There really is no favorite. There's no one team that's clearly better than the other. It's like MichiganOhio State. It's doesn't matter how good your teams are. You're supposed to win. Each side.

"It's the media coverage that can wear you out. It's one game on the schedule and I know it's Boston. I know it's a team in your division. But I think the rivalry got out of hand as far as magnifying every single thing that went on in the game. It's absolutely exhausting. And you know what's interesting? The game is tense, but the game is even tenser only because you know you're going to have to explain the outcome in every small detail. The game itself, though, is great. It's everything else that wears you out."

From the time John Henry bought the Red Sox in 2002, when Boston began to make the commitment to look the Yankees in the eye and be a worthy rival, to the start of the 2004 American League Champions.h.i.+p Series, when the Red Sox could best measure that progress, the Yankees and Red Sox had played 64 times, including the t.i.tanic 2003 ALCS. Each team had won exactly 32 of those 64 games.

Both teams had made significant in-season alterations to their clubs to get to the ALCS. For the Yankees, it meant dumping the object of the intense and expensive international bidding war they had engaged in with the Red Sox less than two years earlier: righthanded pitcher Jose Contreras. The big man who was supposed to be an ace for the Yankees struggled with his command and the subtleties of pitching, such as pitching out of the stretch and holding runners. He also had a particularly harmful and unforgiveable flaw with the Yankees: he could not pitch against the Red Sox. Contreras was 0-4 with a 16.44 ERA against Boston.

"He showed sparks of great pitching here and there," Torre said, "but he had a phobia against Boston and Boston just whipped his a.s.s. He was tipping his pitches against them. They were in his head. They waxed him. They just waxed him.

"His stuff was good, but he had a lot of issues that I felt had to do with pitching in New York. I had gotten to the point where I said, 'He just can't help it.' He just didn't seem comfortable in New York."

On July 31, 2004, the day of the trading deadline, the Yankees were on their way toward beating the Orioles, 6-4, at Yankee Stadium when Brian Cashman called Torre.

"We can get Esteban Loaiza for Contreras," Cashman said.

Torre quickly checked with pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre before getting back on the phone with his general manager.

"Do it," Torre replied.

Loaiza was something of an enigma himself, and as a player with free agent rights after the season, only a rental return on the investment in Contreras. Loaiza was 9-5 for the White Sox but with a pudgy 4.86 ERA. The Yankees were his fifth team in seven years. He was 32 years old. Loaiza had won 21 games the previous season, but it was the only year in his life he won more than 11 games. In short, Loaiza was nothing more than a spot starter. The Red Sox once had bought up all the rooms in a hotel to try to keep Contreras away from the Yankees, but now here was the celebrated El t.i.tan de Bronze ingloriously being dumped for a rotation filler. And the Yankees didn't think twice about it. Neither did Contreras. Though he held a no-trade clause, he waived it without asking anything in return.

"At that time we were just looking for someone who could go out there and pitch," Torre said. "We could score runs. Our plan with our pitching was, 'Let's just try to stay in the game,' but even that didn't work sometimes.

"I didn't realize it when I first got to New York, but after having been there a little bit I understood that playing in New York was unlike playing in any other place. People either really embraced it, or they just really had a problem with it. I think Kenny Rogers had a problem with it. David Justice did well with it. Roger Clemens, after a bit, did all right with it. Randy Johnson, no way. I have to put Contreras in the group that had trouble with it."

The Red Sox made an even bigger, more stunning move on that same trading deadline day. Epstein organized an elaborate trade web of four teams involving seven players in order to dump an erstwhile star of his own, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. The Red Sox obtained shortstop Orlando Cabrera from the Expos and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz from the Twins as part of the exchanges. That trade brought more dividends for Boston than the Contreras deal did for New York.

"We had a fatal flaw," Epstein said. "Our defense was terrible."

Under Epstein and Henry, the Red Sox not only embraced statistical a.n.a.lysis but also developed propriety formulas to measure performance. When they ran the numbers on Garciaparra's defense that season, they were astonished at what came out. He was, by a long shot, the worst defensive shortstop in the history of their database. The Red Sox did not rely solely on the numbers. The numbers were backed up by the observations of Red Sox scouts who occasionally checked in on their own team.

"Whether because of age or injury, he just wasn't getting to b.a.l.l.s he normally did," Epstein said. "The pitching was really taking a hit, especially a groundball guy like Derek Lowe, in ways that you can't always see. We knew that teams that win the World Series typically have pretty rangy shortstops. Really, it was our whole infield defense that needed to be addressed."

The other element pus.h.i.+ng Boston toward dealing Garciaparra was that he no longer seemed to be a perfect fit in a clubhouse that had become a band of crazy extroverts, who would become famously self-described as "idiots." Garciaparra was more the quiet, brooding sort, especially ever since spring training of 2003, when the Red Sox offered him what he considered to be a below-market contract extension.

"He was understandably upset," Epstein said. "He became isolated."

When Epstein put Garciaparra on the trade market, only one team, the Cubs, showed any interest at first. They offered to send Boston 24-year-old outfielder David Kelton, but they also wanted to swap pitcher Matt Clement for Lowe. Epstein said no thanks, and furiously went back to work. He eventually pulled enough strings to wind up with Cabrera and Mientkiewicz, two players renowned for their defense.

"Two minutes before the deadline I thought it was dead," Epstein said. "I must have made four dozen calls in the last half hour. It ended up happening right at the deadline. We thought it was the right deal. We knew Cabrera was good offensively but was underperforming. What we knew about his personality convinced us he would have no problem being put on the big stage with everyone watching. It was just what we needed. And we thought our first-base defense had been equally shaky.

"We got two guys. .h.i.tting about .230 at the time, but we thought it was what we needed. We had power, we had a really good pitching staff, but defense was killing us. These guys were exceptional defenders. It helped. Our starting pitching got on a huge roll. Starting in mid-August, they went 30-13."

If the Red Sox had outmaneuvered the Yankees the previous November, they had done so again in August. After the deadline deals, the Red Sox were the best team in baseball over the remainder of the regular season (42-18), 5 games better than the Yankees (36-23).

"Over that year, for sure, I thought they were a better ballclub than us," Torre said. "But the games in the postseason have nothing to do with the season. At that point in time, you throw everything out the window. We certainly were conditioned enough to know that there was n.o.body on the field that could beat us. I mean, they got our attention and I'm sure we got their attention."

Boston's sweep of the Angels in the Division Series allowed the Red Sox to align their rotation to have Schilling and Martinez open the first two games of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium. It sounded great for Boston. Schilling, however, was a diminished pitcher. He had hurt himself while pitching in the Division Series, tearing a tendon sheath in his right ankle. A wholly ineffective Schilling was gone after three innings in Game 1, having buried his team in a 6-0 hole.

One out into the seventh inning, the Yankees led 8-0 and Mike Mussina was throwing a perfect game. The Red Sox suddenly showed their might, and before the Yankees could get five more outs it was 8-7 and Boston had the tying run at third base and Kevin Millar batting. Torre brought in Mariano Rivera and that was the end of Boston scoring. He retired Millar on a pop-up and the Yankees wound up winning, 10-7.

The Yankees also won Game 2, though they did so in far different form, with Lieber besting Martinez in a cla.s.sic pitcher's duel, 3-1. Once again, Torre gave the ball to Rivera with a runner on third and one out in the eighth inning, and the great closer locked down another victory.

There would be no need for Rivera in Game 3. The Yankees won, 19-8, with a prodigious show of hitting in a game that had been tied after three innings, 6-6. The Yankees were rolling, up three games to none, a lead no team in the history of baseball ever had lost.

All was not perfect, though. Yankees starter Kevin Brown, who was supposed to be the ace of the staff, and who had battled back problems most of the year, had pitched horribly and did not look right. In only two innings, Brown gave up four runs on five hits and two walks before Torre sent Vazquez to replace him to start the third inning. (Vazquez, too, was hammered, yielding four runs on seven hits and two walks in 4[image]innings.) It was only the latest episode to explain why Brown engendered no confidence from his teammates. Brown had a famously rotten temper and a surly disposition, attributes that did not serve him well at a time in his career when he could no longer throw as hard as he once did and didn't have the wherewithal to concede to his age and battered body in order to make adjustments.

Brown had missed seven weeks over the summer because of a strained lower back and also because of an intestinal parasite. On September 3, pitching against Baltimore, Brown was staked to a 1-0 lead when he gave up a run in the second inning, yielded another in the third, tweaked his knee while covering first base in the fifth, and was struck on the right forearm by a run-scoring hit in the sixth that stretched the Orioles' lead to 3-1. It was all too much for him and his short fuse to bear. After getting out of the inning, Brown stormed off the field and straight up the runway leading to the clubhouse. Stottlemyre, knowing Brown's low boiling point, and concerned about the shot the pitcher took off his arm, decided he should walk back to the clubhouse to check on the righthander. He found Brown standing in the narrow hallway outside of Torre's office, seething.

"Are you okay, physically?" Stottlemyre asked him.

"What's it look like?" Brown snapped back.

Brown wheeled away from Stottlemyre, walking into the main portion of the clubhouse. He stopped at a concrete pillar and hauled off on it, throwing a hard punch. Brown quickly bent over in pain, holding his hand.

"Tell me that wasn't your right hand," Stottlemyre said.

Brown didn't answer. Stottlemyre thought he saw that Brown was holding his left hand.

"Are you all right?" the pitching coach asked.

Still no answer. Brown kept ignoring his coach.

"Kevin," Stottlemyre said. "I need to know if you can go back and pitch or not. You gotta tell me something."

Brown looked down at his hand. Finally, he spoke.

"No," he said. "I'm not all right."

Stottlemyre knew the first order of business was to alert Torre because the Yankees would need to get a pitcher ready to replace Brown. He walked down the runway, back to the dugout.

"Joe," he said, "you're not going to be too happy with your pitcher."

"What'd he do?" Torre asked.

"He punched a wall," Stottlemyre said. "Might have broken his left hand."

Now Torre left the dugout and headed up the runway and into the clubhouse. He found Brown and immediately began to scream at him.

"That's the most f.u.c.king selfish thing I've ever seen anybody do!" Torre said. "I have no patience for that s.h.i.+t!"

"I'm sorry," Brown said.

Torre's anger and tongue-las.h.i.+ng quickly subsided. He saw that the man in front of him was a beaten man.

Said Torre, "At that point he was so demoralized. He was never a fighter. He never wanted to fight you. Neither was Randy Johnson, for that matter. I like Kevin Brown. The difference between Kevin Brown and David Wells is that both make your life miserable, but David Wells meant to. I don't think Kevin Brown meant to. I don't think Randy meant to. And that's what I go on."

Brown came back from the broken hand to make two starts before the end of the regular season, the first of which was a nightmare against Boston in which he couldn't get out of the first inning. The Red Sox pounded him for six hits and four runs in that abbreviated time. Brown simply generated no good feelings from his team, and ALCS Game 3, while ending up in a blowout victory, continued with Brown as the carrier of bad karma, hardly the role the Yankees had in mind when they traded for him and his $15 million per year salary to take the sting out of losing Pett.i.tte and to provide a return volley to the Red Sox for getting Schilling.

Buried within the Game 3 win was another troubling sign. Torre brought in setup reliever Tom Gordon to pitch the ninth inning with the score 19-8. It was the third straight game in which Gordon was used. Why would Torre use his key eighth-inning reliever in a blowout? Gordon badly was in need of a confidence boost. He appeared jittery in both Game 1 and Game 2, giving up two runs and failing to pitch cleanly in both outings. Torre thought giving him the ninth inning, with n.o.body on base and an 11-run lead, would relax Gordon and give him confidence that would carry over into the next time Torre needed him in a tight spot. Nonetheless, Gordon still appeared on edge. With one out he gave up a double to Trot Nixon. Then he uncorked a wild pitch. He did strike out Millar and retired Bill Mueller on a fly ball to end the inning without a run scoring. It represented progress for Gordon, but only by a small step.

Vazquez, Brown and Gordon all had struggled, but how much could that really matter at this point? The Yankees led the series three games to none. The Red Sox were as good as dead. In the history of Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL, teams trailing 3-0 in a best-of-seven series were 2-231. The Red Sox had a 0.85 percent chance of winning the series. The only teams to recover from the bottom of that well were the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs and the 1975 New York Islanders. The Yankees were starting Orlando Hernandez in Game 4, the veteran righthander with a 9-3 career postseason record. The Red Sox were starting Derek Lowe, who had pitched himself out of the postseason rotation and was only getting the ball because the scheduled Game 4 starter, Tim Wakefield, pitched in relief in Game 3 to save Francona from blowing out his bullpen in the rout.

A few hours before Game 4, Epstein watched Schilling muster his way through a bullpen session at Fenway Park, using a special bootlike spike to try to give support to his wobbly right ankle. No one was sure if he could pitch again in the series. Actually, no one was sure there were going to be any more games in the series.

On his way from the bullpen to the dugout, Epstein was stopped by reporters on the warning track, down the right-field line. They had obituaries and epitaphs to write about this Red Sox team and they wanted the team's general manager to cooperate. Epstein wasn't playing along.

"Guys," he pleaded. "We have one game to win tonight. That's our focus."

The line of questioning didn't end. A columnist, with the sound of the Yankees' bats still ringing in his ears after the 19-8 sh.e.l.lacking, asked Epstein, "Is what happened yesterday an indictment of the lack of professionalism in your clubhouse, especially contrasted to the Yankees? Is that a sign that you can't win with the kind of lawlessness in your clubhouse?"

"Guys," Epstein said, barely concealing his anger, "we might not win, but it has absolutely nothing to do with our makeup."

Epstein marched off into the clubhouse. He was hot. It wasn't the reporters that bothered him most. It was how everything invested in this season, going back to the motivation to redeem the Aaron Boone game, to the stealth securing of Schilling, to the hiring of Francona, to the bold trade of Garciaparra . . . all of it could be washed down the drain without winning so much as one game against the Yankees.

"It was just a thought in the back of my head that wouldn't go away," Epstein said. "I was so p.i.s.sed off about the possibility of getting swept. I'm thinking, I cannot f.u.c.king believe a team this good that played so well down the stretch and could so easily win the World Series is going to be swept by the Yankees. We cannot let it happen."

When Epstein looked around the room he saw reason to be encouraged.

"They were still really loose," he said of his players. "They had incredible makeup."

Millar, the first baseman who was always quick with a quote, a laugh or a joke, was walking around the room saying the same thing over and over again: "Don't let us win one! Don't let us win one!" It became the idiots' rallying cry.

As Millar recounted, "I was thinking, You better beat us in Game 4, because if we win it . . . look out. I didn't like our matchup in Game 4. I didn't know how we were going to do it, but don't let us win. Because now we've got Pedro in Game 5 and now we've got Schilling in Game 6, and in Game 7 anything can happen. So I knew once we could win that game, the entire pressure went to them. We didn't have any pressure. We were supposed to lose. We're down. Now we're just having fun. Now we're going to watch them choke. That's basically what it boils down to. We're going to have fun and keep battling. And those were great games."

The Yankees scored first, on a two-run home run by Alex Rodriguez in the third inning. It would be the last time Rodriguez drove in a base runner in the postseason in this series and the next three postseasons combined, and the next three postseasons combined, a span of 59 at-bats overall in which he batted .136, including 0-for-27 with 38 total runners on base. The Yankees lost the lead when Boston nicked Hernandez for three runs in the fifth, then seized it right back with two runs in the sixth. The tie-breaking run scored on an infield hit by Tony Clark. Torre put the 4-3 lead into the hands of Tanyon Sturtze, not Gordon, and Sturtze came through with two scoreless innings. a span of 59 at-bats overall in which he batted .136, including 0-for-27 with 38 total runners on base. The Yankees lost the lead when Boston nicked Hernandez for three runs in the fifth, then seized it right back with two runs in the sixth. The tie-breaking run scored on an infield hit by Tony Clark. Torre put the 4-3 lead into the hands of Tanyon Sturtze, not Gordon, and Sturtze came through with two scoreless innings.

Now the Yankees were six outs away from sweeping the Red Sox, with the heart of the Boston order due up in the eighth inning. Torre was absolutely sure who was going to get those outs: Rivera. Gordon's shakiness didn't even come into play now. Torre's closer was fully rested after three days off. Torre always worried about giving a near-dead opponent any reason for optimism. Rivera, even for six outs, was the surest option in baseball, the king of postseason closers. It was time to step on the throat of the Red Sox.

Rivera yielded a single to his first batter, Manny Ramirez, but it was cla.s.sic Rivera for the rest of the eighth inning: three consecutive outs on 13 pitches (15 total for the inning) without the ball leaving the infield (a strikeout of David Ortiz and groundb.a.l.l.s from Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon).

The Yankees went quietly in the top of the ninth against Keith Foulke. Three outs to go. The Yankees held an extreme advantage over Boston. In all best-of-seven series games, the road team leading by one run with three outs to go was 77-11, an 87.5 percent success rate. Representatives from Major League Baseball Properties carried large boxes into a back room of the Yankees clubhouse. The boxes held dozens of hats and T-s.h.i.+rts that said, "New York Yankees. 2004 American League Champions." There was no champagne being prepared yet. The Yankees were so experienced at those kind of celebrations-and so cautious not to jinx them-that their clubhouse staff learned to wait for the last possible out; they could set up for the party in under 10 minutes.

As Rivera prepared himself to leave the dugout to pitch the ninth, Torre thought of pa.s.sing on to him a word of warning about the leadoff hitter, Millar. He thought about having Stottlemyre, or even himself, tell Rivera to be aggressive with Millar. He let the moment pa.s.s without saying anything. It is a decision that gnaws at Torre to this day.

"If there's one thing I can second-guess myself about," Torre said, "it was in 2004 with Mo going out in the ninth inning. I didn't tell Mel, 'Tell him don't get too fancy.' Or I was going to go to him and tell him, 'Don't get too fancy. Go after him. Don't worry about trying to make too good of a pitch.'

"The only reason I didn't say anything is I remembered the last time he faced him, in Game 2."

Rivera had faced Millar, representing the tying run, with Ramirez at second base, with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 2. The at-bat was relatively brief and emphatic: called strike, ball, strike swinging, foul, strike swinging for a strikeout to end the game.

"That's the only reason I didn't plant the seed," Torre said. "Because of how easy that at-bat was. I said, 'f.u.c.k it.' Because I didn't want to plant a seed that wasn't there. It was so easy, the last time."

That Game 2 at-bat, however, occurred at Yankee Stadium, where Millar's pull-everything hitting philosophy was penalized by the expansiveness of left field. The Game 4 at-bat occurred at Fenway Park, where a fly ball to left field could easily be off or over the towering wall that seemed to loom right over a pitcher's shoulder.

"In that ballpark, you're trying not to make a mistake to him," Torre said. "It's a little different than in our ballpark."

On the other side of the field, Francona did not bother to say anything to Millar.

"No," Millar said. "There's nothing to say. In that situation, we're down by one, we're down 0-3 in the series, you've got Mariano Rivera in the game . . . there's not a lot of sunlight on us. But you know what? That's why you've got to play the game."

Millar was a .364 career hitter against Rivera in the regular season, with four hits, including one home run, in 11 at-bats, while also once getting hit by a pitch. Most hitters would begin the ninth inning while down one run trying to find any means possible to get on base, to grind out an at-bat in survival mode. But these were the idiots and this was Millar, who was one of the premier pract.i.tioners of the kind of brazen idiocy that served the Red Sox so well. There was only one thing on Millar's mind: try to jack a Rivera pitch over the Green Monster in left field.

"I've always had good at-bats against Mo," Millar said. "Decent numbers. But you don't want to make a living facing him. He's a power guy and I like the fastball, so I was just thinking one thing: get a pitch up and middle-in and hit it out for a home run. That was my thought process. Just try to hit a home run. There was no looking away. So I was basically in watch mode. If I could just get something up and leaking in and I was trying to pull, I thought that was our only chance. That's what I felt."

The "watch mode" approach served Millar well. Because he was going to swing only if the ball entered the area in which he was watching, Millar actually made himself patient. The downside of his approach is that he essentially conceded the outer half of the plate to Rivera, at least until he got two strikes. Rivera never got to two strikes. He missed with his first pitch. Millar fouled off the next. Then Rivera missed with three consecutive pitches, putting the tying run on first base with a free pa.s.s.

What were the odds that Rivera would walk the leadoff batter? Through 2004 in his regular season career, Rivera had faced 110 leadoff batters in the ninth inning while protecting a one-run lead. He had walked only four of them, and only twice did those walks presage a defeat. One of them occurred only one month earlier against the Red Sox, a game that suddenly looked eerily predictive. On September 17, Rivera began the ninth inning by walking Nixon with a 2-1 lead. Dave Roberts pinch-ran and stole second base as Varitek struck out. Rivera hit Millar with a pitch. Cabrera knocked in Roberts with the tying run. One out later, Damon knocked in the winning run with a single. Millar's walk in Game 4 gave the Red Sox that shred of belief that Torre wanted to avoid.