Sports Memories I'll Tell My Grandkids About: Tim Wakefield, Fenway Park and My First Red Sox Game

Following my most recent visit to Fenway Park, I decided to sit down and make a list of all the major league baseball games I have ever attended. It was an exceedingly easy task, I discovered – despite my long-time geographical proximity to Boston, I have never liked visiting the city and don’t often make the effort to do so, two facts that kept me from seeing Fenway Park up close and personal until 1995 and have limited me to just six subsequent visits.

A lot of interesting stuff has happened in those seven games: Alex Rodriguez hit a homerun off Pedro Martinez. Devern Hansack held the Baltimore Orioles without a hit for five full innings. My wife stood on her seat and cheered as the benches emptied against the Yankees. Pedro and Roy Halladay engaged in a tense pitcher’s duel. Rickey Henderson played his final game at Fenway Park and received a car from Red Sox management. I haven’t been to many games, but the ones I’ve seen have always seemed to contain at least one memorable event.

One of my favorite Fenway moments, however, remains the first game I ever saw there, a contest between the Red Sox and California Angels late in the 1995 season. The date was September 3, a Sunday. The Sox were competitive for the first time in years, running away with the American League East division by fourteen games over the second-place New York Yankees. The Angels, meanwhile, had been enjoying a dream season, steaming toward their first division crown since 1986, but like that previous campaign it was quickly becoming a nightmare; the Halos entered the September 3 game in the midst of a terrible and historic free fall, with eleven losses in twelve games allowing the charging Seattle Mariners to chop seven games off the lead. The Red Sox advantage in the East ultimately held, with the Yankees taking the wild card, but three weeks later the Angel’s collapse was complete, the team overtaken for good by the Mariners following a nine-game losing streak.

The game started just after one, so my father and I got an early start so we could pick up a pair of binoculars from Rich’s department store in Portsmouth before meeting up with my soon-to-be brother-in-law Ron and his son, Jaymes, at their house in Melrose. From there, we headed into the city, where I was to get my first glimpse at the place writer John Updike once called “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.”

I honestly can’t remember the first time I saw Fenway Park from the outside or even what the concourse below the stands looked like; my first viewing of the playing field, however, more than compensates for those missing pieces in the mental jigsaw puzzle. Our seats were in the centerfield bleachers (I didn’t realize it at the time, but the centerfield bleachers at Fenway Park are actually located several miles away in Cambridge; hence the binoculars) but we somehow ended up entering the seating area on the opposite side of the ballpark, behind the first base grandstand. My first experience with the playing field of Fenway Park was straight out of a movie: the field laid out in front of me, the green expanse of center field stretching out endlessly, the Green Monster looming high above the truncated left field, the net on top making it seem that much higher.

The game itself might have been forgettable if those Red Sox hadn’t been so damn good. They refused to show mercy on the sliding Angels, jumping out to an early 3-0 lead on Tim Naehring’s first inning homerun to left (which I missed because every fan in our section stood as one to see if the drive would carry over the Monster) and chasing starter Chuck Finley with three more by the end of the fourth.

Boston’s early advantage was safely held by Tim Wakefield, the 29-year old pitcher who had traveled a winding road before coming to Boston in late May. A knuckleballer in the tradition of Hoyt Wilhelm, the Niekro brothers and Charlie Hough, Wakefield’s major league career had begun in fine fashion with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992; after being called up from AAA Buffalo in late July, he won eight games against just one loss to help the Bucs reach the National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves. He became a national sensation in the NLCS, winning both his starts – including a must-win in Game Six to avoid elimination – and indicating that, at the age of 26, his career as a solid major league pitcher was just getting started.

The knuckleball, however, is a fickle pitch – one day it’s working perfectly and seems untouchable, the next it rolls up to the plate screaming, “HIT ME!” Such was the case with Wakefield, who watched fame, fortune and his future disappear along with his knuckleball into thin air. In a complete reversal of fortune from the previous year, he couldn’t get anyone out, starting the season by walking nine Padres and finishing 6-11 with a 5.61 ERA, nearly 3 ½ runs higher than his rookie mark of 2.15. It got so bad that the Pirates shipped him off for a midseason stint in AA Carolina in an attempt to regain control of the pitch. The maneuver didn’t work – Wakefield’s numbers in the minors were even worse than his major league stats – although he showed a spark with back-to-back complete game shutouts over the Cubs and playoff-bound Phillies in his final two starts of the season.

The positive vibe didn’t carry over to the 1994 season, as Wakefield was banished to Buffalo for the duration of the season, presumably with the hope that he would finally work out the kinks in his bread-and-butter pitch and cash in on the potential that he had flashed two years before. He rewarded the team’s faith by demonstrating consistency for the first time in his career, struggling to a 5-15 record and 5.84 ERA in thirty games. The frustrated Pirates had had enough, releasing him on April 20, 1995.

Six days later, Boston called, offering Wakefield the chance to play with their AAA team in Pawtucket and work toward becoming a major league pitcher again. He took the opportunity, worked with both Phil and Joe Niekro to make changes in his mechanics, pitched well in four games for the Paw Sox and was wearing a Red Sox uniform by the end of May. He won his first four starts for the team before losing to the Blue Jays, then won ten more in a row to keep them ahead of the pack well into August. By the time we saw him in September, he had come back down to earth, losing two consecutive starts en route to a 2-7 finish that took him out of the lead in the race for the Cy Young award (he eventually finished third behind Randy Johnson and Jose Mesa), but his role as the anchor of Boston’s pitching staff through the dog days of summer was not to be taken lightly.

On September 3, we saw the Tim Wakefield who had pitched for the Pirates in 1992 and the Red Sox earlier in the summer. His knuckler was working to perfection; the Angels could barely touch him. As the game wore on, I looked at him on the mound a few times through the binoculars and admired the confidence he carried out to that solitary hill, the sense that he was in total control. He ran into trouble only once, in the second inning, when three singles and a hit batsman plated the only run he allowed in eight innings. His poise was most evident under this extreme duress, however: with the bases loaded and one out, nursing a two-run lead, the game in danger of turning into an offensive slugfest, he induced back-to-back pop-ups to end the threat and break the Angels’ spirit.

Knowing that Wakefield had the game safely in hand allowed me to take in some of the other things that were going on around the ballpark at that time. Most notably, a lifelong fear of the right field bleachers was drilled into me that day by the denizens of that area, who at one point began loudly taunting Angel’s right fielder Tim Salmon with a long, sustained “Saaaaaaaaaaaaalmooooooooooooon!” chant. It was the type of thing that has stuck with me, a fairly quiet fifteen year old kid; to this day, I haven’t dared venture into those sections (although I did wind up in the next section over on my last trip – I needed to point out the Ted Williams Seat to my wife and see just how far from home plate it is, but we were separated by a runway).

Beyond all that, the memories are hazy – I know I brought my glove and put it on every time Mo Vaughn came up, even though we were almost five hundred feet from home plate, and I remember Jaymes, barely four years old at the time, curling up in his seat and falling asleep during the late innings – there are certain areas beyond even Retrosheet’s scope of information. But I think I remember enough to know that it was a good day. I saw Fenway Park for the first time, my favorite team won (the first of a 6-1 record with me in attendance; I’m drafting a letter to Theo Epstein to get myself some complimentary tickets) and I watched the pitcher who was and is my wife’s favorite player as he struggled to overcome his personal demons and prove he belonged in the major leagues. Yes, it was a good day indeed.

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Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu by John Updike

Sports Memories I’ll Tell My Grandkids About: Kevin Romine, Morgan Magic and the Day I Came To Love Baseball

The Boston baseball historical landscape is littered with the remains of teams that ascended nearly to the peak of sports achievement before awakening from the dream and crashing back down to earth. The late 1940s were a particularly difficult time for Beantown baseball – the Red Sox lost the World Series on a controversial play in 1946 and were bested in down-to-the-wire pennant races in 1948 and 1949, while the Braves lost the 1948 Fall Classic to Cleveland – although in many ways the late 1980s and early 1990s were even worse, characterized by a heartbreaking World Series loss in 1986 (the fourth consecutive Series in which the team lost Game Seven) and mind-numbing thirteen consecutive postseason losses. There were some memorable moments, but it wasn’t until 2004 that the Boston baseball community finally reached the top of the mountain.

Most Red Sox seasons end in an agony that feels like agony (see 1986 and 2003 for vivid examples); there are two campaigns in recent history, however, that ended with less than the desired result - a World Series win (take a seat, 2004, you’re not a part of this discussion) - yet somehow avoided the feeling that the sky was falling and the sun would decide not come out tomorrow. The first, of course, was the 1967 “Impossible Dream” team led by Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Lonborg – the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Award winner, respectively – that overcame the weight of a recent team history clouded by institutional racism and bad ball clubs to finish within one game of a world title. There were few hard feelings when the Dream ended because few had expected the Red Sox to be in contention past April, let alone advance as far as the seventh game of the World Series. The lower level of incoming expectation led to a lower level of regret when the fairy tale ending didn’t come true.

The second season that ended with a positive feeling despite an undesirable conclusion – in this case a sweep by the Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series – was 1988, the year of “Morgan Magic” and my debut season as a baseball fan. This was the year that the Red Sox fielded a quality team, with a lineup composed of solid veterans (Dwight Evans, Wade Boggs, Jim Rice) and good youngsters (Jody Reed, Ellis Burks, Mike Greenwell) and a pitching staff spearheaded by a feared lefty-righty combination (Bruce Hurst and Roger Clemens) and an All-Star closer (Lee Smith), yet limped into the All-Star break as the fourth best team in the American League East division with a 43-42 record that left them nine games behind the Detroit Tigers.

At the break, Boston general manager Lou Gorman made a change, replacing manager John McNamara with “Walpole Joe” Morgan, the manager of the team’s AAA affiliate in Pawtucket and a native of nearby Walpole, Massachusetts. Morgan was hired during the All-Star break and managed his first games on July 15, a doubleheader against the Kansas City Royals. The Red Sox won both games to begin a streak of twelve wins in a row (a record for a manager at the start of his career) and nineteen of twenty overall under their new skipper. The streak (which also occurred within the framework of twenty-four consecutive wins at Fenway Park, a run that extended from June 25 to August 13) earned the nickname “Morgan Magic”, virtually guaranteeing the return of the “interim” manager the following season. Most importantly, Boston closed the gap in the division race: after trailing by 8 ½ games at the close of play on July 14, Boston found itself side-by-side with Detroit atop the AL East on August 3.

This is the time period to which I date my interest in the Boston Red Sox and the game of baseball. For me, the game is rooted in Jody Reed taking the field to pinch-run for Spike Owen and somehow becoming one of my favorite players, Bo Jackson ending a game against the Sox with a leaping catch against the wall in foul territory in Kansas City, and watching a game with my grandfather (who forced me to admire both halves of Boston’s double play tandem with the solemn intonation, “Marty Barrett – he’s a good player.”) These are minor happenings, of course, but much of the joy in baseball, as in life, is in the little things.

The summer of Magic in Boston might never have transpired without the game that took place on Saturday, July 16. With the All-Star break still visible in the rear-view mirror and Joe Morgan still finding his way around his new team, the Red Sox prepared to meet Kansas City in the third game of a four game series. Perhaps upset over its poor showing in the previous day’s doubleheader (swept by the Red Sox, 3-1 and 7-4), the Royals jumped out to a 6-0 lead after five innings, including a mammoth Bo Jackson homerun that ricocheted off the back wall in centerfield; it is considered by some one of the longest drives in Fenway Park history.

Boston’s offense finally figured things out in the bottom of the sixth, scoring four times to trim the deficit to 6-4. The inning included two important lineup changes: Kevin Romine pinch-ran for leftfielder Mike Greenwell and scored the third run, while Dwight Evans drew a walk as a pinch-hitter for Randy Kutcher. Both players stayed in the game – Romine in Greenwell’s leftfield position, Evans at first base. The switches proved beneficial as early as the eighth inning, when Evans greeted Kansas City closer Steve Farr with a game-tying two-run homerun.

The game entered the bottom of the ninth knotted at sixth, with Romine leading off against Farr. It was an unusual spot for Romine, then 27 years old and in his third year with the Red Sox; an All-American at Arizona State in the early 1980s, he had become a utility major league outfielder who under ordinary circumstances would be safely on the bench in such a tense situation. These were no ordinary circumstances, however; thanks to Morgan’s sixth inning shuffling, his only remaining bench player was infielder Spike Owen, who only started twice in the manager’s first twenty games with the club. To bring Owen into the game would not only mean losing the last extra bat, a strategic no-no considering the possibility of extra innings, it would also require moving certain players out of position to accommodate everyone. In any case, Romine wasn’t the most desirable option to start off the ninth against Farr (that honor probably belonged to Greenwell, enjoying a career year on his way to a second place finish in the MVP voting), but he was pretty much all Morgan had to offer.

Romine didn’t disappoint. He lofted a Farr offering high and deep to left (memory says it was the first pitch, but there is no way to verify that information), where it settled into the screen above the Green Monster for a game winning homerun. It was Romine’s first career homerun (in his 127th at-bat), the only homerun he hit in 1988 and one of only five he hit in a career that ended in 1991.

For the next three weeks, the Red Sox rolled. On July 20th, Todd Benzinger hit a walk-off homerun of his own to guarantee win number seven (Benzinger’s round-tripper came in the bottom of the tenth inning, with Boston trailing by a run). Two weeks after Romine hit his game-winner, he factored into another big moment, scoring the winning run on a Marty Barrett single to give the team sixteen wins in seventeen tries. In a nice touch of parallelism, he had once again pinch-run, stayed in the game and led off the ninth, doubling off Teddy Higuera to start the game-winning rally.

Though Boston didn’t play well over the final two months, finishing with a 27-30 mark in the final 57 games, the charge to the front of the pack had been enough. Despite losing six of their last seven games, the Red Sox held off four other teams – Detroit, Toronto, Milwaukee and New York – to claim the AL East title for the second time in three years. Given the relative weakness of the team and the fact that West division winner Oakland boasted a powerful lineup and strong pitching, not much was expected from the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. They didn’t deliver much, being outscored by a 2-to-1 margin in four straight losses to the A’s.

Still, from the perspective of a new, young fan such as myself, the season was a success. The Red Sox had found themselves in a tough spot, played nearly perfect baseball for three weeks to charge into the lead, and then held off all comers despite not having their best stuff. And somewhere in there, maybe on July 16, I found myself a favorite player. Kevin Romine wasn’t the best player on the field at any time during his seven years in a Red Sox uniform, but he might have been something more important – as he proved against Steve Farr and Teddy Higuera, he was the type of guy who could be counted on to come up big just when it was needed the most. Despite this, he never really earned the opportunity to play full-time with Boston (largely due to his lack of power and the All-Star outfield of Greenwell, Evans and Ellis Burks), although injuries to Burks and Evans allowed him to play a career high 92 games in 1989, when he hit .274 in 274 at-bats. And of course, the fact that his birthplace of Exeter, New Hampshire was minutes from my own hometown didn’t hurt his standing in my eight year old eyes (even if he had lived in California since very early childhood), if only to prove that even a kid from the northeast could make it big someday.

1988 might have been the last carefree season I remember experiencing with the Red Sox; in other words, it’s the last time I felt something less than sadness at their failure to win the World Series. Of course it was disappointing, but the entire season had been so much fun to watch that I just couldn’t muster much sadness when it ended. After two more division titles in 1990 and 1995, the wild card provided entry into the postseason in 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004 and 2005. By the time I’m writing this in July 2006, playoff appearances are almost expected around Boston – we’ve exchanged the joy that comes from an out-of-the-blue run like 1967, 1988 or 2004 (although I’m not entirely comfortable using the word “joy” to describe 2004; it was dramatic, exciting, intriguing, and tense, but not necessarily joyful – at least not until the Yankees were vanquished) for a sense of entitlement, a feeling that we always deserve to be one of the eight teams that remain at the conclusion of the regular season. That’s not entirely a bad thing – it’s nice to root for a winner - but sometimes it’s nice to be surprised. Someday, maybe in the near future, maybe for several years at a stretch, it is likely that the Red Sox won’t be one of the best teams in baseball. When that happens, when we are forced by the Baseball Gods to experience seasons like 1961-66 or 1987 again, I hope we are rewarded with another “Impossible Dream” or “Morgan’s Magic”, because those are the types of teams that are the most fun to follow and the most fun to remember.

(Thanks to Retrosheet for all statistics used in this article.)