The Futility Infielder

Warning: language alert. Feel free to leave if four- and 12-letter curse words frighten you.

What can I say? I picked the wrong game. Back in January when my partial season ticket group sat down to pick our games for the year, it figured that I'd choose a game from the September weekend series between the Yankees and the Red Sox. I chose the Saturday game instinctively because I was wary of the September 11 date of the Sunday game.

I chose wrong. In the words of Seattle Pilots manager and Ball Four icon Joe Schultz, "Ah, shitfuck."

Saturday's ballgame was a miserable time to be a Yankee fan, as Curt Schilling returned to the scene of the Bloody Sock to pitch his best game of the year. He came into the game with a 6.52 ERA on the year, having allowed 15 runs in 17.1 innings over three starts since returning from his stretch in the Sox bullpen. Yankee fans had reason to be licking their chops.

It didn't work out so well. The Big Shill had a no-hitter through three innings, and by the time he gave up his first hit -- a solo home run to Jason Giambi -- the Sox led 8-0 and my pal Nick and I were already on our fifth set of seats, having attempted to elude our fated section 668 in the leftfield upper deck. Between the sun and my nearsightedness even with corrective lenses, I'm downright useless out there.

Yankee starter Shawn Chacon, who'd already given up a two-run homer to Manny Ramirez, couldn't make it out of fourth. He started the frame by giving up an upper-deck solo shot to John Olerud, who's slugging well above .500 in limited duty this year after two year well below .400. A pair of singles later, Chacon was done, and Yankee fans were sentenced to watch Felix Rodriguez and then Al Leiter pitch mop-up. The Yankee "defense," which included a dropped fly ball by Hideki Matsui and a Knoblauchian throw from Robinson Cano, didn't give them much help. By the time the dust settlled, six runs had scored. Though Leiter successfully ate some innings after that, the Yankees never really mounted a threat.

Really, I'd have done just as well to stay home and use my $37 as toilet paper. My blood pressure certainly didn't need the extra agita caused by a Schilling outing, and I am sure that dozens of parents could have done without the creative vocabulary lessons I provided for their children (hey, you take your kid to a Yankees-Red Sox game, I'll show you da Bronx). It says something that the fondest memory I could summon on this day was of the rainout of the scheduled game between these two teams exactly four years ago, the night before the cataclysmic events of 9/11. I'm only grateful that Schilling and his "Look-at-me-I'm-praying-before-I-pitch" shtik didn't coincide with the anniversary of that day. He probably would have tried to give a speech on the mound, telling New Yorkers how he understands our pain and that the country is in good hands with George W. Bush and his merry gang of bandits. There ain't enough vomit in my gut to do justice to that.

At least my seats were better on Sunday, as I watched Randy Johnson take the mound with the Yanks' ever-slimmer postseason hopes essentially on the line. Had they lost, they would have been five games in back of the Sox with three weeks to play, and tied for second in the Wild Card, 2.5 in back of Cleveland. It's getting late early for them.

Johnson rose to the occastion, pitching like a man packing a serious firearm and a wallet that had Bad Motherfucker written on it. He snarled and glared his way through seven innings, limiting the Sox to a single hit, reaching 99 on the gun, and striking out eight.

In a complete contrast from Johnson's fast and filthy repertoire, Boston knuckleballer Tim Wakefield continued to give the Yankees fits, nearly outdid the Big Unit. With his signature pitch dancing, floating and otherwise befuddling Yankee hitters, Wakefield struck out 12. But it was a curveball which proved Wakefield's undoing. He brought it out for a cameo appearance and Giambi the pitch off the rightfield foul pole for what proved to be the only run of the ballgame.

After seven, Johnson gave way to Tom Gordon, who gave up a leadoff single and then got an out on a weird force play in which the Yankee infield let a catchable popup (not high enough to trigger the infield fly rule, but high enough to be lost in the sun, apparently) bounce off the back of the mound. It was a heart-stopping play that could have easily been the difference in the ballgame, but Alex Rodriguez collected it on a good hop and got the force, thereby swapping pinch-runner Adam Stern for catcher Doug Mirabelli on the basepaths, a worthwhile tradeoff.

One out later, Gordon yielded to Mariano Rivera as David Ortiz, who sat against the lefty Johnson, pinch-hit for Gabe Kapler. This was it: the season on the line, the Yanks best pitcher against Boston's best hitter. The matchup numbers showed that that Gordon had given Ortiz more trouble (1-for-8 with a homer in the regular season) than Rivera (5-for-14) had over the course of his career, but anyone who remembers the homer he tagged off of Flash in last year's ALCS couldn't blame Joe Torre for tossing those numbers out the window. to go with his ace.

Rivera fell behind 2-0 to Ortiz but battled him to a full count. In an emphatic demonstration of Mo's stuff, he shattered Ortiz's bat on a checked-swing foul ball. Still, he lost the battle when his next pitch was too high, walking Ortiz. That brought up Johnny Damon, who worked a 10-pitch at-bat, complete with another broken bat, before grounding to Andy Phillips at first base to end the threat.

Rivera had to evade more trouble in the ninth. He got two outs, snagging Edgar Renteria's liner back to the box on his first pitch of the inning, then getting Trot Nixon to ground out. He walked Manny Ramirez on a 3-2 pitch, then yielded a single to Kevin Millar that sent Manny to third. Oh, the agony. Olerud got ahead 2-1 before Rivera, on his 37th pitch of the afternoon, blew a 94-MPH cutter by him for strike three. I danced in front of the TV, whooping it up, suggesting an anatomical bat rack for Olerud and the Red Sox. After Saturday's result, this was some welcome catharsis.

• • •

Speaking of the Red Sox (and tangentially, the Yankees), the Boston Globe's Gordon Edes gave Baseball Prospectus' forthcoming book, Mind Game (to which I contributed two chapters and some sidebar material), a glowing review in his Sunday column:

"Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series and Created a New Blueprint for Winning," published by Workman Publishing, was written by the staff of Baseball Prospectus, a bunch of smart guys (Yale, Brown, Stanford, University of Chicago, Wisconsin pedigrees, graphic designer, meteorologist, tech consultant, math whizzes, and assorted other brains) whose statistical analysis is helping transform the game as we know it.

But don't worry, while there are enough numbers to satisfy the most voracious stat geek -- VORPs and FRAAs and EqRs that make the more simple-minded among us pine for the days when knowing a player's batting average or ERA sufficed -- the prose is lively and informed, and the authors challenge you, even if you can't follow all the calculations, to consider issues from a different perspective.

There is much here that is familiar -- the Alex Rodriguez negotiations, Nomar Garciaparra's departure, the bullpen-by-committee theory, the Dan Duquette era -- but the spin is often original.

...It does what the best books do, offering a unique prism to view a world you thought you already knew.

So far as I know, that marks the first mainstream review of the book, which comes out next week. I'm excited for this baby to hit the streets; as painful as it is to relive the Yankees' collapse against the Red Sox, I'm confident that this is a quality BASEBALL book first and foremost rather than being merely another celebration of the Sox's magical ability to beat the zzzzzzzzzz....

I'll have plenty more to say about Mind Game when it hits the shelves..