Emperors and Idiots The Hundred-Year Rivalry Between the Yankees and Red Sox, from the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse

Chapter 1 Not Again I don't know if I believe in curses, or jinxes, or anything like that. But I'll tell you what I do believe: I believe in ghosts. And we've got some ghosts in this stadium. Derek Jeter, October 17, 2003 Every day you sit in front of your locker and ask God, "What the hell is going on?" Rick Burleson, September 17, 1978 He'd been asleep for only a second or two, the kind of restless, involuntary slumber that arrives only after you've stretched your work-night bedtime way too long. Through much of working-class America, millions of people were fighting a similar battle, not wanting to give in to their eyelids, certain that something unforgettable would soon fill their television screens. Clocks up and down the East Coast had just clicked to 12:15 A.M. on this morning of October 17, 2003, including the digital Armitron chronometer that dominated the center field scoreboard at Yankee Stadium, right above where the most important numbers were posted: Red Sox 5, Yankees 5, bottom of the eleventh inning, seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series. It was quiet inside the eighty-year-old stadium, a spooky silence having long before seeped into the bleachers and grandstands, where 56,279 had gathered to watch these two old foes play out the final moves of their sweaty chess match. It was a duel that had ground two cities to a halt, reduced millions of fingernails to the quick, even captured the imaginations of otherwise sane citizens who spend their days blissfully unaffected by baseball. This was why so many people in so many parts of the country were trying to blink away their exhaustion as Thursday night bled into Friday morning, as Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone stepped to the plate to face a Boston knuckleball specialist named Tim Wakefield, as all those timepieces ticked over to 12:16. The exact minute, as it happens, that Bucky Dent fell asleep. It was the shouting that jarred him back to life. "What happened?" Marianne Dent yelped. "Huh?" her husband sputtered. "Look at the TV! They're mobbing somebody! The Yankees just won the game! They won the pennant! I think someone hit a home run!" They were showing replays, and Dent, wide awake now inside his Boynton Beach, Florida, home, watched Wakefield deliver a flat, fat knuckleball, watched Boone all but jump out of his spikes as he dove into the pitch, watched the camera follow the baseball as it sketched a beautiful white path against the black Bronx sky, watched it settle into the lower left-field stands, watched Wakefield march solemnly off the mound, watched Boone jump onto home plate with both feet, watched as the crowd, suddenly liberated from nearly four hours of unbearable tension, exploded in a giddy rush of joy. "Look at you," Marianne Dent said. "You're beaming." It was more than that, of course. Dent's eyes remained locked on the TV, but the moment he saw it all unfold, his soul had immediately drifted.... Suddenly, he was rounding first base on another October day, exactly twenty-five years and fifteen days before, the last time the Red Sox and Yankees had met under these circumstances, one game for a championship, only then the game was played in the middle of a glorious afternoon, in another grand old ball field called Fenway Park. Dent had greeted Mike Torrez' fastball with the sweet spot of his borrowed Max 44 bat, and now his eyes were trained on the left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, who was drifting back toward the left-field wall, only 310 feet from home plate. Nobody ever played that thirty-seven-foot-high wall at Fenway like Yaz, everyone knew that, so DVaccaro, Mike is the author of 'Emperors and Idiots The Hundred-Year Rivalry Between the Yankees and Red Sox, from the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse', published 2006 under ISBN 9780767919104 and ISBN 0767919106.