Boston’s Marco Scutaro leaves the ugout after a 4-3 loss against Baltimore. (Getty Images)
BALTIMORE — It is five minutes past the season, and nobody can move; they can barely breathe. They are Orioles fans in orange and Red Sox fans in red, all of them sprawled in the good seats at Camden Yards, none of them able to articulate what they have just seen, endured, absorbed.
It is a few minutes past midnight on — let’s call it what it was — the single most-exciting, most intense, most exhilarating night in baseball history. None of the people in the stands can believe what they just saw, because none of you do, either. None of the Red Sox can believe it. They are staggering off the field. Their season hangs by a thread right now . . .
Wait. Check that.
Their season is over. Their season is over! They have just lost an unloseable game to a last-place team after surrendering an unsurrenderable playoff lead. They walk into the visitors’ clubhouse, and on television there is a pile of Tampa Bay Rays waiting for Evan Longoria to jump on home plate and carry them to the playoffs.
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Soon, on television, Longoria is telling a stunned baseball nation: “It seemed like everything happened in a matter of seconds.”
David Ortiz doesn’t think so; he has his head in his hands in front of his locker. Seven hours earlier, he had faced a solemn media throng and joked: “You’re all looking at me like I killed somebody.” Then, he was trying to lighten the mood. There was no such attempt now. He looked broken.
“It’s totally unpredictable,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein says. “That’s why it’s the greatest game in the world.
“And also the most painful.”
The sound is off on the TV so nobody can hear Longoria’s take of the night. “It’s pretty cool,” he says.
Yes. It was cool. It was cool and it was unforgettable, it was breathtaking and it was improbable and damn near impossible. Three different games, all with do-or-die stakes, one in Atlanta, one in St. Petersburg, one in Baltimore. The Yankees and Red Sox were one strike away from victory in the ninth. The Braves were two outs away.
So close, all three of them.
And all of them lost.
All three games started at 7 o’clock, and all were still being played as midnight approached, and across baseball America people were wearing out their remote controls and their rally caps, screaming “WOW!” as if they were looking at a Christmas tree for the first time through a 3-year-old’s eyes.
In Baltimore, the Sox left the field for a rain delay leading 3-2, knowing the Yankees were beating the Rays 7-0, just knowing they were about to halt their historic tumble. Only, by the time the Sox returned, the Rays were within 7-6.
And just after play resumed, with the Rays one strike away, a .108-hitting Ray named Dan Johnson — from here on known in New England as Dan Bleeping Johnson — took Corey Wade out.
“This team,” Johnson said later in St. Petersburg, “is just a bunch of grinders.”
Soon, in Atlanta, another site of baseball triage, Freddy Freeman bounced into a 3-6-3 double play, completing the Braves’ fall from 10 ½ games ahead of the Cardinals in late August. The Braves’ dugout looked worse than a morgue, because corpses can’t cry. But grown men, even professional ballplayers, can. And did. And the fans looked catatonic. We’ve seen those looks, in 2004 with the Yankees, in 2007 with the Mets.
Would we see them on the 2011 Red Sox, too? They seemed certain to buy themselves at least another day, dominating the Orioles, holding them to four hits. Jonathan Papelbon blitzed through the first two hitters. Then Chris Davis ripped a double, a hiccup on the way to St. Petersburg (or Detroit, or Arlington), but then he powered two strikes past an overmatched Nolan Reimold.
The Sox were going to survive.
Then Papelbon threw another pitch.
What happened next came in blurs and flashes: Reimold doubled into the gap. Robert Andino followed with a looping fly to left that Carl Crawford couldn’t catch. The fans in orange shrieked. The ones in red wanted to hide. The Sox came staggering off the field, into the locker room, just in time to see Longoria make a baseball — and their season — disappear.
“It’s numbing,” Jason Varitek whispered.
In here, it was. Everywhere else? It was one final song of summer. It didn’t want to end. And nobody seemed to mind.