BOSTON – This is when you know things are going well, so well that you can sniff the champagne, so well that you can hear the parade musicians beginning to tune up their instruments. They don’t just cheer the sluggers at Fenway Park anymore. They don’t just cheer heroic starting pitchers. Anyone can do that.
No, at Fenway Park, they greet the bullpen like conquering heroes, and with good reason. Oh, they cheered Big Papi and Manny Being Manny and especially Mike Lowell, when he drove in what proved to be the winning run in the fifth inning. They gave Curt Schilling a standing ovation after an abbreviated 51/3-inning stint, and Schilling doffed his cap not once but twice as he walked into the dugout.
But they saved their very best, and their very loudest, roars for the men who came out of the bullpen and shortened the baseball game, who suffocated the Rockies, who inherited a 2-1 lead with one out in the sixth inning and slammed the door on Colorado’s collective fingertips.
“This,” Schilling said, “was the Papajima show out there tonight.”
There were 36,730 people inside Fenway last night, and when Hideki Okajima fanned Kazuo Matsui for the fourth strikeout of a six-batter stint, they threatened to turn Fenway’s foundation to dust. And that was only a warm-up. Because there is no greater party in baseball right now than the traveling carnival that follows Jonathan Papelbon, whether he is River Dancing with his legs or blowing people away with his arm.
“These two guys tonight … we had to have it,” Schilling said. “And they answered the bell.”
There is no way to explain how much electricity a bullpen can generate until you see one work the way the Red Sox’s bullpen worked last night. Mostly, bullpens are the source of unlimited amounts of angst. The Mets’ adventures with their bullpen down the stretch still cause their fans middle-of-the-night flashback screams. Joe Torre’s biggest black mark across 12 years with the Yankees is that he never seemed able to figure out how to recapture the old bullpen magic.
It is worth remembering, especially in the wake of this Red Sox victory, which nudged them halfway to a second world championship in four years, just how imperative it is to be able to have absolute faith in your bullpen.
If you are a Yankees fan, you remember the Mike Stanton/Jeff Nelson/Mariano Rivera gauntlet that Torre used to throw out at teams in 1998 and 1999 and 2000. It was a lineup that basically dared opposing teams to take a lead by inning six because they certainly weren’t going to get there by inning nine. And even the 1996 Yankees title came, thanks mostly to an astonishing assortment of career months by the likes of David Weathers and Graeme Lloyd.
Now you have the Red Sox. Now you have Okajima, with his Valenzuela-esque delivery and his nasty change-up. And you have Papelbon. It is unfair to put Papelbon in the same category as Rivera, because it may well happen that nobody will ever earn that kind of proximity to the great Rivera.
But, man, he’s getting there.
From the moment he jogs into the game backed by “Wild Thing,” he is a study in pure adrenaline. From the time he unleashes his first fastball and his first three pitches yesterday went 96, 97, 97 there is an inevitability that permeates Fenway Park that is only possible to describe if you’ve experienced it yourself. Yankees fans did, once upon a time. It’s a nice feeling.
“This place delivers in adrenaline and intensity like none other,” Papelbon said. As a pitcher you can use that to your advantage or it can hurt you. I think most of us feed of that.”
Even when Papelbon dances with trouble, he finds a way to make that trouble work for him, to increase the aura that’s quickly grown around him. The first batter to face him, Matt Holliday, nearly drilled a hole through him with a line drive back through the box. So what happened? Papelbon picked him off.
Of course he did.
It was warm-up, of course, all of it. In the ninth, Papelbon blew Todd Helton away with 98-mph gas. He coaxed a weak fly ball from Garrett Adkins, off 97-mph kerosene. And then he finished off Brad Hawpe with 97-mph smoke. The Sox bullpen, Okajima and Papelbon? Eleven hitters. One hit. Six strikeouts.
Wow.