BOSTON – In every other precinct outside New York and New England, there remains the hope that baseball’s feel-good story still can deliver the goods. The Tampa Bay Rays making the postseason would be as close as baseball has come to the ’69 Mets since . . . well, since the ’69 Mets.
If you are objective, then it would be impossible for you not to embrace the Rays, a collection of underpaid kids and overachieving veterans managed by a smart baseball man named Joe Maddon who have captured the sport’s collective imagination for the season’s first two-thirds.
Even this morning, the Rays wake up clear of the behemoths, a game up on the Red Sox and three up on the Yankees. They are 18 games over .500, they are already but nine games shy of the all-time franchise record of 70 wins set four years ago, when they still had a Devil in their name, the only time in their decade of existence when they finished out of last place.
It would be a hell of a story, the Rays finishing ahead of the Red Sox, ahead of the Yankees. A hell of a baseball story. A hell of a Cinderella story.
Too bad it isn’t going to happen.
It saddens me to be the bearer of such sobering news, it really does. But the past three days and nights at Fenway Park, both the Yankees and the Red Sox made it abundantly clear that they will be preparing no concession speeches for the Rays across the next 60 or so days.
The A.L. East may not be as it’s been for much of the past 10 years, when more than vying for the championship of the division the Sox and Yanks were battling for the championship of each other, the way familiar heavyweights always do. The Rays will not simply wither and die, they are too game for that, too talented, have invested too much across the season’s first four months.
It’s just not logical to assume they can keep it up for eight more weeks while fighting off these two teams. It’s not practical. In many ways, this weekend series at Fenway Park provided a perfect glimpse of where we are with this rivalry, deep in the heart of the summer of 2008. The Yankees won one blowout, Saturday afternoon. The Red Sox won one blowout, last night, reminding Sidney Ponson that he is, after all, Sidney Ponson, splattering him 9-2.
And, of course, there was that beautiful 1-0 jewel of a game Friday night. Joba Chamberlain outdueled Josh Beckett, pitching seizing the day inside one of the all-time hitter’s paradises, Mariano Rivera coming in for old-time’s sake and delivering a five-out save that neatly paid tribute to Goose Gossage, another old Red Sox slayer, on the weekend he entered Cooperstown.
There were the usual theatrics. There was Chamberlain throwing at Kevin Youkilis’ head (again), and there was an old St. John’s pitcher named Craig Hanson who drilled Alex Rodriguez but good with a blazer to his arm.
There was the continuing saga of Manny Being Manny. And a new left arm belonging to Damaso Marte that whiffed David Ortiz. And the odd reality that Boston has moved on from the shackles of angst that used to paralyze the city in the old days, when the Sox would lose a couple games like the ones they lost on Friday and Saturday.
“There are a lot of fans who come to these games,” one Sox official said last night, “who honestly don’t seem all that bothered when we lose anymore.”
Maybe that’s because it still happens all too infrequently, because the Sox are still in splendid position to arrive at October’s door in good shape, same as the Yankees look. The Athletics have sunk like a stone and the Twins are tumbling, and the Tigers look like they’ll never get going.
It leaves the Rays, who this morning still lord over the Sox and the Yanks, who have refused to submit even as the footsteps behind them have grown louder and more threatening. They are a good story. Easy to root for. And unless this weekend was merely a terrible tease, just a week or two away from seeing a couple of blurs zip by them in the passing lane.