If watching the Tampa Bay Rays score 29 runs to the Red Sox' 5 over the course of two games and six and half innings weren't discouraging enough to watch on television this postseason, imagine the fans at Fenway Park.
By the seventh inning of last night's ballgame, the Sox, who hadn't had a lead since ALCS Game 2 in St. Petersburg, looked like a bunch of scrubs. They had yet to get a man to third base—they'd gotten runners to second twice—and not even Jonathan Papelbon, at his most Frankensteinian, could get B.J. Upton out. (Paps stepped off the mound at one point, as a shirtless man waved his Leviathanesque torso toward the fans in the first base grandstand, closed his eyes, and, we think, visualized killing Upton with a pitch to the brains.) What's a fan to do?
Boo the team and leave the ballpark.
It wasn't long after Varitek flied out to center field that Bostonist relinquished a brick post in the standing room for a bona fide $100+ seat along the first base line.
And then Papi came up to bat, hit a three run homer, and put a plug in the hemorrhaging. The Sox stopped bleeding runs and stopped bleeding fans and the mood of the ballpark suddenly felt like a house party DJed by David Ortiz (entry anthem: Too $hort's "Blow the Whistle").
Bostonist wished that the Sox could have brought Okajima back into the game so that the suddenly festive crowd could truly appreciate his entry theme, "Okajima, Okie Dokie," (warning: LOUD) which had seemed so incongruous played to the glum, ashen-faced New Englanders of the fifth inning.
So, the crowd was back. And they stuck up for their team, taunting the Rays' relievers mercilessly, transforming, through the sheer force of sophomoric malice, a bullpen into putty. The crowd buoyed Coco Crisp through every pitch of his 90-minute-long at-bat in the eighth; Crisp was locked in and so were we. His single tied the game, and, even though we finally had a seat behind us, there was no place to sit down.
After the error that brought Youkilis into scoring position during the ninth, a fluke that the Fenway faithful had somehow seen coming, and after Dioner Navarro set up for an intentional walk to Jason Bay, the stadium let out a single bleat of requisite catcalls before chanting the name of the man whom last year they might have called the Sultan of Slouch. In a voice, Fenway Park called out to J.D. Drew, and, when he entered the batter's box, the scoreboard showed his lifetime average against J.P. Howell: .576. Nudge that a bit higher, and the game was won.
The second biggest come-from-behind victory in MLB postseason history was a game even a lobster could love.
(AP Photo/Mary Schwalm), Flickr user Revelwriter
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