A New History
By John Hatcher
To really sum up how amazing the last week has been, here is an excerpt from "The Bronx Zoo", a book by Sparky Lyle that covers the New York championship season of 1978:
Sunday, September 10 Boston
It's very hard to believe what's going on. For the fourth game in a row, we came out and started kicking ass and scored runs and hit the ball like I couldn't believe. Today we had 18 hits. We were ahead 5 to 0 in the second inning, and there was no way they were going to beat Figgie, and Goose, who pitched the last three innings. To sit there and watch it was really something. For five years I played with the Red Sox, and I've never seen a team come in and do that to the Sox. I think we even surprised ourselves. I mean, we came into Boston loaded for bear. We'd been hoping to win three out of four, and we got 67 hits and 42 runs, and they started making errors, and our pitching was solid, and after it was over, we were almost feeling sorry for them. Almost. Before we got here their momentum had been taken away, and we completely destroyed them. In every game by the time we scored the third or fourth run, they'd be standing around in the field with their gloves off, their heads down, as if to say, "Oh, Goddamn, I hope we get a little luck and get out of this inning giving them only five runs."
What took place in the ALCS was not on par with the Boston Massacre of '78, but it was just as good, if not better, from the perspective of a Sox fan. You can draw a lot of parallels between this excerpt and Game 7. You could see Jeter begging Vasquez for an out. You could see the Yankees gasping with all the trips to the mound. You saw Damon, with no BP, still hit two homers. It was a beautiful thing.
Everyone in New England can't help but be proud of this team. They proved me wrong by beating back adversity and showing enough character to be the first team to come back from an 0-3 deficit to win a best-of-seven. Nobody wanted to miss Game 7 because we've all in some way been waiting our whole lives for it. Now if they can only make history one more time.
