BOSTON -- One strike away ....
Five times with two out in the nightmarish ninth inning Sunday, Boston Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon reared back and fired the pitch he hoped would end the game, needing one more strike to allow his team to live another day.
The first one was slapped for a single by Erick Aybar. He had two shots at Chone Figgins, who fouled off the first one and looked at ball four with the second.
Bobby Abreu, with the count 1-2, fouled off a pitch before pounding the next one off the Green Monster to cut Boston's lead to 6-5. That was just before Vlad Guerrero smacked the first pitch he saw into centre field for a two-run single that, for all practical purposes, ended the Red Sox' season.
Few, probably none, of the Angels, could have appreciated the delicious irony of the moment.
Twenty-three years ago, I sat in the press box at Anaheim Stadium and watched the California Angels poised on the top step of their dugout ready to pour out on to the field to celebrate an American League pennant at the end of an amazing ball game against the Red Sox.
It was the fifth game of the 1986 ALCS played on Canadian Thanksgiving Sunday, just as it was this past Sunday. Back in those days, the Sun didn't publish on Thanksgiving Monday, so I was a writer with a great story to tell and no where to tell it.
The Angels, with a 3-1 series lead, had their sore-shouldered closer, veteran Donnie Moore, on the mound. They had begun the top of the ninth with a 5-2 lead but Don Baylor's two-run homer off starter Mike Witt had cut the lead to a run. Reliever Gary Lucas had complicated matters by hitting Boston's Rich Gedman with a pitch to put the tying run aboard.
Now Moore, a day after getting a cortisone shot in his pitching shoulder, was in the game, facing Boston's Dave Henderson, who had earlier embarrassed himself when a Bobby Grich fly ball bounced off his glove and over the fence for a two-run home run.
The count went to 2-2 and the Angels were ready to party. Inside the clubhouse, the champagne was on ice and the lockers had all been covered with plastic.
Gene Mauch, in his 26th year as a major-league manager, had never been to the World Series. Now he was going to get his chance. Ditto for popular team owner Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy.
One strike away ...
Moore delivered. Henderson swung. The ball rocketed off toward the left field seats. A split-second earlier, 64,223 fans had been roaring in anticipation. Now you could hear a pin drop. The ball sailed over left-fielder Brian Downing's head, into the crowd.
At the plate, Henderson leapt into the air and did a 360-degree pirouette before starting his home run trot. This past Sunday, Henderson threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park and after delivering the ball, he recreated that 1986 spin-jump, pointing and laughing at the Angels dugout.
To their credit, the Angels came back to tie that game in the bottom of the ninth, but another Henderson swing, this time a sacrifice fly in the 11th inning, gave Boston a 7-6 win. The Red Sox went on to win the sixth and seventh games of the series by an 18-5 margin.
Of course, we all know what happened in that World Series against the Mets.
Within three years, Donnie Moore was dead, by his own hand. Some said he never got over the Henderson home run. Others said he was a troubled man long before that. Mauch retired after the 1987 season without ever getting to the World Series. He died in 2005. Autry died in 1998, also without a Series.
One strike away. So close, but yet so far.
KEN.FIDLIN@SUNMEDIA.CA
