NEW YORK — There is, as I write this, the sound of rain drumming the pavement of Seventh Avenue. Taxicab headlights move quietly through the city night. The hotel room window is open, late October is blowing in, and I know this. They are out there somewhere, the baseball ghosts, dancing in the water.
NEW YORK — Live from New York, it’s . . . The Mets? Live? What are they doing still alive? Didn’t you go to sleep last night figuring this thing was over? Didn’t you flick off the TV set around 10 o’clock, figuring “That’s it. This is history. Red Sox win.” Didn’t you?
Ho, ho, sleepy breath.
Never trust New York on Saturday night. It is rich with surprise, with turnarounds, twists, muggings and this night, ironies. Oh, what ironies! Oh what a game!
“I like a look of Agony, because I know it’s true.”
— Emily Dickinson
NEW YORK — His eyes were vacant, as if someone had sucked out any hint of anger or disappointment. Maybe he never felt those things to begin with. The last glimpse of Dwight Gooden in the 1986 World Series was clean and sanitized: dressed in street clothes, dipping to the mike for a few questions, then heading to the airport.
“Whose fault?” the reporters had wanted to know Thursday. “Why did the Mets lose?”
BOSTON — Dave Henderson bounces. He is young and muscular and slides into the bag like a Boeing jet crashing in some distant desert, but then, whoop, he’s back up again, springing to his feet — so quick the dirt doesn’t stick. Up, down, up. The perfect slide for the man from nowhere.
BOSTON — It was out there, ugly, its green shoulders squared and tight, like a bully just daring the new kid to open his mouth. Hey, not even the locals were touching The Wall. For 12 World Series innings, it remained untoppled. Oh, there were a few whacks off its side — a double, a long single
— but The Wall spit those back like watermelon seeds.
BOSTON — Listen. I have a trade to propose: Me for Ron Darling. One for one. Here’s the deal. Darling, the New York Mets’ heartthrob pitcher, gets everything I own. Everything I ever accomplished. Everything I ever laid my eyes, ears or hands on, including my first bicycle. And I get to be him for 24 hours.
That’s all. Just one day. I do not jest. Everything in the kitty. For 24 hours.
BOSTON — There was fever. In the streets, in the shops, in the dirty hallways of Fenway Park and in the Red Sox clubhouse, where reporters darted like waterbugs, player to player, gathering news for the third game of the World Series. The Sox had won the first two in New York. Now they were home. The town was juiced. The town was electric. There was fever everywhere.
Except here, in the lazy slouch of Wade Boggs, who stood alone by the bat rack, sifting through the lumber, looking for the handles marked “26.”
His number.
“What are you doing?” someone asked.
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