Chapter 21

Fenway, as always, was chock-full of screaming Red Sox fans, despite the fact that their club had been all-but-mathematically eliminated from the pennant race. They'd have to sweep our three-game set just to avoid elimination.

They weren't up to it.

We took two out of three from the dispirited Red Sox, including the first one -- the one that decapitated them, so far as getting to the post-season was concerned.

The fans still showed up for the other two games. God, I love the Baltimore fans, but these people up in New England, man they are just incredible! You gotta hand it to them. No greater love.

New York was next. They'd swept their last series and were only one game behind.

The Goddamned Yankee fans were almost as crazy as the ones in Boston, and there were about 23,000 more of them in Yankee Stadium.

Not greater interest -- just greater seating capacity.

We played well in the opener. Gene Holtz held them to only three runs in eight innings, but our guys weren't hitting much and we dropped it, 3-1.

Now we were tied for first.

We got the word after the game that the Angels had clinched the American League West, and that Seattle could lose every remaining game and still be the League's Wild Card team in the playoffs.

So it was official, now. Beat the Goddamned Yankees or forget about it.

The regular season's too long. The players can't sustain their emotional highs for 162 games. There aren't enough breathing spaces. Not enough days off. Not enough family time.

I was fresher than most. Maybe because I was the only Oriole whose bed partner was with him, at home and on the road. Anybody else who was getting laid on road trips was either a Lothario picking up groupies, or a wife-cheating womanizer, or else he was paying for the privilege.

Anyway, we were tired. All of us. Shiggie, with his background of year-round conditioning and grueling workout schedules in Japan, was in better physical condition, probably, than anybody. But Shiggie was tired, too. Maybe his weariness came from the emotional trial he'd been experiencing.

The players were being kind, now. The locker room was no longer a problem. Occasionally, Shiggie would hear it from opposition players, or fans hollering at him from the stands.

The Japanese press was still around, but most of the reporters were treating Shiggie like some kind of pariah. They probably wished their editors would assign them to cover Ichiro, or Matsui.

Both those Japanese superstars, by the way, had made very public gestures of solidarity toward Shiggie, when we'd met their clubs on the field. Pretty classy. It made me feel even warmer toward Ichiro.

But not so much Matsui, of course. He remained a presumptive S.O.B. After all, he played for the Yankees. And it was his own damned fault, too! The Orioles had bid on Matsui's contract when he'd first came to play in the U.S.A.

He was the worst kind of Goddamned Yankee -- he'd chosen them!

Ed Murphy started for us in Game Two of the Yankee series and he got creamed early. Warren brought me in to relieve him with two on and nobody out in the third. We were already down, 3-zip.

I let in one more (the run charged to Ed Murphy) before getting them out in the third, and I pitched pretty decently until the seventh, but I left the game with the Orioles still down 4-1.