Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season

Two Fans' Notes

If Hollywood's forthcoming adaptation of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be the sugar-sweet cinematic translation of the 2004 Red Sox cursed-to-first story (co-stars Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon received a special dispensation to rush the field for the celebratory scrum after Game Four of the World Series), then consider Faithful the official Sox memoir of our reality-TV era: "Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season," as the subtitle goes.

Comprised of diary entries, supplemented by occasional emails exchanged by its co-authors, Faithful reconstructs two fans' eight-month rollercoaster ride day by day, sometimes inning by inning, even batter by batter and pitch by pitch. Welcome to Baseball Lit's version of Mystery Science Theater: Eavesdrop on two fans while the Bosox play out the year up on the big screen.

Beginning in March as players report to Spring Training and continuing chronologically through the World Series, good friends Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan chart the season as they experience it: in Monster seats at Fenway, at home in front of the TV, on the radio, as reported in newspapers, overheard in diners, and discussed at gas station pumps around New England. Schilling's arrival, Arroyo's emergence, Varitek's mitt in A-Rod's jaw... Bestselling novelists and diehard followers of the Olde Town Team record a season from the bleachers and wind up capturing a historic, curse-cleansing campaign. As a collectible souvenir, a completist's highlight reel, joyous fans could hardly ask for more.

As a book, however, not as a keepsake but rather as four hundred pages of self-standing reading material, it's not exactly a page-turner.

We all know who won, and we know exactly how. As the authors reflect on one game after another -- O'Nan handles most of the play-by-play while King fills in color commentary -- citizens of Red Sox Nation will inevitably wonder, Did I watch this game? Or maybe I only saw the highlights on Sportscenter.

May 7th
...Tonight it's Wake and his 2.25 ERA against Jeremy Affeldt, who's yet to win a game. I'm thinking we should score a bunch of runs, but it's Wake who struggles. It's a windy night -- usually good for a knuckler -- but his ball looks awful straight...

May 12th
Tonight it's Wake versus Cliff Lee, a young lefthander who's 3-0 with a nifty ERA. It seems every time the Indians have someone on, they take advantage of Wake's slow delivery and steal. Twice Bellhorn lets throws from Mirabelli skip by him into center. The Indians get a run in the second, and the third, and the fifth, and two in the sixth...

May 16th
...In Toronto, it's Pedro-Halladay III, a series I'm growing fond of....

Too often, particularly in the early pages, before the writers have found their rhythm and with the season itself still months away from any sense of overarching drama, Faithful plods along in highlight-reel mode, and readers will be forgiven for wondering whether the first three hours of life used up actually watching the game weren't quite likely enough.

It's a simple truth that sports are best consumed live. A few games every year will stand up to repeated viewing, but a whole season? King himself, candid as always, concedes:

Stanley Kubrick, insulated in his compound in the English countryside, used to have an assistant here in the States tape the playoffs and World Series so he could devour them at his leisure, and while I admire Kubrick's taste (and appetite), watching a game that's long been over, and watching alone, seems to leach the immediacy from what is essentially a shared experience. Ideally, I want to be at the game, reacting to every pitch and situation as part of the loud, honest-to-god crowd; short of that I'll join the far-flung (and far from imaginary) audience all across New England watching Don and Jerry or listening to Joe and Troop or Uri Berenguer and J. P. Villaman, knowing that when David Ortiz cranks one, citizens of the Nation -- from the capital of Fenway to the borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and the Dominican -- are hollering like idiots the same as I am. A box score or even a decent recap can't show me what kind of location Lowe has, or how much of a lead Dave Roberts is getting. I need to see it now, before what happens happens.

In 1962, William Shawn sent Roger Angell to cover the Mets' first Spring Training for New Yorker readers back home. Angell brought a pedigree -- E. B. White's step-son, Katherine White's son -- but until that trip to Florida he'd never written about baseball. In his first report and in the regular correspondences that followed, Angell broke ground on a new form of baseball writing: Setting his easel in grandstands or in front of TVs, he approached the game as a fan. Not as a beat writer or a journalist or a retired jock reliving old glory days, but a fan. Effusive, good-natured, prodigiously articulate, inquisitive, and lyrical as all get-out, Angell brought a rooting interest to the action.

To be fair, no baseball writer should suffer comparison to Angell -- few novelists stand up well against Faulkner, and who cares. Besides, King and O'Nan aren't aspiring to art here; they're jotting down journal entries. Working toward a publication date just five weeks out from the season's final games, they simply weren't afforded time for reflection. Remarking on early season games with no knowledge of the year's eventual outcome, it's as if they're groping in the dark for a subject -- Who are this year's stars? Is Terry Francona capable of managing in Boston? -- but none of this aimlessness ultimately detracts from the portrait. After all, it's how fans experience a season, blissfully ignoring the fact that every team but one is destined to lose. And yet the point bears making: Roger Angell reports as a fan, but he never confuses himself for the subject. Faithful, on the other hand, isn't so much about baseball as it's about two fans watching baseball. Call it a sign of the times.

On that first assignment, Angell didn't go into the press box. He feared that seasoned journalists would know he was faking it; his lack of formal baseball training would expose him as a hack. Yet he took advantage of his presence in the stadium to bring fans inside the game -- dramatizing compatriots in the stands, picking players' brains -- and in doing so revealed the sport as something more (and oftentimes less) than radio broadcasts and box scores made it out to be. Upon publication of the 2003 anthology that collects forty years of his best work [Game Time], the octogenarian remarked, "Once I could persuade these guys [the players] that all I wanted to hear from them was what they did -- 'Tell me what you do' -- once you can persuade someone that this is all you're after, you can't shut them up because we're all fascinated by what we do."

King and O'Nan seek no special access to players or management. They quote post-game interviews and statistics, but it's rare that Faithful brings us any closer to the action than we're able to get on our own. That's the point, of course -- we're fans, just like you -- but for all the verisimilitude their populist stance ensures (boy, this really is how it felt to be a fan that summer), the authors' self-imposed detachment means most everything here seems reheated somehow. We've heard it before. Perhaps in ten years time, your nephew will open these pages and marvel at the way two middle aged men followed their team. Today, however, it's all to close in our memories, too familiar. Both King and O'Nan are keen viewers of the game, and of course these two can write, but there's very little new in these pages, nothing you didn't see first on NESN or read in the Globe. In less inspired passages, you can practically see the freezer-burn on the page.

And yet here's the rub: the authors stumbled on a rare season, and somewhere down the line just about anyone who followed this year's Red Sox will be thankful that two passionate fans kept notes. For the first time in eighty-six years, Boston captured the World Series. Along the way, they became the first team in major league history to win a seven-game playoff series after trailing three games to none, and as if that weren't enough they did it against the Yankees, their (very) bitter rivals. It is a dramatic story. If in the rush to explain what happened the book fails to teach readers much of anything about baseball, it does capture exceedingly well the ritualistic excesses and wild mood swings that every box-score junkie takes as a matter of course for more than half (by far the better half) of the year.

If occasionally the book drags, well, often a season drags, too. As the Sox muddle their way through June and July, failing to capitalize on favorable match-ups and gradually falling further and further behind New York, the authors are at their wit's end, hoping not only that their team can salvage the season but that their once-promising book project isn't about to tank. Will anyone want to read about a third-place team? "Why why why did I ever let you talk me into this?" King asks his partner. He stops reading the sports pages, begins watching the games without volume, and changes the station immediately after each final out to spare himself the postgame autopsy. He's learned to deal with disappointing Sox seasons -- this would hardly be the first -- and you sense he could live with a clunker of a book, but his commitment to the project means he can't turn away from the wreck. It's that lack of escape that gnaws at him. King's a fan, first and foremost, and he simply can't bear to watch.

Meanwhile, he has a whopper of a crush on SportsDesk host Jayme Parker. Both writers harbor a nearly religious devotion to old favorite Brian Daubach, re-signed by the team in the off-season but relegated to the minors for most of the year. When the Sox pull off a trading deadline deal that sends an ailing Nomar Garciaparra to Chicago, Boston's press paints the departing hero as a fractious malcontent -- and King is simply incensed at what he deems merely the latest example of malicious, revisionist local sportswriters sucking up to team management at the expense of a player's reputation. Just four innings into April, we find O'Nan bitching about third base coach Dale Sveum -- award him several bonus points for prescience. It's all here, Sox fans, the long, adventurous ride from Fort Myers to St. Louis. Rest assured, through the odd diversions and awkward dead ends, that two of your own are leading the way.

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