The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Memories of ’04 and a lost hero
It’s safe to say that most of the fans at Fenway Park for Tuesday’s home opener, certainly the ones over 35, knew where they were on the night of Oct. 17, 2004, or rather, early in the morning of Oct. 18, when Red Sox history turned a corner.
The moments came to life on a postcard day at Fenway two decades later. Dave Roberts stole second and scored to tie the American League Championship Series Game 4 against the New York Yankees in the bottom of the 9th. David Ortiz won the game with a walk-off home run in the 12th, sparking a miracle end to the 86-year Red Sox championship drought.
After the national anthem, after introductions of the 2024 team, a giant American flag gave way to a 2004 World Series champions banner covering most of the Green Monster in left field.
Memory floodgates opened. Players from that 2004 Red Sox team streamed onto the Fenway field. Highlights of that season, including the historic comeback from 3-0 against the Yankees, played on the big screen to Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
And Red Sox Nation said goodbye to beloved knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, stalwart of that 2004 team who died of cancer last Oct. 1, the final day of the season — with a moment of silence for him, for his wife, Stacy, who died this past winter and for former team president Larry Lucchino, who passed away at 78 just last week.
It was impossible not to feel the wistfulness of loss and the promise of renewal as 18-year-old Brianna Wakefield, both parents now gone, threw out the first pitch. She tossed a knuckleball to Jason Varitek, close friend to the Wakefield family, the catcher who anchored that tough team, now a coach for a 2024 Red Sox squad that’s off to a surprisingly strong start.
I say that as a lifetime Yankees fan invited to this game by my friend, Larry Tye, biographer of Satchel Paige, Robert F. Kennedy and others, and a longtime ticketholder who was right there in Fenway for that 2004 Game 4 comeback. No matter the allegiance.
The thick sense on this day when the Red Sox lost badly to the Baltimore Orioles despite an uplifting early home run: Nothing is guaranteed. No victory, no long life. Nothing is ever guaranteed.
I sought out a fan decked out in Yankees gear for the Sox opener. Chris Abate had traveled from Maine with three Red Sox fans for their 16th straight year, four women celebrating friendship and baseball. She talked about 2004.
“It was an amazing run. You’ve got to hand it to them,” Abate said. “The baseball fan in me liked it. The Yankees fan didn’t like it.”
I might not have said any part of me liked seeing the Red Sox make history that year. Still, witnessing the scene at Fenway Tuesday did bring back cherished parts of my life that I’ve lost. Nothing is guaranteed.
“That was a wonderful tribute. Even I shed a tear,” Abate told me.
In fact, the assistant principal of a pre-K-to-8th grade school wore a Tim Wakefield T-shirt until that ceremonial first pitch of the season. As it happens, she grew up in Connecticut, went to high school in Cheshire — and naturally she’s a UConn basketball fan coming off a whirlwind few weeks.
Her friend Laura Garnett bemoaned what she called poor rebounding by the UConn women’s basketball team, which she said cost them a berth in the title came.
But now March Madness gives way to another season of baseball. The cycle continues. After the game, another friend in that tight group, Jen Cooper, wearing her Wakefield shirt and a Red Sox hat, shouted for players exiting a side door of the stadium to pose for photos and sign autographs. It was all part of their opening day ritual.
They recalled harsher opening days, one when their drinks froze. They recounted the 2013 opener, just a few days before the Boston Marathon bombing united the whole region behind another Red Sox team that won it all. And they joked about Abate’s Yankees gear. “We love her because she loves baseball,” Cooper said, “a love of baseball that transcends whose team you represent.”
Coming off the lost game Tuesday when the Red Sox seemed to forget how to field, a day when the team announced its shortstop, Trevor Story, is now out for the season with a fractured shoulder, Cooper recalled the bitter memories of Red Sox disappointments. Why? I asked. The curse is over and the team has won four World Series in the last 20 years.
“As much as you hold onto it,” she responded, “you feel like it will always disappear and be gone forever.”
That is baseball, and it is life. And death. Amid the eternal hope of a new beginning, amid the turmoil of the outside world, nothing is guaranteed.