BOSTON — This is the best part of the postseason, really, when you wander the streets of a city not your own, overhear the conversations of strangers, all of them talking about the same thing: an important baseball game that went down to the final out, witnessed and fretted over by fans whose cuticles are now down to the quick.
This was Newbury Street, downtown Boston, late on a Saturday morning. Outside the Saltie Girl wine bar a crowd of friends had gathered, waiting for the doors to open. They were planning on a full day of college football at another place downtown, followed by Sox-Yankees Game 2, but they waited here for their wives and their girlfriends who were exploring the other businesses on Newbury.
“[Alex] Cora showed me something,” one of them said, referring to the Red Sox manager.
“Me too,” came the reply. “That’s a harder job than it looks sometimes.”
“Especially with that bullpen.”
“Don’t get me started. Holy [cow].”
“That’s what’s going to get us,” a third friend chirped in, his local accent a little thicker than the others. “Maybe not in this series. But eventually.”
“They don’t throw strikes.”
“They nibble.”
“They nibble and it’s going to drive me batty.”
There was a pause, and then the first guy said, “Porcello.”
“Yeah. Porcello. Circle that inning.”
“The only one with a set of [courage].”
It went on like that outside the doors at the Saltie Girl, and inside Fenway neighborhood bars like Boston Beer Works and the Cask ‘n’ Flagon, and everywhere else in town where Red Sox baseball matters, which is to say: everywhere else in town.
And you wonder why, all these years later, you can still get people to flinch by just uttering the name “Grady Little.”
You wonder why, if you get into a heated debate, you can still get men of a certain age to slam tables when you bring up Bobby Sprowl (a petrified non-prospect whom Don Zimmer threw in the heat of the ’78 Boston Massacre against the Yankees, mostly to spite Bill Lee), when you bring up Jim Burton (the non-prospect Darrell Johnson summoned to pitch a tied ninth inning of Game 7 of the ’75 World Series against the Reds), when you bring up Denny Galehouse (the journeyman Joe McCarthy selected to pitch a one-game playoff against the Indians to determine the 1948 AL pennant winner.
Yes. Managers make decisions that can stick in craws for generations.
Or make fans eternally grateful on the morning after.
“I was all in,” Cora explained on Saturday afternoon, a day after his decision bring Porcello into the eighth inning of Game 1 on Friday night. It was a [courageous] decision, one that a lot of managers wouldn’t have made, because Porcello is the No. 3 starter and he is schedule to pitch Game 3 at Yankee Stadium on Monday, and because he was being asked to do something he hasn’t been asked to do all year.
Managers hate asking guys to do something they haven’t done all year.
Except Cora had seen what everyone else saw on Friday: his bullpen had become a dumpster fire. Everyone knew that would be a problem coming into these playoffs. And then the Sox pen came in and scattered lighter fluid everywhere, revived a dead Yankees team, tried to turn New England into a region of baseball zombies.
Until Cora said: enough.
Until he summoned Porcello.
It seems so full of common sense, and it is, but for a manager managing his first-ever playoff game, it represented such a clear-eyed decision. “I need outs. I need to stop momentum. And I won’t be dictated to by job description.”
So in came Porcello. Down went the first two hitters he faced. The momentum was stopped. The Sox won, 5-4. And on the morning after, he was toasted by a grateful fan base that has seen so many past decisions go to seed. For one morning, at least, Alex Cora really was the toast of the town.
