Boston crushes New York in an anticlimactic finish to its unprecedented comeback.
By MARC TOPKIN
Published October 21, 2004
NEW YORK - The Red Sox insisted they were going to make history.
Who knew they would have so much fun along the way?
Their 10-3 Game 7 victory Wednesday over the Yankees in an anticlimactic climax of the AL Championship Series gave all of Red Sox nation reason to celebrate.
Not only did the Red Sox become the first team to come back from a 3-0 deficit and win a postseason series, they get to watch their archrival Yankees deal with the ramifications of being the first team to blow such a margin.
Not only did they celebrate winning the AL pennant and a berth in the World Series, they got to do it in most hostile territory, on the once hallowed ground of Yankee Stadium.
Not only did they avenge last year's cruel Game 7 loss to the Yankees, they did it in dominating style, taking a 6-0 second-inning lead that took the Yankees and the crowd essentially out of the game.
"It's an amazing storybook," Boston's Kevin Millar said. "We know the past. We feel their pain. We felt the pain last year on this field, and this team was so much tougher for that pain we felt last year."
Having taken care of the Yankees, the Red Sox will start working on rewriting the next chapter of their painful history. They'll open the World Series on Saturday at Fenway Park against the Astros or Cardinals, who play tonight for the right to be there.
The Sox haven't won the Series since 1918, before they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. They've been back four times, losing to the Cardinals in 1946 and 1967, the Reds in 1975 and the Mets in 1986.
As for curses?
Well, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was probably uttering a few.
The Yankees went stunningly flat at a surprising time, and Steinbrenner is certain to do something about it. The only question was whether he would start firing people today or convene a summit in Tampa on Monday.
"He's going to be disappointed," Yankees manager Joe Torre said. "None of us wanted this to happen."
As gripping as the ALCS was through six games, what with the marathon games, gut-wrenching turns and dramatic endings, the seventh wasn't very exciting.
Johnny Damon hit two home runs, a second-inning grand slam and a two-run shot in the fourth, as the Sox built an early 8-1 lead against Kevin Brown and Javier Vazquez. Series MVP David Ortiz got them started with a two-run homer in the first. And all Derek Lowe, who started by default, did was hold the Yankees to one hit over six innings.
The Yankees didn't have a lot of good choices to start Wednesday, but it was quickly obvious they made the wrong one.
Brown didn't get out of the second inning, with six of the nine batters he faced reaching base. He left with the bases loaded in the second, and Damon hit reliever Vazquez's first pitch out to right to expand Boston's lead to 6-0.
Pitching wasn't the Yankees' only problem.
The pinstriped offense had been struggling since the middle of Game 5, scoring five in their last 26 innings. The hitters seemed to be abandoning their usually patient approach, and there wasn't much Torre could do about it.
"They played better, bottom line," Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield said.
The Sox were the 26th major-league team to go down 3-0 in a best-of-seven series and the first to make it back to win. Two NHL teams had done it, the Toronto Maple Leafs over Detroit in the 1942 Stanley Cup finals and the New York Islanders over Pittsburgh in the second round of the 1975 playoffs.
"It's unprecedented," pitcher Curt Schilling said. "And I can't think of a more appropriate group of guys to do something like this for the first time. ... We just beat the best organization in sports history. We persevered and survived."
The series seemed over after the Yankees won Game 3 in Boston, but the Red Sox adopted a simple mantra: to win their next game.
"We just wanted to win and move on," manager Terry Francona said. "And the only way we could move on was to do it the way we did."
"It didn't matter if we were down 3-0," Ortiz said. "We just had to keep the faith."
