UNCASVILLE — Manny Ramirez turned to the man next to him, his former captain, and shared a little secret.
“When I came to Boston, I watched you and I looked up to you,”: Ramirez told Jason Varitek. “When you went 4-for-4 or 0-for-4, you worked hard. It made me a better player.”
It was a poignant moment during an evening of funny stories, fond reminiscences. “Man, I’ve never heard that before,” Varitek said, affected by it. “… Of course, Manny never went 0-for-4.”
Twenty years later, there are still all these little moments and feels, still little things to be unearthed and discussed about the Red Sox of 2004, the team that ended the mythical “curse” that haunted a city, a franchise and a wide-ranging nation of avid fans for 86 years. Their historic comeback against the ancient enemy, the Yankees, in the ALCS changed baseball, or at least the course of history for both franchises — with Connecticut, as always, caught in the middle.
Six member of the ’04 Sox gathered Saturday night at Novelle, within Mohegan Sun, to meet and greet fans and partake in a panel discussion of a sporting victory that lives on.
“What a magical time with this family,” Johnny Damon said. “We came back from some impossible moments and made so many people happy. We reversed a curse, we brought a ‘Nation’ together, Red Sox nation, and it’s going to live on forever.”
In case you are too young to remember, or not conversant in baseball history, here are the basics of this fable-like story. The Red Sox hadn’t won the World Series since 1918, two years before selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees, which launched a New York dynasty that lasted for decades.
In 2003, the Red Sox had victory over the Yankees in their grasp, but blew a 4-0 lead in Game 7 of the ALCS and lost in extra innings on Aaron Boone’s home run. The next season, after a number of epic regular season clashes, they met again in October. The Red Sox had added a couple of missing ingredients, including Curt Schilling and closer Keith Foulke, but lost the first three games. They are still the only team in history to overcome such a deficit, winning four in a row, and then they swept St. Louis to win the World Series, Ramirez the MVP.
“We were very aware of what we were doing,” said Foulke, 52, who got the final out of the World Series on a bouncer back to the mound. “But you’re a young man, in the prime of your career, you don’t think about 20 years down the road. It just says a little bit about that team that here we are, 20 years later, you see the same guys and it brings the same smile to your face.”
The Red Sox went on to win again in 2007, 2013 and 2018. Varitek, 52, the catcher and captain, is best remembered for a game July 24, when he shoved his mitt into the face of Yankees star Alex Rodriguez during a brawl at Fenway Park, a game the Red Sox won in dramatic fashion. He’s still with the Red Sox as a coach.
“The longer you were there, the more you understood the baggage, how big that piano (on our backs) was,” Varitek said. “But also how fortunate you were to be getting closer and closer and closer. I don’t think you really understand until you’ve won. The energy definitely did change. It goes from ‘what’s going to happen, what fatal thing is going to happen to the fan base?’ That baggage, that piano, that curse turned to winning.”
Damon’s long hair was up in a man bun and he was, again, the life of the party. He lamented playing less than par with the effects of a concussion in 2003 and early ’04. He let his hair grow because sitting for a haircut was uncomfortable. “You’re not cutting your hair,” young GM Theo Epstein told him. “We’re the Red Sox, we’re not that other team. We do what we want.”
Damon crushed the buttoned down, clean shaven Yankees with two homers in Game 7. Later, he shaved, cut his hair and signed with the other team, helping the Yankees to their 2009 championship. But the hair and the beard are back, apparently to stay.
“We are going to cherish this moment for the rest of our life, and why not?” Damon, 51, said. “We get to hang our with each other all the time. We’re still a family today.”
Anyone who watched, covered (as I did) or participated in that postseason has their own take on when it turned, the bounces that went one way or another, managerial decisions that worked or didn’t. Varitek’s notion is that when the Red Sox rallied in Game 4, as Dave Roberts, now manager of the World Champion Dodgers, stole second and scored the tying run the ninth inning, and won on David Ortiz’s home run to stave off elimination, everything changed. The Red Sox had momentum, Martinez and Schilling, who was pitching with an ankle injury and a famous “bloody sock”, won the next two games. Derek Lowe started on two day’s rest and won Game 7.
Damon mentioned the late Tim Wakefield’s several innings of seemingly lost-cause relief pitching during the Yankees’ 19-8 win in Game 3. He saved the Red Sox bullpen and his knuckleball, Damon believes, messed up the Yankees’ swings for the rest of the series.
“We had an up and down season, but the team never panicked,” Foulke said. “People want to point to one thing, but we never panicked. We knew where we had to go, and knew what we had to do to get there.”
Taking Damon’s lead, most of the players adopted a ragged, unkempt look and became known as “The Idiots” for their free-wheeling ways. “I think we were a better ‘tired’ team than the Yankees were,” said Alan Embree, who got the last out in New York. That team had several Hall-of-Fame caliber players, including Ortiz and Martinez, who are enshrined, but in the age-old chicken-or-egg debate, whether chemistry leads to winning or vice versa, the ’04 Red Sox would seem to be a study in value of chemistry.
“It’s like any relationship,” Varitek said. “It’s either growing one way, or it’s growing together. It’s never just stagnant. You’re either pushing in the wrong direction, or pulling in the right direction.”
Said Foulke: “As you grow older and have kids and your perspective on sports and on life changes, you realize how dedicated we were to accomplishing a goal that year. We made it interesting, but we were literally all there for the exact same reason.”
Jeff Hamilton, president and GM of Mohegan Sun, was a college student at Seton Hall in 2004. From Groton, Red Sox fandom was passed down in Hamilton’s, starting with his grandfather, who was born in 1918 and died at 86 three weeks before the last out in St. Louis. He shared the championship with his father, and now tries to explain to his teenage son, J.J., who has grown up with championships, what it was like.
“Just the pain and suffering of being a Red Sox fan,” Hamilton said, “and then, ’04, obviously the story is tremendous being down 0-3, but just the ability to win the World Series and the feeling for Red Sox fans after almost 100 years of losing, and coming so close. It was an amazing, amazing, amazing feeling.”
Multiply that story by all the families of fans that make up Red Sox Nation, a couple of hundred gathered at Mohegan Sun 20 years a later. This is why the 2004 Red Sox’s tale is timeless, the stuff that inspires movies and a Netflix documentary series, “The Comeback.”
“It touches your soul,” Foulke said. “I still hear a thousand times a year, what it meant for families, multiple generations, family members who weren’t around to see it. It’s one thing that makes New England such a unique place. The fan base is born into you, and I love to hear those stories and I’m very proud to be part of the team that put all those things to bed.”
