Ghosts of Fenway Are Put to Rest at Last : Gritty Red Sox Clinch AL East Title With a 12-3 Rout of the Blue Jays

The sound of popping champagne corks triggered the sigh of relief that swept over New England Sunday.

From Boston to Bangor, Me., the concern that had accompanied the Boston Red Sox’s pursuit of the American League East title evaporated as the Red Sox finally exorcised the ghosts of seasons past.

Seven times in the previous 14 years they had held a lead after the All-Star break but had won only once, in 1975. They led by 7 1/2 games in August of 1974 and lost. They led by 10 games in August of 1978 and lost--in a division playoff with the New York Yankees.

They had led the 1986 race since May 15, but the question of fortitude hung like an albatross until Sunday when they officially clinched the division crown, eliminating their last challenger, the defending champion Toronto Blue Jays, 12-3.

The Red Sox now have seven games remaining until they open the AL playoff against the Angels here on Oct. 7.

Said Oil Can Boyd, Boston’s winning pitcher Sunday:

“Look out, California, we’ll be ready. I don’t think they have the ballclub to beat us now.”

John McNamara, who managed the Angels in 1983 and ’84 and spurned their delayed offer to return in favor of the position here, stood behind his desk in a jubilant clubhouse. The champagne that dripped from his face seemed to hide the strain of a long summer.

“Everybody and his brother said we were going to cave, choke and every other word you want to use, but we didn’t do it,” McNamara said.

“Toronto won those nine straight (near the end of August) and we turned around and won 11 (in a row). That’s the way it was all year. No one here ever quit.”

He was asked to compare the feeling to 1979, when he managed Cincinnati to the National League East title.

“This is much more satisfying because we were picked fifth or sixth by just about everyone and we had more obstacles to overcome,” he said.

“We had to go through an entire summer beating people down . . . critics, baseball people, baseball managers, the ghosts of our reputation. It’s a very satisfying, very gratifying, very good feeling to emerge from all of that as champions.”

The reputation, right fielder Dwight Evans said, wasn’t really fair, but now it’s buried.

Only Evans and Jim Rice remain from the ’75 team that reached the World Series. And they were here, of course, when the albatross reappeared in ’78. The Yankees rallied from a 14 1/2-game August deficit. The Red Sox became the Boston stranglers.

“We didn’t choke,” Evans said, his volume rising. “We had 99 wins. We won 11 of 12 to get in the playoff. No one talks about the Yankees playing .720 down the stretch, ’78 is over with, done with. It was then. It definitely is now.

“Maybe we did want to prove something. All I know is that I feel totally relaxed. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.”

An entire region probably shared that feeling, but only proper Puritanism was on display at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox have won 14 of their last 15 games. A crowd of 32,929 left the storied stadium standing, the grass intact.

Maybe it was the early show of strength during which a dozen mounted police circled the warning track in the seventh inning. Maybe it was the fact that police ringed the track by the time it ended. The zealots were on their feet cheering, clapping, chanting “we’re No. 1,” but only a few braved the night sticks.

Appreciative, perhaps, of this calm response, the Red Sox showered in champagne and returned to the field for a curtain call. Roger Clemens did it by riding double with one of the mounted police, a regal parade for the 24-game winner.

Maybe, too, it was the fact that the drama went out of the clinching early. Seven Toronto pitchers yielded 13 hits and 9 walks. The Blue Jays made three errors and twice permitted Boston runners to advance by failing to cover the proper base.

Marty Barrett, Boston’s unsung second baseman, drove in four runs with three singles and a pair of walks. Wade Boggs singled, walked twice and became the first player in Boston history to collect 200 hits in four seasons and 200 hits and 100 walks in the same season. No major leaguer had done that since Stan Musial in 1953.

A second-inning single by Don Baylor allowed him to become the fourth Boston player with 90 or more RBIs, an emphatic and continuing response to George Steinbrenner’s June prediction that his bat would be dead by August.

Said Baylor, of his ex-employer: “If you start believing what George says, you’re going to wind up in trouble.”

Among the Red Sox, no one knows the meaning of trouble better than Oil Can Boyd. But on a crisp, clear and memorable day, Boyd continued to bury his own ghosts, scattering 8 hits and retiring the last 11 Blue Jays in order to improve his record to 16-10. Boyd is a modest 5-4 since his mid-season suspension, but he has won four of his last five decisions and pitched three straight complete-game victories at Fenway. This was the biggest, a personal panacea, perhaps, and Boyd prepared for it by spending the night in a mid-town hotel.

“I had a dream with myself, a talk with myself,” he said. “I tried to block everything else out and think about what I had to do.

“I mean, I wasn’t as flamboyant today because it was all locked inside.”

There is much about Oil Can Boyd that the Red Sox are still trying to unlock, but he has seemed to come back now from those chronicled events of mid-season. “It was a nightmare but you can’t keep a good man down,” he said.

The Red Sox need the slick Oil Can of Sunday. A lingering knee injury may prevent Tom Seaver from pitching in the playoffs. Boston may go with only three starters: Boyd, Clemens and Bruce Hurst, who are a combined 18-2 since Aug. 15.

In Boyd’s words, look out California.