Destiny Calls the Red Sox to a Big Fall

The Red Sox win all the games now. They win by one run, they win by nine. They just win. Let’s have no more absurd allusions to curses and the clammy hand of their haunted history. Nothing can hurt the Red Sox now, not even the negative vibes from their Chicken Little fans. They are untouchable until October.

On Aug. 14, 1978, the Red Sox enjoyed a nine-game lead over the second-place New York Yankees. OK, maybe “enjoyed” is not the right word. Anyone who has heard of Bucky Dent knows it was not enough.

Monday night, Aug. 14, 1995, the Red Sox again had a nine-game lead on the second-place Yankees, who were beginning a 14-game trip with a three-game series at Fenway. The Red Sox had won 11 games in a row, the longest streak in the major leagues this season.

Make it 12. And make it over for the Yankees, who now trail the Sox by 10 games. And make it over for the rest of the American League East, which never had a chance anyway.

Erik Hanson, Tim Naehring and Mo Vaughn made it easy in this 9-3 Sox victory. Easy is how the Red Sox do things these days. Good pitching, timely hitting and various home run heroes.

The Red Sox have used 47 players this season, including a team record 24 pitchers. Soon it will be 48, now that the Red Sox have acquired outfielder Chris James from the Kansas City Royals in exchange for Wes Chamberlain.

Dan Duquette, the Dalton, Mass., lad come home from Montreal to minister to his boyhood team, sure knows how to change his Sox. He is a shoo-in to win American League Executive of the Year. If this were football, we’d be calling him genius.

“I think it’s obvious,” Sox manager Kevin Kennedy said, “that Dan and I don’t really sit still.”

Not even with a 10-game lead.

Timing isn’t everything in life, but it sure makes mincemeat out of nearly everything else. The Red Sox are nothing more than what the Yankees were last season, a good team having a great season. But the Yankees’ timing was incredibly lousy. The strike Aug. 12, 1994, deprived them of their chance for postseason glory.

The Red Sox will experience no such deprivation. Even better, the inherent inequity of the new playoff system guarantees them home-field advantage in the first round (best-of-five) of the playoffs, although it is the Cleveland Indians who have the league’s best record. Oh, those lucky Sox.

How else to explain their amazing season? Imagine betting someone in April that the Sox would lead their division by 10 games at this juncture with Aaron Sele, who hasn’t pitched since May, winning three games, and Roger Clemens, who didn’t pitch until June, winning four. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

No more ridiculous than the saga of Tim Wakefield (14-1), the knuckeballer plucked off the Pirates scrap heap and now the favorite to win the Cy Young Award. In April, what were the Vegas odds on that?

“Who cares?” said Vaughn, who hit a career-high 30th home run Monday night. “It doesn’t matter who is winning. We want people who will do the job. We’re done talking about who’s not here.”

There was a real heartiness to the roar of the Fenway faithful Monday night, an obvious audible delight in the outrageous good fortune their team is enjoying. Show us an unhappy Red Sox fan these days, and we’ll show you a person incapable of enjoyment.

Even the players seem to be truly enjoying themselves. In any other season in which the Red Sox enjoyed such surprising success, half the veterans would be chiding the media for not picking them to finish higher in the spring. Not these Sox. They’re just happy to be here, happy to be together, happy to be winning. They’re having too good a time to be petty.

“I’m just happy for a lot of the guys on this team,” said the oft-injured Naehring. “A lot of guys are just trying to prove that they’re everyday players.”

Vaughn, one of the few who has already done that, said, “We’re pretty good about going about our business on an everyday basis. We can’t look past anything. A 10-game lead has nothing to do with it. You’ve got to keep putting the hammer down. We’re not battling the Yankees. We’re not battling any other team. We’re battling ourselves.”

More than ever, the once stodgy Red Sox have made change their friend. The result is one of the sweetest summers in their history. And entry into enchanted October.