Schilling Is Deeply Pained by Outing

It was but a game in a series that won’t end until someone is wholly devastated, but the Boston Red Sox’s advantage over the New York Yankees was Curt Schilling, the kind of pitcher who before last winter had almost always ended up in the Bronx.

Only hours before Tuesday night’s Game 1 of the American League championship series, Yankee Manager Joe Torre had gone on about the good old days, when the Red Sox were game but a pitcher or two short, leaving the Yankees to their run of the last century.

Now the Red Sox had Schilling to go with Pedro Martinez, four starts in a six- or seven-game series, and the Yankees had Mike Mussina and that’s about it, and that’s what made these Red Sox different than, say, the last 85 or so Red Sox teams.

Problem was, if one was the type to eat Yaz Bread as a kid and swallow hard every October, there was the particularly galling sight of the Red Sox pitching coach, Dave Wallace, hugging Schilling in the dugout after the third inning, Schilling appearing near tears.

In a game that lacked nothing, in which the Yankees and Red Sox played most of a best-of-seven series in 3 1/2 ridiculous hours, in which Mussina went from Larsen to lousy, Mariano Rivera went from Panama City to JFK, the Yankees went from parade mode to survival and the whole rivalry went from good to better -- or bad to worse, depending on one’s bearings -- the Yankees were 10-7 winners at Yankee Stadium and the Red Sox may have lost more than a series opener.

“If I can’t go out there with something better than I had today,” Schilling said afterward, “I’m not going to go back out there.... I won’t take the ball again.”

Kind of changes things, doesn’t it?

While Mussina went six perfect innings and an out into the seventh before he became predictable, Schilling went three, disastrously, and watched for the next two hours as his teammates went about cleaning up after him.

Schilling has a sore right ankle, the one he squares on the rubber with every pitch, and presumably that was why he hit most of the Yankee bats over those three innings, Hideki Matsui’s hard, twice.

The crisis for the Red Sox is that Schilling looked like this after six days off, since Game 1 of the division series against the Angels, which all but ended with Schilling limping from the field.

“It’s the same problem it’s been,” he said. “My arm felt phenomenal. I couldn’t make it come out.... We did everything we could to fix it. It wasn’t working.”

He’d latched onto the trainers and suffered a painkilling injection and adjusted his delivery, all of which left him ... hittable.

And, maybe, questionable, for Game 5, where he is scheduled to start again, in Fenway Park. Maybe, if he’s still in pain by Sunday and therefore unable to push off and deliver his fastball and work the strike zone with the deftness that won him 21 games and the hearts of Olde Towne, he’d be able to go in Game 6. Or Game 7. Who knows what the series will look like then, the Red Sox following Martinez tonight with Bronson Arroyo on Friday and Tim Wakefield on Saturday.

Meantime, Derek Lowe awaits. His regular season was so ordinary he didn’t make Manager Terry Francona’s postseason rotation. Now he could start in Schilling’s place.

“You’re getting way, way ahead of me,” Francona said.

As morning arrived in the visitors’ clubhouse, Schilling sat on a stool in front of his locker and shook his head. He’d waited for such a start for nearly a year, since he took the ball from the Red Sox last winter, allowing a trade from the Arizona Diamondbacks, willing to take on this Yankee beast from within the Eastern Division.

“This place was electric,” he said, meaning the stadium, the town, everything in it. “It was everything I was hoping for it to be. I couldn’t answer the call.”

Catcher Jason Varitek realized Schilling wouldn’t be right in the bullpen, before the first inning. The fastball did not pop. The slider did not bite. And then they had to take it to the mound, to this stage. The Yankees scored twice in the first inning, four times in the third and Schilling paced and retied his right shoe four times and hoped for a catch in the gap or a lucky break.

Asked whether there was anything he could do to help, Varitek shook his head.

“Not much,” he said. “Hopefully, he’d continue to make quality pitches.”

Instead, he said of the Yankees, “they didn’t let him breathe.”

So, after the third, Wallace hugged Schilling like he would a son, told him he’d had enough. Schilling watched, then, as his teammates worked back from 8-0 to 8-7, how they’d made this a game like they’d made this a rivalry.

“The Yankees beat me tonight,” Schilling said. “We’re going to take the loss as a team, but they beat me.”