Red Sox Have Edge in Starting Stitching

While he’s at it, Dr. Bill Morgan might consider suturing Pedro Martinez’s shoulder together, just for a start or two.

It was Morgan, the Boston Red Sox’s esteemed medical director, who jerry-rigged Curt Schilling’s ankle for Game 6 of the American League championship series. He stitched a handful of threads beneath the pitcher’s wobbly tendon, relieving Schilling’s pain, and doubling George Steinbrenner’s. Worked out for everybody.

Morgan practiced first on a cadaver. The procedure on Schilling worked so well that he pitched seven sturdy innings Tuesday night.

The rest is Red Sox history. They went on to beat the New York Yankees in seven games. And if they overcome the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, ending 86 years of baseball misery, the Red Sox will have Morgan to thank.

But, on the eve of the Red Sox’s fifth World Series since 1918, perhaps Morgan should consider further tinkering. After all, these Red Sox exhausted themselves for nine days near the end of a terribly long season.

A year ago, after the Florida Marlins beat his team in the World Series, Yankee Manager Joe Torre cited the rigors of the previous series among the mitigating factors, that being a seven-game, all-hands-on-deck series against the Red Sox.

That too ended on a cool night in the Bronx, players dog-piling near the pitchers’ mound, the World Series looking like the easy part.

Those Yankees lost in six games.

These Red Sox arrived in their clubhouse before noon Friday, a misty drizzle chilling them on their way through the dank concourses of Fenway Park, Wednesday night’s work still warming their spirit. They had vanquished the reviled Yankees, and in the hours since the pools of pepper spray and clouds of tear gas had pretty much subsided on Ted Williams Way.

They, too, had slept off the AL championship series, and so they rolled out the batting cage, pulled wool caps down around their ears and sloshed through batting practice on a perfectly wretched New England day.

Of course, they practiced while stifling grins, a nice way to work. They’d watched the St. Louis Cardinals qualify as their opponents the night before, in another seventh game. The Cardinals flew Friday and arrived at Fenway Park late in the afternoon, almost certainly fatigued.

Nothing compares to Yankees-Red Sox, however, and the Red Sox exhausted their emotions and their pitching staff to get here, to arrive on the eve of the World Series, up against the Cardinals and 85 years of failure.

On Friday, they insisted they had not spent themselves in winning four in a row against the Yankees, the last two at Yankee Stadium. They insisted they had something left, lots more left, that they’d not been satisfied because the Yankees were gone.

But then, the Yankees didn’t see it coming either against the Marlins.

“What we want is a World Series title,” Red Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler said. “I mean, I don’t want to be that guy that acts like that last series wasn’t important to us. It was. But this is it. The World Series is the World Series.”

Schilling will start Game 2 here. Between starts, according to the plan, he’ll have the stitches in his ankle removed and then replaced, primarily to reduce the risk of infection. According to one team official, Schilling probably would be stitched again tonight. The official smiled and shook his head at such a process, even as Schilling wandered nearby, smothering a slight limp as he moved from his locker to the bathroom.

“This place,” the official said, “is a different place.”

Yes, the desperation runs thick, and perhaps that is what will carry the Red Sox. Schilling is such a team guy all of his socks now run red.

“This was a last-gasp effort, a brilliant idea the doctors came up with, because had it not worked I wouldn’t have pitched,” Schilling said. “I heard they give a Nobel prize for medicine. He’s got to be on the ballot.”

Boston’s closer, Keith Foulke, threw more than 100 pitches over consecutive late-series games. Martinez threw an inning in the Game 7 blowout because there were few other options, Coach Terry Francona said. Jason Varitek caught all but a couple of innings, though Doug Mirabelli gets the floppy mitt tonight for Tim Wakefield.

So what? they said. So what?

“The one guy you think would be crushed is the toughest warrior on our ballclub,” Kapler said. “What Varitek did, man, there’s so many little stories on this team.”

Nobody was complaining Friday. And nobody would validate the theory of Yankee drag. If Torre’s team went flat after the last Game 7, well, that was Torre’s team, not theirs.

“The biggest thing is, this team is as focused as ever,” first baseman Kevin Millar said. “There’s no letdown like the Yankees supposedly had last year. They didn’t let down. ... It’s like the Yankee series. Is it the biggest comeback or the biggest choke ever? There was no choke; we beat ‘em.”

Unlike the Yankees, this is all too fresh for the Red Sox, pitcher Derek Lowe said.

“There’s going to be no LCS hangover,” he said. “It’s not like we won 26 [World Series] and we’d say, ‘Oh, we’re here again.’ ”