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........................................| 51 In the grand scheme, eighty-six years is a heartbeat, but in New England the period of time from September 1918 until October 2004 had been a historical epoch along the lines of the Pleistocene Era or, more accurately, the Dark Ages. Had ever a people suffered so much? Always the sweetest of fruit had been dangled, always it had been snatched away. It wasn’t just losing. It wasn’t just not winning. It was the anguish of almost. Now the Curse of the Bambino had lifted. After their back-from-thecrypt comeback against the Yankees, the Red Sox had made quick work of the St. Louis Cardinals. Beneath a full lunar eclipse, they had won it all. Throughout New England it was said over and over again: Now I can die in peace. In truth, most of the fans didn’t perish quite yet. They enjoyed a winter of the most extreme content. They pinched themselves silly and turned basking and savoring into art forms. In mid-February they revel in the annual Boston Globe photo of the equipment truck leaving Fenway Park, heading south. Many follow, more pilgrimage than vacation, flocking to Fort Myers, Florida, to greet the conquering heroes as they try to do it again. They are people like Frankie Jurkowski, a mailman in Northampton, Massachusetts, who always wears a Sox cap when making his appointed rounds. Late in October, Frankie had walked with his son to a nearby cemetery, poured some champagne over his father’s gravestone, and said simply, “Dad, they did it.” On March 4, for the first time since the World Series win, men in Red Sox uniforms take the field to play. They split their squad in two and take on Northeastern University and Boston College in a pair of seven-inning games. For years the Sox have scheduled games against college teams in their first few days of Florida action. For the college kids, playing against the Sox is a photo for the scrapbook. For the pros, it is a gentle adjustment to competition , a way to dip their toes in the water. Invariably, the Sox win big. Game 1 proves even more of a romp than expected, as five major and minor leaguers combine for a no-hitter, with Boston winning, 17–0. Game 2 is a more reasonable rout: 11–5. For all Red Sox players it is a glowing day. 4 Manny Being Manny Fort Myers, Florida 52 | chapter 4 All except one, that is. In his first-ever game in big league camp, Manny Delcarmen gives up all five runs on three hits, two walks, and a wild pitch in just one-third of an inning. ● No player in the Red Sox organization enjoyed the World Series victory more than Delcarmen. Though he wasn’t on the big league roster during the win—he had never even played Double-A ball for that matter—the team and its history were deep in his bones. Who else could navigate every stop of the MBTA bus line, much less call one of its drivers, Javy Colon, a lifelong friend? Who else knew what it was like to live in a triple-decker? Who else preferred candlepin bowling? Even as rambunctious teenagers, Manny and his friends used to flock to Ron Covitz’s ten-lane operation, the one with the Keno games and the homemade ice cream, a place where, as one reviewer deftly noted, patrons could get both a banana split and a 7–10 split. The hub of his youth, though, was the place his old Irish high school baseball coach John Conley called “Fenway Pahk.” Manny had sat in virtually every section of the famed ball yard, often showing up early, stretching his dark, sinewy arms over the railing, imploring Wade Boggs, or Dewey Evans, or Roger the Rocket Clemens for an autograph. Sometimes he sat in the bleachers and watched the pitchers warm up from just a few feet away: crack, crack, crack, sliders on the black. He played his own ball on the skin infields of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, holding hard to that common and unlikely dream, to grow up and play ball for the Sox. The absurdity of the dream was even more pronounced in inner-city Boston. For all the region’s devout worship of the Red Sox, the city’s public high schools had not produced a single major league draft pick since 1966. Manny came by...

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