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........................................| 275 “Tickets! Tickets! Who needs tickets?” It is late on a Tuesday afternoon outside Fenway Park. The Texas Rangers , the top-hitting team in baseball, are in town as the Red Sox, in second place with a 68–51 record, begin a critical home stand. The game is sold out for the 444th time in a row—just eleven shy of the major league record—but there are, of course, tickets available outside the ballpark to fans willing to shell out big bucks. Three and a half hours before the first pitch, it is already a bustling scene. There are pregame toasts at the Cask’N Flagon. Sox hats and jerseys are flying off the shelves of the Twins Enterprises souvenir shop. A line is already forming at El Tiante on Yawkey Way, where draft beers now go for $7.25. Everywhere there are T-shirts proclaiming messages such as “Ellsbury ,” “Matsuzaka,” and “Love Me, Ortiz Me.” Inside the old brick stadium, the receptionist answers a steady stream of phone calls with “World Champion Boston Red Sox.” Grizzled media members take an elevator up to the press box, where a plaque with a quotation from the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti hangs on the wall: “Genteel in its American origin, proletarian in its development, egalitarian in its demands and appeal, effortless in its adaptation to nature, raucous, hard-nosed and glamorous as a profession, expanding with the country like fingers unfolding from a fist, image of a long past, evergreen reminder of America’s best promises, baseball fits America.” Down below, the Red Sox locker room is an unpretentious place with old fluorescent bulbs hanging above a stained green carpet. There are black leather couches, a few decks of cards, a cribbage game going on, three television sets blathering ESPN. The cooler is filled with Poland Spring water, Powerade, Coke Zero, and, curiously, little containers of Mott’s apple sauce. There is only sporadic activity here in the hours leading up to the game. Former Red Sox great turned broadcaster Jim Rice reads USA Today and sips from a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. A bare-chested Dustin Pedroia, in the midst of an MVP season, announces to no one in particular, “I’m gonna hit rockets!” Manager Terry Francona, grabbing some Dubble Bubble gum 22 “The Path of the Knuckleballer Is Rarely Linear” Boston 276 | chapter 22 from a white bucket, laughs and says, “Put your shirt on.” Holding a Japanese newspaper, Daisuke Matsuzaka ambles over to a pitchers’ meeting to review the tendencies of the Rangers’ hitters. Occasionally a player peers at the lineup card posted on the front door beneath a photo of Johnny Pesky stepping out of the Red Sox dugout onto the field in 1942. Right beside the card is the man himself: a dapper eighty-eight-year-old with thick white hair and sharply defined features, Pesky still maintains a locker in the room he once shared with Ted Williams. A gaggle of reporters at one point surrounds Tim Wakefield. The onetime minor league infielder has long since emerged as the most versatile and enduring member of the Sox staff, having helped the team as a starter, in long relief, and as a closer. At forty-two, he is the third-winningest pitcher in Red Sox history, trailing only Cy Young and Roger Clemens. A pitchman for Just For Men (every Sox broadcast includes the spot touting “the hair color Tim Wakefield uses”), Wakefield has indeed seemed ageless . But the reporters are gathered now to hear about the tightness in the back of his pitching shoulder which has sent him to the fifteen-day disabled list, causing him to miss a scheduled start for the first time all year. He seems resigned to his fate: “It is what it is, forty-two years old, and a lot of wear and tear.” Across the way, in the pitchers’ wing, between lockers with nameplates for Justin Masterson and Javier Lopez, is a locker whose plate says merely “Boston Red Sox.” The locker is spare. Dark jeans with a white belt and a light blue polo shirt hang next to a couple of uniforms with the number 51. On the shelf up above sit a Blackberry and a wallet next to a stack of chewing tobacco tins and two Sox hats. Those are perched above two black TPX baseball gloves. In front, placed atop the Sox logo on the standard-issue blue...

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