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........................................| 187 On a sparkling Saturday, July 16, 2005, Charlie Zink stands in the home dugout at Hadlock Field, “Sea Dogs” across the front of his jersey, a familiar logo and the words “Boston Red Sox” on his left sleeve. He stares long and hard at the pitching mound. It is a place where he has known some dazzling success. The mound can be, he knows, the most treasured terrain in sports, literally elevated over the playing surface. When things are going well as a pitcher, you are the king of the mountain. He also knows that the mound can be a terribly lonely place, a hill from hell. Just the night before had featured the latest dispiriting performance in a season and a half of descent: four and one-third innings, five runs, two home runs, another loss, his ERA bloating to 5.56. Those Double-A numbers didn’t even count his meltdown during his brief call-up to Triple-A— the 0–1 record, the 32.40 ERA, culminating in that awful moment in the bowels of McCoy Stadium when he had to fight back the tears in front of Jim Masteralexis and his five-year-old son. But looking out at the mound now prior to an afternoon game, he can’t help breaking into a smile. There stands a paunchy, balding middle-aged man in a brown suit. His salt-and-pepper Fu Manchu is all salt at the tips. The crowd springs to life as he goes into his familiar motion, toeing the rubber, rocking back with his left foot, pivoting with his right, then swiveling around to look at center field, before rotating to deliver the ball to the plate. The fans chant, “Loo-ee, Loo-ee!” This, too, is part of Red Sox Nation up in Portland, Maine. The emotion in the crowd stems not from the zeal of the fresh convert (though the 2004 championship had sprinkled magic dust on the whole region). This is a more ancestral bond. Some of these fans remember Luis Tiant’s greatness in the 1970s. They recall his two wins in the ’75 World Series, the shutout over the mighty Big Red Machine in Game 1, and the remarkable 163-pitch complete game in Game 4. They easily summon the flair of the guy Reggie Jackson once called “the Fred Astaire of baseball.” Along with that panache had come a rich personality and a childlike love of the game. Tiant was the guy who would roller-skate around the ballpark, or emerge from the shower wearing only a lit cigar. He had an almost tangible sense of soul, a 14 “If You Make It, We Will Come” Portland, Maine 188 | chapter 14 sadness in his eyes born of separation from his family in Cuba, and a barrel-chested laugh when his teammates would strike back at his frequent practical jokes. There were colorful tales of Carl Yastrzemski crawling across the locker room floor to light Tiant’s Sunday paper on fire, or teammates hovering in wait to see his reaction to the small alligator they had placed in his locker. More than twenty years after his career had ended, he remained a beloved figure in New England, the one and only El Tiante. Charlie remembers him in a different way. Twice before, Luis had given him a glorious gift: he had made the game fun again. ● Charlie’s first taste of college baseball was an oddly bitter one. Odd because he played on an absolute powerhouse at Sacramento City College, just a half-hour from his childhood home in El Dorado Hills. Sac City had already produced more than two dozen big league ballplayers. Of all their great junior college teams, none was greater than the 1998 squad that went 44–2 and won the national junior college championship. Ten players that year were drafted from Sac City, and that total didn’t even include future big leaguers Matt Riley (drafted in the third round in 1997 but not signed until after the 1998 season) and Joe Thurston (drafted in 1999). But even with all that talent and success, there was nothing fun about the experience for Charlie. He found the coaching staff to be dictatorial, running the team through endless bunt defenses, first-and-third drills, pickoffs and cutoffs. It went on for hours and hours every day. “It was like boot camp,” he said. “It made you question if you ever wanted to play...

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