Red Sox Were Odd Team In

Even by Olde Town standards, which swell with the peculiarities raised annually by its extraordinary baseball club, the Boston Red Sox had an odd season, and yet they won 98 games and scared the New York Yankees and today start anew, comfortable with who they’ve become.

They arrive in the American League division series against the Angels composed and dangerous, or seemingly so, despite a regular season in which the new manager and the 30-year-old general manager beat back the daily crawl of injury, intrigue and so-so baseball.

They recall their catcher, Jason Varitek, stuffing his mitt into the mouth of Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez as their seminal moment, while outsiders insist the midseason trade of Nomar Garciaparra, a Back Bay favorite whose festering discontent fouled their clubhouse, was the more critical stroke.

Either way, the Red Sox have played themselves away from last year’s American League championship series regrets, not to mention the previous 84 years’ regrets, each of which concluded without a World Series title, lending that much more to their every fall incursion.

Curt Schilling, a 21-game winner and Boston’s starting pitcher at Angel Stadium this afternoon, recently told Time magazine, “As a Christian, I know for a fact the curse doesn’t exist,” and as every Red Sox fan knows, they’ve all come in that way, then left believers.

The Red Sox team that stands before the Angels actually began to form last October, hours after Pedro Martinez took them to within five outs of the World Series. Manager Grady Little pushed Martinez a pitch too far, the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS, and Little was gone by the holidays.

Schilling came in a trade, Terry Francona replaced Little and General Manager Theo Epstein swung the three-way trade that would remove Garciaparra and bring A-Rod, a deal that fell apart only after it went public. That Rodriguez would land instead in the Bronx compounded the suffering in Boston, which then went fairly hysterical when Garciaparra really was traded in late July, pressing onward with what Epstein called “the thrill-a-minute type thing.”

That one stuck and, amid the angst, a juggernaut was born. The Red Sox’s daily issues seemed to fade, Manny Ramirez smiled and laughed most of the way to 43 homers and 130 runs batted in, David Ortiz went for 41 and 139 and, despite a late slump by Martinez, they nearly caught the Yankees by mid-September.

On Monday afternoon, Francona corrected a casual observation that their season had been wild.

“When we walk into our clubhouse every day, it’s a wild ride,” he said.

“Within the last couple months we started playing like we wanted to, and you could see that swagger coming back. You can’t fake that swagger. You talk about confidence, things like that, but until you do things, it has to happen, and once it starts happening, you see people do things better, and it grows, and the personality of the team grows, and that’s what happened the last couple months of the season with us.”

Schilling had made his baseball stops in four previous big-league towns, making particular impact in Philadelphia and Phoenix, but he’d never seen or experienced anything like Boston. The fans, the expectations, the history, they all do things to people. He sat Monday on the eve of his first playoff start for the Red Sox, in the wake of a season that appeared to leave him both inspired and bemused, and knew full well his assignment.

“I understand that if I don’t go out and do the things that I have done in the past in October that the season will be a wash in a lot of people’s minds as far as my contributions here....

“All of it, the atmosphere, the energy, the adrenaline. Every night, first inning, two strikes on any first hitter of the game, 35,000 people on their feet. They lived and breathed with every success and every failure of every guy on that team, sometimes to a fault, and I have never been involved in anything like it.”

They have been close before. They did 1986. They did 2003. These Red Sox, like past Red Sox, bear the burdens of those losses. But, shortly after someone roused a napping Ramirez from beneath a couple of towels on the couch, they laughed through Monday’s short workout, and Kevin Millar said for all of them, “I feel five outs better than last year.”