In 1920, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for cash. Ruth was already the best player in the game, and the Red Sox were one of the most dominant franchises in baseball, winning five World Series over 15 years. After giving Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 ($1.5 million in 2024 dollars), the Red Sox suffered through what was dubbed “The Curse of the Bambino.” Ruth was the Bambino, and while 100K was a lot of money in 1920, for future Red Sox fans, it may as well have been the equivalent of an electric blanket and a pack of cigarettes when considering the loss of Ruth and the perceived damage it caused the franchise. For 86 years, the Red Sox did not win another World Series despite playing in a large market in a storied city that loved their team. Over that prolonged era of failure, the Yankees won 26. Hence, “The Curse.”
Award-winning sportswriter (and native Bostonian) Howard Bryant conceived of The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox as the 20th anniversary of the Red Sox breaking “the curse” and finally winning a World Series was approaching. Bryant teamed with Colin and Nick Barnicle to craft the documentary series for Netflix. Once the streamer signed onto the project, the production moved at a breakneck pace to finish the series on Netflix’s timeline. The final product is a highly entertaining look at how a city identifies with its teams and athletes and how mismanagement coupled with bad luck can make superstition a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Entire generations passed without seeing the Red Sox win another World Series. The Comeback isn’t just about the Red Sox franchise; it’s about the particular significance of baseball as a sport and its place in history. Especially to a town that loved their team so much that they were willing to come back over and over again, with a perpetual sense of dread, and not only root for their team but practically beg them to finally get over the hump.
That hump was the New York Yankees. After that 2004 season, the Red Sox and the Yankees became different franchises, and the sport of baseball has never been the same. The era of inevitability closed. The Comeback plays like a sprint to the finish line, which reflects the pace at which it was made. It’s a rollicking good show for anyone who loves baseball, whether you are a Red Sox fan or not.
As a baseball fan, I’ve always admired Bryant’s work for his sense of the game’s history and significance to our culture. Bryant has authored ten books about sports (most of them about baseball), but his writing isn’t about mere wins and losses. He digs beneath the scores to tell you about the people who played the game and their impact on our lives in ways that illuminate the importance of sports (for good and bad) in our society.
For our generation, the highest of all sports is the game of baseball. As James Earl Jones said in Field of Dreams, “Baseball has marked the time.”
This is me and Howard Bryant marking the time.
The Contending: How did The Comeback get started?
Howard Bryant: The original genesis of the project started at the end of game seven, 2004. I was a columnist at the Boston Herald, and I was at all the games. The second job that I had in baseball was covering the Yankees at The Record in Bergen County in 2001 and 2002. In 2000, I covered the A’s for the San Jose Mercury News. Then, in 2001, I was covering the Yankees at The Record. They played the A’s in the playoffs. And then, in 2002, I was covering the Yankees. In 2003, I was covering the Red Sox as a columnist, and they played the Yankees. In 2004, the Red Sox and Yankees played again. So, the Red Sox and Yankees were central to what I covered for that entire period. In 2020, right around the time the pandemic hit, I was thinking about documentary projects, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to do this project as a book or as a doc.
As a documentary, I thought, I’ve got four years. The 20th anniversary is coming. Let’s prepare; let’s get everybody we need to do to get this project off the ground. It’s really been a 20-year process in a lot of ways. Watching The Comeback felt like a home movie because I was at all those games and in some of that footage. The original concept was called The Superpowers. It was all about the arms race between the Red Sox and the Yankees, about John Henry buying the team in ‘02, about this obsession that the Red Sox had to overcome this thing, this Cyclops, that had stood before them for 80 years. My business partner, Melody Shafir, and I were working on this project, and our original production partners were Unrealistic Ideas, Mark Wahlberg’s production company. This is in the spring/summer of 2020. We had creative differences on it. We just couldn’t quite get there on what they wanted it to look like against what I wanted it to look like. So, we let the contract expire. By that point, I had joined Meadowlark, and that’s when we started to work in earnest on the series.
The Contending: Having covered the Yankees and then having covered the Red Sox, as a native Bostonian, did that create any sense of whiplash for you? Or is it easy for you to switch gears from covering the A’s to the Yankees to the Red Sox?
Howard Bryant: It was easy for me because I’m not a fan. I grew up in Boston and am a huge baseball person. The reason it was easier for me to do is twofold. I worked in other markets. I started my career in California. I didn’t start my career in Boston. I wasn’t somebody who grew up having a poster of Jim Rice on his wall to being in the press box as a professional. But the second reason is that, even as a kid, I didn’t root for teams nearly as much as I rooted for people. When I was a kid, I was a Dave Winfield fan. Dave Winfield played for the Yankees. So all my friends thought I was a traitor anyway. So, it wasn’t such a big deal for me to bounce back and forth. I like players. I root for players. I root for people. When people I admire change teams, I hope their teams do well. It wasn’t that border war thing that it is for so many people.
The Contending: The “curse” was the building block for this series—the 86 years of not winning a single World Series and watching the Yankees win 26. In Boston, people cried in the street when the Red Sox lost game seven in 2003. You’re quoted in The Comeback saying you don’t believe in the curse at all–you said the Red Sox weren’t trying hard enough to win. That is a fascinating thought for many baseball fans, who think of all the great players who came through the Red Sox organization.
Howard Bryant: First things first, I don’t believe in curses. But anything that comes before winning is losing. The Red Sox always had an agenda that came before winning championships. And that agenda follows a lot of different things. One, the Red Sox had always wanted to make sure that they were in line with spending, especially during free agency, because they didn’t want to run afoul of the commissioner’s office the way Ted Turner did, the way George Steinbrenner did, the way the big spenders did. So now that automatically means you’re not going to be in on free agents because instead of trying to win games and get the best players, you’re trying to maintain a salary structure. We all know that the Red Sox have been notoriously one of the most racist teams in history in terms of their inability or unwillingness to sign black players. In the free agent era, when the players can now choose where they want to play, you’ve got some of the best players in the game choosing not to play for your team. They’re making an active choice not to play for you. And then, of course, there are always the petty jealousies and all of the other things that get in the way of trying to win–the egos and the mistakes.
And then you look at the Red Sox; they’ve always been a player short. There’s always been something that came in the way of winning ball games until John Henry. That was one of the reasons for doing this project, too. What was the shift? The shift was that for the first time since the 1930s, you had an ownership group that wasn’t afraid of the Yankees, that they weren’t going to cede any ground. The Red Sox had always ceded ground, whether during the regular season or on the bottom line when it came to salaries. Henry was going to go after every player the Yankees went after, and the Red Sox were going to be in on them. And that’s why it was so fascinating to me. The ownership and front office control what these institutions are going to do. It was John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Warner who decided. You talk about a deep bench; no, the Red Sox never had a deep bench. The Red Sox had stars, but they didn’t have depth. The Red Sox were always willing to be a player or two short, and the Yankees weren’t. The Yankees went and got what they had to get to win. And this group, this John Henry group, from 2002 to 2004, 2005, they were finally in the game. They weren’t going to concede like Boston teams always had in the past.
The Contending: The first episode confirms the ending of the film Moneyball, with the Red Sox offering Billy Beane of the overperforming Oakland A’s the general manager job because he was incredibly forward-thinking. Beane turns the job down because he doesn’t want to be so far away from his daughter. What I didn’t know was that he was the person who told Henry to hire the 28-year-old Theo Epstein because “he’s the smartest guy in the room.” Did you take satisfaction in that confirmation?
Howard Bryant: Absolutely, because it was part of our vision. Let’s take a step back. Who really cares about the ‘04 Red Sox? It’s a monumental story in terms of baseball history. They came back from a 3-0 deficit and won a championship for the first time in 86 years in 2004. The very next year, the White Sox won for the first time in 88 years, and nobody talks about them. A few years later, the Cubs won for the first time in 108 years. Those two teams broke their curses, yet they’re the same teams they used to be. Nobody looked at the White Sox once they won in 2005 and thought they were a different franchise. It looked like the Cubs were going to become something else because Theo was there, they had money, they were finally champions, and the Cubs have fallen back into being the Cubs. Why are the Red Sox different? I focused on that when I was writing this treatment and conceptualizing this project. Are they different because they’re our team, or is there something different about this? I concluded it was the latter, and the reason was Moneyball. One of the things that we, Nick Trotta over at MLB and Nick and Colin Barnicle of Barnicle Brothers, kept trying to balance was, as Nick Trotta used to say in his conception, this was the spiritual sequel to Moneyball, but this is the difference, the difference is that after the Red Sox won, think about what baseball looks like—that’s the significance of what this story is.
Why are baseball games four and a half hours long? Because Joe Torre and the Yankees were trying to get Pedro Martinez out of the game, so they were taking pitches. Suddenly, pitch counts are the most important stat for a pitcher. After Theo succeeded, and now he is in the copycat league, everyone has to be a 28-year-old Ivy leaguer to run a baseball team. That’s from the Red Sox. That’s from this story. And then, of course, because of the 2003 disaster of (Red Sox Manager) Grady Little, as I said, but it didn’t make the film, that was the night that Billy Martin died. That was the night Tommy Lasorda died. That was the night Casey Stengel died and Sparky Anderson and all those managers who were the face of the franchise. When Grady Little left Pedro Martinez in the game and the minute Aaron Boone hit that home run, the front office would make those decisions from now on. The front office would tell you who would face the lineup the third time through the order and who would set the lineup. The manager was no longer the face of the franchise. And that is the sequel to Moneyball, at least in a small way. That was the significance of what this has been all about. This championship series changed how baseball is played. It changed who runs the game.
The Contending: Theo Epstein is an interesting guy. I remember when he was hired as general manager; there was a reaction in the baseball world that this was insanity. Theo seems to have a deep well of self-awareness. He knew that people in and around the game looked upon this decision as crazy. You have to have one hell of a spine to take this job on at 28 and keep pushing, especially after ‘03.
Howard Bryant: And to apply it the way that he did, because the thing about Theo’s arc is why this doc could have been five or six parts. I love the character-driven nature of three things in particular, and they weren’t highlighted that much in the film, but if you follow the story along, it’s fascinating. Colin Barnacle did a terrific job in episode one, breaking down the effects of that Aaron Boone game. It’s that Theo Epstein did something that nobody thought was possible, and that was trading a superstar in Boston in his prime. You don’t trade superstars in Boston. Superstars were all we had; we didn’t have the championships, but we had stars. So those guys were huge outsized characters in Boston: Clemens, Yaz, Rice, Mo Vaughn, and Nomar. To trade Nomar was Theo’s gangster moment. That is the moment where he says; I have a vision of how this is supposed to be, of what this is supposed to look like. That was his legacy. That was his way of breaking with the past. Once again, anything that comes before winning is losing. And one of the things that came before winning was that you catered to the superstar in Boston. Theo decided no more of that. I am the 28-year-old GM unafraid to look at a giant in that town, Nomar Garciaparra, and say you’re the problem. We’re going to be better without you. Nobody would have ever risked that.
The Contending: It’s stunning. And Nomar was at his peak. He tailed off pretty fast after he left.
Howard Bryant: Exactly. Theo saw that Nomar was never going to be the same player. He was never close to the same player. He never made another all-star team after he was traded. For Theo to do that is the beginning of his origin story. He showed a level of unsentimentality you never saw in Boston. And it did shake people up. It’s another demarcating line. You look at that and say, as a Boston fan, are we better off? Yeah, you’re better off. You got your championships. And now you’re a player in the game in a way that you had never been before. You’re not the same franchise anymore. Do you have the stones to go after Curt Schilling and not let him go to the Yankees? He wasn’t willing to just give in to the Yankees. When working on these projects, you think about how much people care about this. It’s the same thing when I’m working on a book project. This is interesting to me, but is it interesting? Is the Theo Epstein arc going to resonate in Nebraska with the people who don’t care about the Red Sox? That’s where you have to do an excellent job creating the character so the character is of interest to people who don’t care about his occupation.
The Contending: I’m stunned that the ‘03 manager, Grady Little agreed to be a part of this. When discussing those lines of demarcation, Grady Little references himself as a gut-feeling guy, which was definitely what the Red Sox wanted to get away from. In game seven of the ‘03 LCS against the Yankees, you see him mismanage his way out of going to the World Series. Pedro was shot after the seventh. He had given everything, and then Little brings him out for the eighth. Then there’s that morbidly hilarious quote of John Henry saying, “Can we fire him now, or do we have to wait until the end of the game?”
Howard Bryant: He was fired immediately after the season, and they brought in Terry (Tito) Francona.
The Contending: Francona’s eventual success is interesting because the season didn’t start out well. The Sox struggled for several months before they hit their stride. To have withstood these expectations and to sputter along as long as the team did says something about Francona.
Howard Bryant: I am one of the luckiest reporters in terms of the people I got to cover as managers and coaches. I got Art Howe in Oakland. I got Joe Torre in New York. I got Grady, and I got Tito. And then I got Joe Gibbs when I went to football. Tito is a baseball man. His father played with Hank Aaron. Tito grew up in the game, and Tito had wanted another managerial spot. Tito started in Philly and then went to Boston, two of the three hardest cities to manage in. New York’s the other one. They go down 3-0, and Tito may get fired if they get swept. The Red Sox and John Henry, during that period, this was their Empire Strikes Back. They like to call the Yankees the evil empire, but the Red Sox had gotten ruthless. You fired Grady, which I understood because management had major philosophical differences with him. Tito was following the plan, but they weren’t getting the results. So who’s to say if they go out there after all of this, you lose the Aaron Boone game, you go after A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez) in the offseason, you hire Francona, you get Curt Schilling, and then you get swept the next year after losing 19-8 in Game 3? I don’t know if Tito survives that. All of this success happened by a hair. John Henry was not going to be that patient.
During the season, there were people in the Red Sox front office who referred to Tito as FranCOMA because they didn’t like how he was managing the team on his pitching changes. Things had gotten to a real boiling point in Boston, where it was all right; everybody’s fair game. And that runs counter to the genteel country club; I love my players of the Tom Yawkey era. We’re going to coddle the players, and we’re not going to do everything it takes to win, but boy, people are going to love our players, which is not that different from the Cubs. The Red Sox never had a ruthless front office. They had an incompetent front office. They had a bumbling front office. They had a coddling front office–they weren’t ruthless. Henry plus Theo became much more businesslike, much more professional, and much more what does it take to win? John Henry refers to it as an epic quest. I think of a scene in The Untouchables where Costner says to Connery, I need to get Capone. Help me get him. How do I get him? It’s become an obsession. How do we do this? How do we win? Tito had the right personality to let the team do their thing. When he talks about the team being loose after being down 3-0, If they go out and get beat 10 to nothing, Tito would have gotten hammered because his team was too loose. If they go out there and do shots before game six and lose 13 to nothing, he’s going to get fired because he was letting his team do shots before an elimination game. So the story is shaped by the result, and the results came up aces for him.
The Contending: One of the series’ arguments is that the Red Sox needed a personality change, not just a facelift but a heartlift. That 2004 team had its stars and established players like Pedro, Schilling, Manny, Jason Varitek, Johnny Damon, and Orlando Cabrera. The Red Sox also emphasized finding players that other teams don’t appreciate. You see that in Big Papi (David Ortiz), Kevin Millar, Mark Bellhorn, Pokey Reese, Dave Roberts, and Doug Mientkiewicz. They were digging, not just buying.
Howard Bryant: They were broke and had to figure out a way to re-engineer what they were doing. To me, it all starts with Ortiz. He changed everything. This is the point that I was trying to make, and I don’t think it made the documentary when I sat for it, but I’m not saying Dennis Eckersley wasn’t tough. I’m not saying Louis Tiant wasn’t tough or that Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Fisk, Nomar, Roger Clemens, or Mo Vaughn weren’t tough. I’m saying Ortiz was different from everybody in his ability to deliver in the biggest moments. For every tough guy that the Red Sox had, the Yankees had an equally tough guy and more, but they had no answer for this guy. The Yankees recognized that. He delivered against them in a way that went beyond the numbers. He’s the difference maker and the guy that begins to shift the tables. 2003 was the last season that ended where everybody knew what was going to happen. We know the Yankees will win, and the Red Sox will lose. That culture stopped when David Ortiz came to the plate. He just changed the rhythm of it all. Whereas the Red Sox used to be afraid of Reggie Jackson, the Yankees were afraid of Ortiz.
The Contending: There’s one real enigma on that ‘04 roster. On the productivity side, he was hard to beat. But can Manny Ramirez be explained?
Howard Bryant: No, he can’t, and he wouldn’t sit for the doc, and I wasn’t broken up over that. Every team needs some form of Manny. Even J.D. Drew, in some way, is a form of Manny. Just like in some way, Mike Mussina is a form of Manny. You need somebody who is oblivious to the maelstrom around you. When Mussina went to the Yankees, you would look at him and go no way is he going to fit in New York, and he thrived in New York. It ran completely counter to his entire personality and what you think you would know about Mike Mussina. Same with J.D. Drew, the guy doesn’t have a pulse. And yet here’s J.D. Drew, winning championships with the ‘07 Red Sox. The combination of Manny and Ortiz with Damon at the top of that lineup, and even the Yankees with Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, A-Rod, and Gary Sheffield, the two teams matched each other. There’s no clear advantage there. And that’s what I mean about being short. The old Red Sox would have been like we got Rice back there. Whereas the Yankees would have said okay, we’ve got Reggie, Winfield, and more. The point is that the Red Sox were always a player short. Are you trying to win, or are you trying to win what it looks like? When John Henry bought that team, the Red Sox didn’t care what it looked like. The hell with the salaries, the hell with the luxury tax, the hell with the optics; just get guys who can win.
The Contending: I know you do not like the expanded playoff system. The Red Sox made the playoffs that year despite coming in second to the Yankees in the division, but only because Major League Baseball had expanded the playoffs.
Howard Bryant: Baseball had expanded the playoffs at the begging behest of the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox were the team pushing the loudest and the longest for a wild card. Why? Because we can’t beat the Yankees over 162 games, but if we can get them in a playoff series, we can beat them in seven. Lo and behold, look what happened. This goes back to winning a certain way. The Red Sox conceded the division to the Yankees because they didn’t believe they could beat them. Now they had a backdoor to get there, and they still didn’t win a division until ‘07, when they won the World Series again. The ‘04 team was a wildcard team; the ‘03 team was a wildcard team. The ‘05 team was a wildcard team. It wasn’t until ‘07 that they won the division outright. This is another example of history shifting as the rules shift.
The Contending: We’ve touched on this, but it’s worth reemphasizing that no team in a seven-game series in the history of baseball has ever come back from 0-3 down, and no one has since. People forget games four and five went into extra innings.
Howard Bryant: They were losing in the eighth inning of both games.
The Contending: Have we lost the sense of the enormity of the accomplishment, and maybe that’s part of what the documentary does, is bring that back?
Howard Bryant: It does. It also does what these types of projects are supposed to do, which is to give you a lot of reflection. I was curious to see how Colin was going to play this. I thought the elegiac nature of time would be a bigger character. Twenty years is a long time, especially with ballplayers. And I love the idea of using age as a character. The documentary was more of an event-driven doc than a character-driven one. The event, of course, was them winning. That was the end of the story. We didn’t have time to do the whole soup-to-nuts thing. We signed that deal with the Barnicles in July of 2023. And Netflix was asking for the whole doc. I don’t think we began shooting and conducting interviews until the first week of November, right before Thanksgiving. You want to talk about a tight turnaround. It was about five months total before we had to start handing Netflix cuts. I give Colin and Nick Barnicle all the credit in the world for pulling this thing off. Nobody else could have done this because of Nick and Colin’s sourcing and the sourcing that I contributed to, simply to get the subjects to respond, never mind getting them in the chair. Going through all the traditional channels, we would have run out of time. They had the Rolodex to make this happen, and I had part of the Rolodex to also reach out to players.
The Contending: When they went down 0-3, the Boston media were brutal, and I think reporter Dan Shaughnessy is the perfect person to characterize that brutality–to call them “frauds.” The 86 years of frustration were boiling over into sportswriting. Shaughnessy’s a good writer, but was that a bit far to call them frauds?
Howard Bryant: Oh, that’s been Dan’s language. I didn’t think about it very much because when you’re in it, you’re not thinking about it that way: this is over the line. In retrospect, people don’t write like that anymore, but back then, they did. Dan’s been doing this since I was in the fourth grade. Dan is a giant in that town. Watching it 20 years later was jarring, but he’s tough. And this is what happens when you come to Boston. Do you want to play in the big city or not? This is the language here. This is the language in New York. This is the language in Philadelphia. That’s the challenge of coming to these East Coast baseball cities and playing, whether for or against. There used to be a saying in baseball that the toughest out is a called third strike in the ninth inning on the road in Boston or New York. Even the umpires were intimidated. They’re not going to make that call. You better put the ball in play. We are not ringing up a game here and live to tell about it. Was it tough? It was tough. Is Danno tough? One hundred percent, and Will McDonough before him and all the old columnists in Boston. It was their job to hold the team accountable, and they’d let you have it when you didn’t get it done.
The Contending: Curt Schilling is one of the most divisive personalities in the history of baseball. But the bloody sock game and the details about the cadaver experiment were just fascinating, and you have to be one bullish competitor to do what Schilling did while injured in game six.
Howard Bryant: I don’t really care about Curt Schilling or Curt Schilling’s politics. Would they have won that series if Curt Schilling had been pitching for the Yankees? No. Curt Schilling is a legendary postseason performer. He’s one of those “we’re not losing tonight on my watch” guys. And, as a Hall of Fame voter, I don’t know. He’s close, but he is borderline. And the reason why he’s borderline isn’t because of his politics. The reason why he’s borderline is because of the first half of his career. The second half of his career is a Hall of Fame career. He just wasn’t great enough, long enough. He messed around by his own admission for seven or eight years of his career. And if he gets in, it won’t bother me. I never voted for him because I thought he was just borderline. I actually enjoyed him that season because he was so tough–he was such a committed professional. Personality stuff came later, but there is no doubt what he meant to that team, which is why I was happy that he did the documentary: he and the Red Sox weren’t getting along. I was glad we had spoken to enough people to ask Curt, do you really not want to be part of this? You have to be part of this. He hates me, and I’m not fond of him, but I have huge respect for him as a professional. How do you not respect what he did?
The Contending: Alex Rodriguez gets exposed in the series. He was the most productive player on the Yankees. There is no better distinction between the Red Sox and the Yankees of that year than Papi’s engaging personality and A-Rod’s being very pleased with himself. That moment when he swats the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s mitt is one of the worst visuals in playoff baseball history.
Howard Bryant: A-Rod is the most fascinating piece of this. They went after A-Rod, who was almost in a Red Sox uniform, and the trade fell apart. And then he’s a Yankee. And everyone is expecting the worst, right? Then we get into the fight in the summertime, in July, and everybody is all happy that Jason Varitek pushed A-Rod around, although he tried to lift him and couldn’t, which shows you how big a guy A-Rod is. He’s a big dude. But when A-Rod hits that home run off Arroyo in game three, If the Yankees win game four, he’s the MVP of the ALCS, and the whole story changes. So he goes from that to the guy slapping the ball out of the hands of the pitcher in desperation, trying to get a rally going, which is an embarrassing, unprofessional baseball play, to the point where on the internet when that happened, people were sending out memes of him with a purse and high heels making that slap. It was the nadir of it all in terms of the proud Yankees in total desperation, watching it all slip away. A-Rod doesn’t recover from that until ‘09 when the Yankees win the championship. Before 2004, the Red Sox and Yankees were never a rivalry. It was hammer and nail.
The Contending: It was like Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova in tennis–a rivalry in name only.
Howard Bryant: Exactly. Now if you saw what happened in game 5 of the Dodgers/Yankees World Series this year, it’s the Yankees who can’t close anymore. It’s the Yankees whose fans have that Red Sox feeling of dread that somehow we’re going to find a way to mess this up. It’s the lordly Yankees who have, in a lot of ways, never fully recovered. Why do we have an amateur draft? Because the Yankees were too powerful in the amateur market. Why do we have a wild card? Because the Yankees were too powerful over 162 games. Why do we have a luxury tax? Because (Yankees owner) George Steinbrenner kept spending after the strike. And now, why do we have expanded playoffs? To keep the Yankees and the Dodgers from running the table because they’re going past the luxury tax. Now, you can go out and win 98 games and have a 9% chance of winning the championship.
The Contending: You can also win 85 if you’re in the right division and make the playoffs.
Howard Bryant: And have a 9 percent chance of winning the championship, which is ridiculous. And they’re going to expand the playoffs next year.
The Contending: Wait until a team with a losing record gets in.
Howard Bryant: Exactly. And the guys are going to be throwing underhand. You can’t rely on the things you did that got you there because you’ve stretched the limits of what’s humanly possible on a pitching mound. But it’s true, and this all goes back to what we discussed earlier about the import of this individual series. The Yankees have never been the same. The Red Sox were never the same. The Red Sox won three more titles. The Yankees have never beaten the Red Sox in the playoffs since. They’re 0-3.
The Contending: That was something I did not know.
Howard Bryant: They haven’t played each other in a seven-game series since. But the point that I’ve been trying to say is when we talk about the actual legacy of something, it’s what you left behind. You may still hate the Yankees, but you don’t fear them as you used to. You don’t look at them with that sense of inevitability. When I was a kid, they would show up to Fenway in those imperial gray uniforms, and they were all about business. And you just feared them.
The Contending: I think there’s a level of almost embarrassment in the Yankees right now where this is a team that spends all the money, and there’s this sense, as you said, no one fears them anymore, even with all the assets in the world.
Howard Bryant: They are a Megalopolis. They’re the fall of the empire. They are the shell of themselves. Where the embarrassment comes in is the belief that you can still be what you were when and you can’t. The rules don’t allow you to be that. On the other hand, the Dodgers seem to have figured it out.
The Contending: Beating the Yankees was not the final step in breaking the curse. It was like the 1980 USA hockey team beating the Soviet Union. They still had to play Finland. After this incredibly grueling and emotionally taxing series, the Sox still had to play the Cardinals in the World Series, but the Red Sox were like the locomotive on the tracks after beating the Yankees.
Howard Bryant: Two things really struck me about that. Number one, I had forgotten how good that team was. The Cardinals won 104 games that year. You got a Hall of Fame manager in La Russa. You got Larry Walker on that team, Hall of Fame. You got Scott Rolen on that team, Hall of Fame. You had real guys on that team. Edgar Renteria was a really good player. Albert Pujols was on that team. That was Pujols’ first World Series, and the Cardinals won the World Series two years later. And yet, nobody was afraid of them. The second thing was John Henry’s anecdote, saying we will “crush these guys.” That is the most un-Red Sox-like thing I’ve ever heard in my life. To go into a world series and not only expect to win but expect to dominate? Every Red Sox World Series since 1918 had gone seven games. And they lost all of them ‘46, ‘75, ‘67, ‘86.
The Contending: ‘86 was particularly brutal.
Howard Bryant: ‘46 was brutal. In ‘67, you weren’t beating Bob Gibson; in ‘75, you weren’t beating the Big Red Machine. Against both of those teams, the Red Sox were underdogs. When they lost in ‘67, nobody was like oh my God, we choked. They were like oh my God, we’re back. They had been in last place for seven years. People were ecstatic. There was nothing but joy after losing that World Series. In ‘75, you had game six; you had a lead in game seven. But even when they lost, everybody was like, Dwight Evans is 22, Jim Rice is 22, Fred Lynn is 22, Carlton Fisk is 25. We’ll be back. And they never got back. There was no feeling like this was our last chance. It was like this was the beginning of something, but it wasn’t.
The Contending: Once the Sox ended the 86-year drought, as a Bostonian, how would you measure the relief versus joy meter in ‘04?
Howard Bryant: I was there, and the first thing that hit me was who those people were running out in left field? It was Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon. Why isn’t anyone stopping them? I had no idea they were filming a movie (Fever Pitch). Why are there two people on the field, and no one’s doing a goddamn thing? I was standing next to (sportswriter) Bob Ryan. I just looked at him, and he looked at me, and…they won? It was a relief and a sort of disbelief—even though it was inevitable that they were going to win that series because they were so good. I remember going downstairs, and I hate celebrations. I don’t like having to cover celebrations for two reasons. Number one is because nobody says anything because they’re incoherent, they’re so happy, and the stuff that they say is either unusable or nonsensical “It was us against the world,” “nobody thought we could” bullshit. But, the second reason is because it’s their moment. It belongs to them. Let them have their moment.
We’ve been sitting in that clubhouse since February. Let them have their moment. I don’t need to put pen and paper in their face. That’s the first half of it. The second half is it was 1000 percent joy versus relief. There was joy in the relief. It was all tied into the same thing, and the feeling that they had won was incredible. Up and down Boston. It’s not understated. And it tells you how much this matters. It goes back to the great Roger Angel line when he wrote about the Mets: the business of caring. That’s what this is all about. And I steal that line periodically. “The business of caring,” why does this matter so much? It matters so much because baseball, unlike any other sport, is the wallpaper of our lives, the radio, and the length of the summer. The fact that it was the only live sport in town at that time when we were kids growing up. There was only one thing happening in the summer and it was baseball, and that brings you to your family. It reminds you of your dad painting the deck with the game on. It reminds you of your grandmother sitting in the den in her shawl with the game on. It reminds you of all the broadcasters whose voices you remember, and that becomes less about them and more about you. It’s the story of your life in a way that basketball, hockey, and football aren’t.
The Contending: There’s no time limit when you go to a baseball game or turn the game on the TV. You choose to watch a baseball game, and you have to settle in. There’s something about that which doesn’t apply to other sports.
Howard Bryant: And you’re going to get comfortable. What did Vin Scully use to say? Pull up a chair, and come have a conversation with me for the next two and a half hours, three hours. And once again, the difference is because of family. And that’s going to change. It’s changing now, but the other sports weren’t even being played for a certain generation. There was no NBA in 1925. The NFL was only five years old. The National Hockey League had six teams. What baseball does is connect you to your family. People of that generation don’t say “my first basketball game”…they say “my first baseball game, my first baseball glove.” It’s all wrapped up in the culture. It’s not necessarily wrapped up in the new culture, but it’s certainly wrapped up in a generational culture.
The Contending: There’s a real difference between those who report on a team and fans.
Howard Bryant: When we talk about crossing the line and being a fan and the whole thing, many writers, whether they admit it or not, want to feel like they are part of the celebration and we’re not. Win or lose, we cover them. That doesn’t mean that when they win, we win. When they win, they win. And when they lose, they lose. I didn’t lose.
The Contending: Many fans use “we” when discussing their team.
Howard Bryant: The fans do because the fans are invested. There’s a sense of ownership that the fans have, which is appropriate because the fan has been there and will be there longer than the player.
The Contending: Especially now in the era of free agency, very few players spend their whole careers with one team.
Howard Bryant: How many players last longer than the fans? None. It can get ugly because of that sense of ownership: you are performing for me. But the other part of that is joy. This is my escape. You do take ownership of that. The relationship is reciprocal. When we talk about the business of caring, I remember being in the Fenway Clubhouse one year. It was ‘03, and Nomar was pissed off about something. It was like 3:30; the clubhouse had just opened. I walked up to him, and I was like, hey man, and he is just mumbling. He is like just because I go to a restaurant doesn’t mean I’m a fucking chef. Just because I’ve been to the doctor doesn’t make me a surgeon. I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Then he told me what he was talking about. He said what right do you have to judge me? You can’t do what I do. I’m like, oh, okay, who wrote something you don’t like? I know it wasn’t me. I didn’t write about you yesterday. And he’s like, you can’t do what I do. What right do you even have to be in here?
It’s a good point. And I told him none, except for one thing: the fans. That’s why I am here. I’m here for them. I said, Nomar, I’d be making the money if somebody were willing to pay me 12 and a half million dollars to juggle in the Boston Common. People care about this, and they are willing to compensate you for that care. That’s what it’s all about. I said do you honestly think that the only thing I want to write about is you motherfuckers in your underwear? I have other interests, man. And he got it. And he’s like yeah, fuck it, still bullshit. Yeah, it’s still bullshit, but that is the game. There are certain guys; I put Nomar and Josh Beckett in that category of players I covered, who wouldn’t mind playing in a completely empty stadium as long as they got the money. There’s nothing inherently valuable about hitting a ball with a stick unless someone’s willing to pay to watch it. A lot of players lose sight of that—the owing of a performance. People care. That’s why they’re there. They are willing to pay $75 to park. They are willing to pay $16 for watered-down beer, and they will pay a hundred dollars to watch you play. You are here for them.
The Contending: Is baseball the greatest game?
Howard Bryant: Yeah. By far, it’s the greatest game. As Greg Maddux told me, it will remain the greatest game no matter how much they try to mess it up. He said: the game always saves us from the people who run it. And it’s the greatest game for all the reasons we’re talking about. Baseball and tennis are my favorite sports because you gotta close with them. You can’t win a tennis match if you don’t win the last point. You can’t win a baseball game unless you score the final run or record the final out. If you don’t do one of those things, you will lose, or you’ll play forever. There’s no end to the game unless you end it. And I love that about both of those sports. I also love that both sports are slow enough that your brain gets in the way—your brain feels pressure, your brain is aware of the moment—but they’re fast enough to be a sport. When you add generations to it, family to it, and American history to it, no other sport can touch it. None of them come close to this sport. The next generations, time will change it into something else, but for my generation, nothing comes close to baseball.
