This game deserves some love.
Dan Secatore makes many great points and observations that deserve a deeper dive in his 34 Stray Thoughts About the 2004 Red Sox Documentary on Netflix post from yesterday, but I feel compelled to dive into this one specifically:
The Dave Roberts steal in game four gets all the attention (I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of younger non-Red Sox/Yankee fans incorrectly assume that steal happened in game seven), as does Curt Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game six, but game five was easily the best game of the 2004 ALCS. It deserves to be talked about a lot more.
This is so true! You could make an entire documentary on just Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS. It’s one of those events where there’s so many big, key moments and factors that none of them become easily defined as THE big moment, and they all kind of get lost in the chaos.
But just off the top of my head, you had all of the following going on (I’m sure I’m missing some things too):
– The fact that people with tickets to that Game 5 originally bought them for Game 3, which ended up getting rained out on Friday night. To avoid shuffling plans for people who bought tickets to all three games at Fenway, they just just moved the Game 3 people to Game 5, which got placed on what was supposed to be a Monday off day.
Think about the emotions here. People went from thinking they’re going to Game 3, to thinking the Sox are going to get swept and they’re not going to any game at all, and then going to one of the greatest games in the history of the sport. I’d love to hear fan experiences of that roller coaster!
– The rainout, which again does not get enough credit for setting up the entire stage for what happened on the backside of this series, also worked out perfectly in another way. With the NLCS already scheduled for Monday night, this was the one game of the series that started around 5:00pm instead of 8:00pm, which worked out great because it ended up going for nearly six hours and fell into the optimal viewing hours for even most kids to see it. If it was an 8:20 start instead, it would have run beyond 2:00am in the morning.
I can guarantee you there are WAY, WAY more kids who actually saw the bulk of this game in real time than end of Game 4, even if the Game 4 highlights have been burned into everybody’s brain.
Then there’s all the wild in game stuff:
– Pedro’s outing, and potentially walking off a loser in his last ever Boston start on Derek Jeter’s highly annoying bases clearing double that gave the Yankees a 4-2 lead. (I was so sad!)
– The Sox leaving the bases loaded in the first inning with a chance to do real damage off Mussina.
– The Yankees leaving 18 men on base throughout this game and missing chance after chance to deliver a knockout punch. Perhaps most glaringly in the top of the eighth inning when Miguel Cairo led off with a double in front of Jeter and A-Rod and they couldn’t get him home. (A-Rod’s strikeout after Jeter bunted Cairo over might have been the most costly at bat from an offensive standpoint of the entire series for the Yankees.)
– The way the entire bottom of the eighth inning unfolded. How it was managed, how Joe Torre went to Rivera after the inning got out of control, the Ortiz Home run, the Nixon hit, the Varitek sac fly. For my money, this inning as a whole is probably the most consequential frame of the entire series with highly compelling and hugely impactful at bats from start to finish.
– The ball hopping into the seats on the ground rule double in the ninth (The Red Sox got the crazy break for once?)
– Damon leading off the bottom of the ninth with a hit and trying to recrate the moment of Game 4 with a steal of his own, only to get thrown out.
– The Sox blowing a first and second nobody out chance in the 11th
– The Yankees leaving the men on second and third in the 13th
– The brilliance of Tim Wakefield in the moment where he could have been the guy on the mound as they lose the LCS to the Yankees AGAIN! Just an unbelievable performance!
– Obviously the Ortiz walk off. The long at bat, and the legend that was born in those 24 hours.
– Joe Buck’s call. Honestly, for someone who doesn’t like Joe Buck, “he can keep on running to New York” might be his greatest call of all time. It matched the moment.
And lastly (and this is really important), a deep dive on the complete wrecking ball this game and the surrounding elements took to both bullpens and how it set the stage for the Yankees to get pulverized in Game 7.
Both teams had to use seven different pitchers in this Game 5, and because Game 3 was initially rained out, it meant Games 3 through 7 were all played on five straight days. So when you combine a 19-8 Game 3 (where each team’s starter was out of the game after two innings) with a 12-inning Game 4, and then throw this 14-inning masterpiece on top of it all with no off days running into Games 6 and 7, you really set the stage for one if not both pitching staffs to come completely off the rails.
Bottom line, if Derek Lowe didn’t provide the most underrated contribution to the entire comeback (six innings of one run baseball on TWO DAYS REST!), then Game 7 probably turns into a 10-9 slugfest style style game, all brought to you by Game 5, which was supposed to be Game 3, completely blowing out both pitching staffs.