The big gag going around Boston going into Game 1 of the World Series was that maybe it would be cool if the Red Sox let the St. Louis Cardinals take the first three.
You know … just to make it interesting, like against the Yankees.
Try as they might, though, the Red Sox could not give away Saturday night’s game. They won it, 11-9, and sent their fans home hoping Boston could win this series the conventional way, the way other franchises do.
The 35,035 who came to Fenway Park to give their all for the old home team including up to $80 per car at nearby parking garages obviously were not foolish enough to believe that giving St. Louis a 3-0 head start would be a wise course of action.
You don’t go 86 years without a World Series championship and deliberately set out to dig yourself a deeper hole.
So most in “Baseball’s Most Beloved Park” that’s what it says on the door were relieved when, right off the bat, the Red Sox roughed up Cardinals starter Woody Williams for four runs in the first inning, then chased him in the third with three more.
“Woody! Woody!” went their cheers, and they didn’t mean Harrelson.
They were into this game from the get-go, beginning with leadoff man Johnny Damon’s 10-pitch at-bat. Damon sliced a double to the left-field corner and scored when the most red-hot Red Sox of all, David “Papi” Ortiz, hooked a three-run homer around the right-field foul pole in his first World Series at-bat.
Boston players sprang from the dugout, doing a Pudge Fisk impersonation with their hands as they waved Ortiz’s ball to stay fair.
This was followed by more Fenway cheers:The men and women Red Sox Nation couldn’t have felt any better. Not for 25 years had a team (Baltimore) scored so many first-inning runs in a World Series.
By the third inning, the score was 7-2, the shelled St. Louis starter was gone and the dependable old knuckleballer, 38-year-old Tim Wakefield, was on the hill for the Red Sox. Who could ask for anything more?
“We kind of gave it back,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “I mean, we knew the Cardinals would come back on us, but we definitely kind of helped.”
It began with knucklers floating and fluttering like butterflies, everyplace except across home plate. Wakefield walked the bases full to start the St. Louis.
Then the fielding turned as shaky as the pitching. The Cardinals scored three times.
Back and forth the game went, Boston gaining control of it and then giving it back. St. Louis, meanwhile, began pitching around Ortiz as if he were Barry Bonds, walking him on four pitches twice in succession.
In the seventh inning, though, the Cardinals could not do that. Already having walked Mark Bellhorn and Orlando Cabrera, they could not afford to be careful pitching to Manny Ramirez, someone who once upon a time would have been walked intentionally to load the bases
(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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