May 7, 2004: Many contributors forge Red Sox rally, walk-off win over Royals

The Boston Red Sox held a one-game lead over the New York Yankees for first place in the American League East Division, but it was only 28 games into the season. Both teams were getting over disappointments from the year before. The Yankees had denied the Red Sox the pennant in a seven-game AL Championship Series, then lost the World Series to the Florida Marlins.

The Red Sox were hosting former Boston catcher Tony Peña – now in his third season as a big-league manager – and the Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park on May 7. Starting the Friday night game for Boston was knuckleballer Tim Wakefield.

The Royals were last in the AL Central, but they went ahead against Wakefield in the top of the first.

The first Royals run resulted from on a leadoff single by shortstop Ángel Berroa, who took second on a groundout to short, stole third, and scored on another groundout to short.

Left-hander Jeremy Affeldt retired the Red Sox in order on 12 pitches in the first.

Wakefield got three more groundouts in the second. The Red Sox got a single and a walk in their half, but no runs.

Kansas City scored another run in the top of the third. Alternating outs and singles, the Royals had runners on first and third with two outs. Wakefield faked a pickoff to third, then threw to first, trapping Carlos Beltrán off the bag.1 Beltrán – who stole 42 bases in 45 attempts in 2004 – was caught in a rundown but escaped when second baseman Mark Bellhorn missed the throw from first. “I had my glove positioned in the wrong way,” Bellhorn said later.2 The error allowed KC’s Desi Relaford to score from third base for a 2-0 lead.

The Red Sox got two runs in their half of the third, evening the score at 2-2. With one out, center fielder Johnny Damon homered over the Royals bullpen in right field. Bellhorn singled into right field. DH David Ortiz struck out on three pitches. Left fielder Manny Ramírez singled to left, then Kevin Millar doubled into the left-field corner and knocked in Bellhorn.

Neither team scored in the fourth, but the Royals broke the tie with four runs in the top of the fifth. Berroa hit another leadoff single. After Beltrán flied out, DH Mike Sweeney singled and so did right fielder Juan González, driving in Berroa. Left fielder Matt Stairs doubled to right, and Sweeney scored Kansas City’s fourth run of the game.

When third baseman Bill Mueller grabbed Royals second baseman Joe Randa’s bouncer to third and threw wildly to first, two more runs scored on the infield single and error. It was 6-2, Royals. The Red Sox got a man on in the fifth, but he never got past first. Neither team scored in the sixth or seventh. Wakefield hit Stairs with a pitch in the seventh but otherwise didn’t let another Royal on base. Manager Terry Francona left the 37-year-old knuckleballer in the game through eight innings and 114 pitches.

Trailing by four runs, the Red Sox began to rally against Affeldt in the eighth. Manny Ramírez led off with a single. After Millar flied out, right fielder Gabe Kapler hit a high fly ball to left. Stairs appeared to misjudge it in the wind. He dived for the ball, but it dropped in for a single, and Ramírez stopped at second.

Both Ramirez and Kapler were able to come around and score on catcher Doug Mirabelli’s single to left and an error on the throw in by Stairs. Jason Grimsley relieved Affeldt and retired Mueller and pinch-hitter Brian Daubach, but the score was now Royals 6, Red Sox 4.

Francona and pitching coach Dave Wallace conferred, and Mike Timlin took over for Wakefield in the top of the ninth. Timlin struck out shortstop Berroa, got Beltrán to ground out to Millar at first, the pitcher taking the toss, and then saw Sweeney fly out to center field.

Boston was down to its final at-bats, and Mike MacDougal took over pitching for Kansas City. After a couple of fans ran on the field, Damon worked a walk on six pitches, then scampered to second on a passed ball. On a 1-and-1 pitch, Mark Bellhorn tied the game with his third homer of the season, several rows deep into the right-field grandstand.

The sold-out crowd was – by far, most of them – thrilled, and hoping DH David Ortiz would end it with one swing of the bat. But Ortiz struck out, swinging, on just three pitches for the second time in the game.

Manny Ramírez walked to put the go-ahead run on first. Peña summoned Scott Sullivan in hopes of getting two outs to send the game to extra innings. Sullivan got the first one, as Millar hit a high popup to Relaford, the second baseman, in right field.

Francona sent up Jason Varitek, Boston’s regular starting catcher, to pinch-hit for Kapler. Swinging at the very first pitch, Varitek doubled to into the corner in right field. Ramírez summoned such speed as he had and ran all the way from first to score the winning run, the throw home arriving just a moment late as Ramírez scored without sliding.3

Asked why he hadn’t slid, Ramírez said, “I didn’t see the throw. I was watching [Royals catcher Benito Santiago]. He wasn’t moving like there was a throw.”4 It was very close play, and the deke might well have worked if right fielder González had been faster to get to the ball.

“What a job by Manny,” Varitek said. “All I did was step up there and get a hit. I hit a changeup and Manny scored. It’s just what this team believes it can do.”5

The Red Sox won 7-6, giving them a two-game edge in the standings when the Seattle Mariners beat the Yankees that evening. It was still early May, though, and there were 133 games left on the schedule.

That said, the Red Sox had had significant contributions by Bellhorn and Millar and Mirabelli as well as the homer by Damon and the pinch-hit by Varitek. Mike Timlin got the win.

It was a game in which, Mirabelli said afterward, “for the whole day you seemed to be going through the motions. We had no rhythm. All of a sudden … BAM!”6

The Royals had dropped to 2-13 on the road. Beltrán said, “This was just unbelievable. This is the first time that I feel that it’s just impossible for us to win ballgames. I was 100 percent sure that we were going to win this ballgame.”7

For his part, Bellhorn said, “We never think that the game is over. We know somebody is going to step up and it’s not always one guy. It’s the whole team.”8

It was the second walk-off win of the 2004 Red Sox season. The first had been on April 11 against the Toronto Blue Jays, that one on David Ortiz’s home run in the 12th inning. During 2004 the Red Sox had nine regular-season walk-off wins, six of them in extra innings. Two came in back-to-back games on September 21 and 22.9

Three more walk-offs followed in the 2004 postseason. Ortiz was 0-for-5 with three strikeouts in this early May game against the Royals, but he drove in the winning runs in all three postseason walk-offs. Most memorable were his game-winners on back-to-back nights in mid-October, walking off Game Four and Game Five of the ALCS and igniting Boston’s history-making comeback over the Yankees.

And to think that when the Red Sox had acquired him, the team was accused of “shopping at Walmart.”10

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Carl Riechers and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, and YouTube.com.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS200405070.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2004/B05070BOS2004.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA52K9kWqH4

Notes

1 A rule change for the 2013 season made it a balk to fake a pickoff throw to third, but it was permitted at the time of this game. Tyler Kepner, “A Trick’s Farewell: Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff,” New York Times, January 26, 2013: D1, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/sports/baseball/baseball-rule-change-eliminates-a-fake-pickoff-by-pitcher.html.

2 Nick Cafardo, “Tek-nical Knockout,” Boston Globe, May 7, 2004: E5.

3 “We needed a break for the ball not to kick (off the wall),” said manager Terry Francona. “It kind of hugged the wall. Manny was thinking score right from the jump.” Bob Dutton, “KC at a Loss, Again – Late Meltdown in Boston Is Called ‘Unbelievable.’” Kansas City Star, May 8, 2004: D1.

4 Cafardo.

5 Cafardo.

6 Mike Fine, “Home Cookin’ Lifts Sox,” Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot Ledger, May 8, 2004: 51.

7 Dutton.

8 Cafardo.

9 The Red Sox also lost nine walk-off road games in 2004.

10 Gordon Edes, “Sox Officially Bring in Ortiz,” Boston Globe, January 23, 2003: E3. The sentiment Edes expressed was nearly universal at the time – that new Red Sox GM Theo Epstein was looking for bargains and not going after the best players available at the time.