September 26, 2004: Red Sox score early, beat Yankees by 7 runs for the second game in succession

After the 2003 season, which saw the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees take the fight for the pennant to Game Seven of the American League Championship Series, with New York winning and the Red Sox once again out in the cold, both teams had made moves to bolster their rotations. At Thanksgiving, the Red Sox had traded for and signed 37-year-old right-hander Curt Schilling from the Arizona Diamondbacks. The following month, New York had sent three players and cash to the Los Angeles Dodgers for 39-year-old righty Kevin Brown, whom the New York Times described as “the Yankees’ answer to Schilling in last winter’s expensive arms race.”1

Schilling and Brown faced each other only once in 2004: at Fenway Park on Sunday, September 26. Schilling had won his 20th game of the year on September 16 and was 20-6 with a 3.28 ERA. Brown was 10-4 with a 3.99 ERA but hadn’t pitched since September 3. Brown had punched the clubhouse wall with his left hand three weeks earlier and broken his hand. He had also been out from June 9 to July 30.2

In the previous night’s game, the Red Sox had scored seven runs to break an eighth-inning tie. They wasted little time scoring the first seven runs on Sunday afternoon. After Schilling retired the Yankees in order in the first, Brown began the bottom of the inning by retiring center fielder Johnny Damon. Then things fell apart with five consecutive hits. Second baseman Mark Bellhorn singled to right. Manny Ramírez doubled to left-center, Bellhorn stopping at third. David Ortiz, the DH, doubled to left, both baserunners scoring. Trot Nixon doubled to center, driving in Ortiz for a 3-0 lead. All three balls were hit off Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

On the ninth pitch he saw, catcher Jason Varitek singled to right, and Nixon scored Boston’s fourth run. Brown struck out shortstop Orlando Cabrera but gave up a single to third baseman Bill Mueller. By this time, Esteban Loaiza was hurriedly warming up in the bullpen and Yankees manager Joe Torre made the change, replacing Brown with Loaiza. First baseman Doug Mientkiewicz lined out to Loaiza and the inning was over.

The Red Sox started it up again in the second. Damon walked and Bellhorn singled to right, Damon going to third. On the first pitch, Ramírez hit a fly ball to deep right and Damon tagged and scored. That made it 5-0. Ortiz walked on four pitches. Nixon grounded to Álex Rodríguez at third base, who threw to John Olerud at first for the out as both baserunners moved up. Varitek singled, a ball hit to Derek Jeter at shortstop. Jeter’s errant throw went wild and both Bellhorn and Ortiz scored.

The Red Sox had scored seven runs, matching the seven they had scored in the bottom of the eighth inning the night before to break a 5-5 tie and pull off a 12-5 win. Another win in this game would bring them to within 3½ games of the division-leading Yankees in the AL East with seven games to play. They had come back from being 10½ games behind the Yankees as recently as August 15. A win in this game would also better cement their position leading the wild-card standings.

With a 7-0 lead, Schilling seemed in good shape, setting down all nine Yankees he faced in the first three innings. Mysteriously, though, after Jeter led off the fourth by running the count to 3-and-2 and lining out to Mientkiewicz at first base, Schilling couldn’t find the plate. He walked A-Rod on four pitches, He walked right fielder Gary Sheffield on four pitches. He walked left fielder Hideki Matsui on four pitches. After retiring the first 10 batters he had faced, suddenly he had missed with 12 pitches in a row and was faced with a bases-loaded situation and Bernie Williams coming to bat.

Schilling then found the strike zone and struck out Williams on three pitches. Catcher Jorge Posada, however, swung at the first pitch he saw and hit a ball just out of Schilling’s reach, scoring Rodríguez and Sheffield on what the New York Times characterized as a “routine ground-ball single up the middle.”3

At this point, with the lead down to 7-2, Schilling regained his stride. He took Mientkiewicz’s throw to first on Olerud’s grounder for the third out. One-two-three innings followed in the fifth and sixth.

In the meantime, the Red Sox continued to score. Mueller hit a one-out solo home run to right in the fifth, his 12th of the season. With one out in the sixth, Dave Roberts – who had replaced Ramírez in left field in the top of the inning – doubled to left against Loaiza. Ortiz walked. Nixon singled to right field, scoring Roberts to make it 9-2. Varitek, who had fouled enough pitches in the first inning to have a nine-pitch at-bat before singling, now saw 10 pitches and a base on balls that loaded the bases.

Torre summoned Steve Karsay to take over from Loaiza. The first pitch Karsay threw to Cabrera was a wild pitch; Ortiz scored and the other runners all moved up a base. Three pitches later, Cabrera flied out to center and Nixon tagged and scored. It was 11-2. Red Sox.

Schilling walked one batter – Olerud – in the top of the seventh. The other three Yankees all flied out.

Rookie left-hander Brad Halsey pitched the bottom of the seventh for New York and retired each of the three batters he faced, two by strikeout.

Pedro Astacio replaced Schilling in the eighth. In his 13th season in the majors, it was the 35-year-old righty’s third appearance for Boston. Astacio only got off three pitches, each one of them a ball. After his third pitch, he was ejected for throwing behind Kenny Lofton.4 Terry Adams took Astacio’s place. His first pitch was a ball, and Lofton walked. Félix Escalona pinch-hit for Derek Jeter. Escalona grounded out to third baseman Mueller, who threw out Lofton at second base.

That brought Andy Phillips to the plate. This was the 27-year-old Alabama native’s first major-league at-bat. He had appeared in one prior game, on September 14 in Kansas City as a pinch-runner. On the first pitch he saw as a big-league batter, Phillips homered over the wall in left-center field, a two-run homer. The ball bounced back onto the field, leaving Phillips uncertain until the umpires signaled a home run.5 The score became 11-4.

Adams restored order after that, pitching around Rubén Sierra’s two-out pinch-hit single to maintain the seven-run lead. Former Yankee Ramiro Mendoza put up a scoreless ninth, and the Red Sox had their second seven-win run in a row. An early blowout and September’s expanded rosters resulted in a total of 41 players seeing action for both sides.

Schilling improved to 21-6. He’d walked four but allowed just one hit, Posada’s single in the fourth. With a week to go in the season, the second-place Red Sox stood just 3½ games behind the Yankees in the AL East. Boston also had a six-game lead in the AL wild-card race with just seven games to play.

It was the last home game of the season for the Red Sox, who improved to 11-8 against the Yankees in 2004 and 7-3 at Fenway Park, where Yankees pitchers had a collective 7.45 ERA.6 Schilling was 12-1 at Fenway and had won eight decisions in a row. The 55 home wins for Boston were second in the majors only to the Yankees’ 57. They were ready for the postseason.

The Red Sox won five of their remaining seven games and ended up as the AL’s wild card, three games behind the Yankees. They advanced through all three rounds of the postseason, including a memorable seven-game ALCS against New York, and wound up as World Series champions for the first time since 1918.

Acknowledgments

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

Photo credit: Trading Card Database.

Sources 

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

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS200409260.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2004/B09260BOS2004.htm

Notes

1 Harvey Araton, “Red Sox Lose the Hand, but Still Hold the Ace,” New York Times, September 27, 2004: D3.

2 That earlier absence had been after a “strained lower back and what was diagnosed as an intestinal parasite.” Ron Dicker, “In His Return, Brown Shows Some Endurance,” New York Times, July 31, 2004: D3.

3 Schilling hadn’t contested that the three walks were anyone’s fault but his own. “I threw 12 straight balls and thought only one was a strike.” He said the last time he had thrown 12 consecutive balls was when he was with the Phillies maybe in 1996 or 1997, and coincidentally “it was against Kevin Brown when we were playing the Dodgers.” Mike Fine, “Except for Brief Moment, Schilling Rules,” Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot Ledger, September 27, 2004: 23. Manager Terry Francona’s explanation? “It was like Schill had amnesia.” Jackie MacMullan, “Schilling Again Is the Attraction,” Boston Globe, September 27, 2004: D3.

4 The throw was understood as retaliation for when Lofton had “elbowed Boston first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz as he crossed first base in the third inning.” Later in the game, Yankees reliever Brad Halsey “dusted” Dave Roberts with his first pitch. Both Halsey and manager Joe Torre were ejected and players from both benches and bullpens came out on the field, but there was no replay of earlier incidents such as the July 24 brouhaha memorialized in the famous photograph of Varitek with his glove shoved in the face of Álex Rodríguez. Tyler Kepner, “Brown Suffers Rocky Return in Feisty Finale,” New York Times, September 27, 2004: D1. Torre noted that a third-inning incident was arguably being responded to in the eighth, after most of the Red Sox starting players had left the lopsided game. See Nick Cafardo, “No Elbow Room Found,” Boston Globe, September 27, 2004: D7.

5 Don Amore, “One Bright Spot for Yanks Yesterday,” Stamford Advocate, September 27, 2004: B3.

6 Kepner.