Thus, fans departed Fenway Park with a parting gift of taking two out of three from those exasperating men from the Bronx, allowing the locals to make up only one game in their now near-Quixotic quest to finish atop the American League East.
There were even mild regrets within Schilling's exhilarating performance. Had Schilling stuck out his glove one millisecond sooner in the fourth inning, when Yankees catcher Jorge Posada drilled a single up the middle, we might have been talking about a no-hitter this morning.
"I should have caught it," Schilling lamented. "I just didn't react to it well."
It was a bizarre outing, to be sure. Schilling mowed down the first 10 batters he faced before he hiccuped in the fourth, with his team in front, 7-0. It began with Derek Jeter's sharp liner down the first-base line that Doug Mientkiewicz deftly stabbed. (Think he'll come in handy in the postseason?) Schilling then added a smudge to his burgeoning masterpiece by doing the inexplicable: walking Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui, on four pitches each.
"I don't know [what that was]," Schilling said. "I would love to sit here and tell you that [umpire Jim Wolf] was horrible behind the plate and was squeezing me, but I threw 12 straight balls, and I thought only one of them was a strike."
Catcher Jason Varitek did not offer alternate strategies throughout this brief lapse -- "It was like Schill had amnesia," offered Sox manager Terry Francona -- because mechanically there was nothing to correct.
"He was just a touch missing," Varitek said. "That happens sometimes. They were a good, patient team. They were smart enough to stay off a lot of pitches.
"All it takes is one pitch to get back on track. The first splitter he threw for a strike with the bases loaded got him right back."
