Home wreckers

Yankees rout Sox at Fenway, take command of series

October 17, 2004|Globe Staff

Religious leaders prayed for the Red Sox to reach baseball's promised land. The mayor appealed for divine intervention. Even comic Jim Dunn led the congregants at the Comedy Connection last night in a prayer service.

So why did the Sox all but find themselves on death's postseason doorstep? Why was a team that opened the playoffs with such extraordinary promise one loss away from receiving last rites?

Blame the baseball gods, if it helps ease the heartache.

But the fact is, there may be too little ink in the newspaper's printing plant to list the ways the Sox turned a night of mighty hope into a calamitous collapse of the worst order as Terry Francona's crew suffered a historically embarrassing 19-8 defeat to the Yankees and plunged into a 3-0 chasm in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series before a stunned 35,126 at Fenway Park.

"It was just a [butt]-kicking all the way around," starter Bronson Arroyo said, after putting the Sox on the path to the horrible finish. "You would try to forget about it during the regular season, but to get destroyed like this when it's crunch time and have a football score up there at the end of the game, it's definitely embarrassing."

No team has come back from a 3-0 deficit in postseason history. And the Yankees have not lost four straight games since April 22-25, when they dropped the finale of a road trip in Chicago and were swept in a three-game series by the Sox in the Bronx.

The watchword for the Sox by the end of the rout was "desperate." As in, very desperate.

"We have to do what's never been done in history," Johnny Damon said, "and that's come back from a 3-0 deficit."

In a humiliating performance that set an array of records for pitching futility in a League Championship Series, Arroyo and five relievers were punished unrelentingly as the ugliness unfolded over the longest nine-inning game (4 hours, 20 minutes) in postseason history.

"We had a night tonight where none of our pitchers located, I mean none of them," Francona said. "We walked guys, we hit some guys, we gave up a lot of extra-base hits. That's a bad combination."

The Yankees set a record for the LCS with the 19 runs and matched a record for hits (22) set by the Braves in 1996. They also matched the record for doubles (eight).

"It's like they have a certain gear right now," Damon said. "They're playing the best we've seen them play all year. It wasn't fun."