Together they stood, Kevin Millar and Doug Mirabelli, in the on-deck circle at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago July 22, watching as 24-year-old Bobby Jenks, all 270 pounds of him, warmed up. Jenks, who can throw a baseball close to 100 miles per hour, fired fastball after fastball.
Millar and Mirabelli turned to each other and said, in so many words, that a fastball is a fastball, and they'd be able to hit one. Then, Jenks, continuing his warmup, dropped a curveball over the plate.
''If he throws that," Millar told Mirabelli that day, ''we're [in trouble]."
Indeed, both whiffed that day. Last night, in the eighth inning of the Red Sox' entertaining and emotional 9-8 win over the White Sox, it was David Ortiz's turn vs. Jenks.
''It's not a good matchup for anybody, a guy throwing 98," Mirabelli later said. ''But if you want anybody up there, you want David. He has the ability."
Ortiz never let Jenks get to that hook. The first pitch came in at 98. The second was a near carbon copy. The third reached the strike zone at 96 and left the yard even quicker, struck by a thunderous Ortiz swing that supplied his second homer in as many innings, this a three-run blast to dead center that upped the Sox lead to 9-5 before a pulsating gathering of 35,132, the 200th consecutive sellout at Fenway Park.
At the time it was merely decorative, a nice tack-on that followed Ortiz's tiebreaking solo homer an inning earlier off Chicago starter and Cy Young contender Mark Buehrle. But, when Curt Schilling surrendered three runs with two outs in the Chicago ninth on two Monster-clearing blasts -- a solo shot by Tadahito Iguchi and a two-run laser by Paul Konerko -- Ortiz's eighth-inning homer proved the game-winner.
''No," captain Jason Varitek said, when asked if he is any longer surprised by the slugging and smiling designated hitter. ''He is something special."
And, so is the baseball the Red Sox are playing. The win? The club's fifth straight. They've scored 52 runs in those games. The home win? The team's 12th in a row, most since Joe Morgan's 1988 club reeled off 24 consecutive victories. In those 12 games, they're hitting .319 and averaging 8.5 runs per game. At 37-18, the Sox continue to boast the best home record in the American League.
And this one came against the team with baseball's best record -- 74-39 before last night. The Sox, little more than a .500 team for much of this season, have won 13 of 15 and, at 67-47, have only seven fewer wins than the White Sox. They've done this, of course, by pounding teams.
''This lineup," David Wells said, ''is incredible."
