The Indians, with two straight wins in the Jake as encores to their 11th-inning win in the Fens last Saturday night, lead the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, 3-1. That historic 86-year drought the Sox ended by winning the World Series in 2004? Well, the Indians can do that one better tonight. They haven't clinched a pennant or won a World Series in their home park in 87 years, since they beat the Brooklyn Robins in Game 7 of the 1920 World Series, Stan Coveleski outdueling the spitballer, Burleigh Grimes, 3-0.
"The last thing you want to do is get ahead of ourselves," said Eric Wedge, the Indians manager whose team already has conquered the Yankees and is now in line to dispatch the two teams whose uniforms he once wore as a player, the Sox and Rockies. "Yeah, we'd love to do it here at home, but the heartbeat and the pace and the way we play, those need to be the same we've been doing all year."
The Sox have some experience, of course, in ALCS elimination games that they'd love to draw upon. Eight players remain from the team that was down, 3-0, to the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and won the next four games, the only team in baseball history to overcome such a deficit.
"To say there was a lot of confidence in that room would be a lie," Doug Mirabelli, one of the eight, said of the Sox clubhouse before Game 4 in '04. "But it definitely was a focused clubhouse. Everybody knew what was at stake. Everybody knew going into it how good a team we had. We couldn't believe we were in that situation.
"But all it took was one spark in the fourth game. That's what we're looking for right now: a spark, and a sense of heading in the right direction."
