He put the ball in his cowboy boot. A temporary refuge, to be sure, but a measure of how Jon Lester chose to wear his fame on a magical, windswept Monday night in May.
The Red Sox lefthander threw a no-hitter against the Kansas City Royals last night at Fenway Park, which in baseball is often cast as an immortal act but for a cancer survivor is something to be taken with a touch of modesty, a pinch of humor, and, in a quiet moment, to be stuck in your shoe.
Yet for a guy determined to be seen as nothing special because of his illness, Lester has shown an uncanny knack for doing the extraordinary, and all by the age of 24.
Last October, Lester won the deciding game of the World Series, just 14 months removed from his diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Last night, with the assist of a remarkable diving catch by Jacoby Ellsbury, he threw the first no-hitter of the 2008 season, the 18th in club history, and first by a Sox pitcher since rookie Clay Buchholz last Sept. 1, and the first by a Sox lefthander since Mel Parnell more than a half-century ago.
"His story is a good story as it is," said Sox third baseman Mike Lowell, who was among the gleeful throng of teammates that engulfed Lester after he struck out Alberto Callaspo for the final out of a 7-0 win over the Royals witnessed by a sellout crowd of 37,746 likely to grow exponentially in the years to come. "But to add a no-hitter to it, it adds something great to the story.
"I think people will now remember what he did tonight on the mound as something special, instead of he's a young kid who had cancer. It shows his ability has come full circle. Besides the no-hitter, he shows he can really shut down a team, because he has that kind of stuff."
Funny thing is, Lester said, if you'd been down in the bullpen with him when he was warming up, you'd have sworn he wouldn't get out of the first inning. That's no exaggeration, pitching coach John Farrell said.
"To be quite frank and somewhat ironic," Farrell said, "it was probably the most erratic he was of any bullpen throughout this season. I think maybe there was a little frustration warming up, things weren't clicking the way he wanted. But from the first pitch on, it was evident things were clicking."
The first pitch, on a 56-degree night with a 23-mile-an-hour wind blowing from the west knocking down most balls headed toward left field, came at 7:06 p.m. and was a 93 mile-an-hour fastball to David DeJesus. It was called a strike, and it set a tone. Of the 29 batters he faced, he threw first-pitch strikes to 20 of them. The radar gun registered fastballs at 94, 95, and 96 miles an hour.
