Razzle Dazzle: Firefighter Wally's Big Win

Razzle Dazzle
Firefighter Wally's Big Win


(Richard Steier spent most of last week goofing off at home. Rather than deprive readers of a column, we reprint this one that was originally published in the Oct. 24, 2003 issue, a time when his friend Wally was still a firefighter, the Yankees were still capable of winning a playoff series, and only those who had worked for or covered him had reason to doubt Bernie Kerik's honesty.)

A couple of days before the baseball playoffs began, I dropped by Wally the Firefighter's home to give him a couple of tickets and his wife asked me, "Do you obsess about anything the way he does?"

Several times a year at Belmont or Saratoga there will be a stretch run that inspires such demonstrative rooting on my part that my children are reduced to fits of laughter. Those episodes generally last no more than 20 seconds, however, and the ones that end unhappily do not stay with me much past the following morning.

And so I had to tell her, no, there was nothing that propelled me to the levels to which Wally takes his interest in the New York Yankees.

Rhubarb With a Side of Chicken Parm

Two weeks later, we were all gathered in the stately home of Billy the Lawyer to watch the third game of the Yankee/Red Sox series when Karim Garcia hit Pedro Martinez's fastball with his shoulder, touching off much discussion among members of both teams. In the bottom half of the inning, Manny Ramirez flinched when he thought he saw a Roger Clemens fastball flying into his airspace, then began striding toward the mound, providing just the diversion Don Zimmer needed to introduce himself to Mr. Martinez.

THE CURSE OF THE MARIANO?: Boston Red Sox fans who believe their team is living under a curse for having sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees not long after their last World Series win 85 years ago might more logically point the finger at Mariano Rivera, the Yankee reliever whose reliability, demonstrated once again with three shutout innings as he won the final game of their epic playoff series, has been the key to their mastery. All this caused much commotion in both the living room of Billy the Lawyer and the kitchen, where Wally the Firefighter was living up to the stereotype by preparing dinner for the three families (chicken parmigiana, for the firehouse gourmands keeping score at home). Not surprisingly, among the adults and children gathered there, Wally's take on the proceedings was the most extreme.

He loudly called for the ejection of Mr. Ramirez and the arrest of Mr. Martinez. He remained unconvinced that while it might be morally reprehensible to fling a 72-year-old man to the turf when you had the option of retreating, prosecuting him would be complicated by the fact that Mr. Zimmer had appeared intent on socking Pedro when he charged him.

"You ever notice that he's got a lot of George Steinbrenner in him?" I said to Billy the Lawyer regarding Wally.

The game resumed its normal rhythm, but Wally's engine was still overheating. When Mr. Ramirez stepped to the plate leading off the 8th inning, Wally shouted at the image of Mariano Rivera on the TV screen, "Kill 'im!"

Instead, Mr. Rivera followed the conventional baseball strategy for the late innings of a one-run game and traded a life for an out, getting Mr. Ramirez to ground out to first. The Yankees went on to win, Wally calmed down, and dinner was served.

Four days later, with the series back at Yankee Stadium for Game 6, when the Red Sox scored four runs in the third inning to take a three-run lead, Wally excused himself to go get "popcorn and a beer." As his companions knew, this was a pretext for Wally to set off in search of one of his "lucky spots." It might be a beer line in the upper deck, a TV monitor down the right-field line in the loge, or a seat a couple of rows behind Mike Francesa behind home plate downstairs; Wally would keep wandering the ballpark until something good began to happen, and then plant himself there until the Yankees had scored enough runs to persuade him it was safe to return to our seats high above the left-field umpire's post.

Cowboys Rally, He Rides Off

Some games the search lasts for several innings, but in this case, when the Yankees scored four runs in the bottom of the fourth to reclaim the lead, Wally returned relatively quickly. But after a couple of innings of ragging the Boston fans in our vicinity by sarcastically proclaiming "Cowboy up!" whenever the Yankees retired a batter or put a runner on base, a three-run seventh by the Red Sox sent him heading off again, this time never to return that night.

As readers of this space's detailing of past adventures with Wally know, he does not bring this kind of fixation to his public-safety duties or the aspects of his life not tethered to the Yankees. In those areas, Wally is clear-headed and rational.

Even in other baseball matters, he is contemptuous of the sort of Chicago Cubs fan who believes that an ace pitcher's failure to protect a three-run lead with five outs to go can be blamed on a fan whose attempt to snag a foul ball may have cost the Cubbies a crucial out. He'd be the first to tell you that Boston fans have unfairly made Bill Buckner the goat of their 1986 World Series defeat, since Bob Stanley's wild pitch that allowed the Mets to tie the score was the real key to that debacle; and by the way, the Sox also carried a three-run lead into the sixth inning of the seventh game of that Series that they blew without Mr. Buckner's assistance.

He can be full of helpful suggestions, too. After Rudy Giuliani's being given the chance to throw out the first ball for the first-round playoff opener against the Twins led to my proposal that the second-game honors go to Donna Hanover, Wally countered by suggesting that the Irish tenor Ronan Tynan go right from singing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch to leading the crowd in a rendition of "Cotton-Eye Joe."

'Those Idiots Coming?'

When the Yankees' playoff fortunes are involved, however, the word rational rarely gets to Wally's front door, never mind inside his thought processes. One of the pressing questions for him on the afternoon of the Pedro-Clemens rematch in Game 7 was whether "those idiots from the Times," referring to the reporters and editors of a certain publication who had been sitting a row in front of us for Game 6, would once again be darkening his mood by rooting enthusiastically for the Red Sox.

He also asked with some irritation whether nationality might lead a Dominican-born member of our own delegation to be rooting for Pedro; a silly thought since the individual in question is a more passionate Yankee fan than your humble correspondent and refers to Alfonso Soriano as "my baby."

Having the series extended to a seventh game added an unusual dose of the unknown for a team that had made a habit of closing out its opponents during the sixth game, which also would invariably be played at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees had not played a seventh game at home in the postseason since 1957, and had not won a seventh game at the Stadium since the 1947 World Series, a historical gap that seemed to place them almost on equal footing with the Red Sox's 85-year drought since their last World Series victory.

A Feverish Mood

This added to what already were plenty-dramatic circumstances, considering the stakes involved, the special place Mr. Martinez had won in Yankee fans' hearts five days earlier, and the possibility that Mr. Clemens was pitching the final game of his career.

It had a palpable effect on Wally. "I've never seen the Stadium like this right from jump street," he said of the feverish mood in the stands from the very first pitch. Yet he was strangely calm as both teams put runners in scoring position in the first inning but their rallies fizzled. When Trot Nixon came to the plate with a man on in the second for Boston, Wally sounded his first pessimistic note, prompting me to respond, "He doesn't hit homers off top pitchers."

The words had barely left my mouth when Mr. Nixon sent a Clemens pitch soaring into the right-centerfield bleachers for his third homer of the series. Normally this would have provoked a two-minute rant from Wally about not making such statements, but this time he just gave me a look and then offered a tart Yiddish phrase to Mark the CPA.

An error by Enrique Wilson that allowed another run later that inning in the past would have driven Wally from our seats in search of a lucky spot, but this time he stayed planted. "It's only three runs," he said, with a shocking burst of perspective.

Hope From the Past

The Red Sox scored again in the fourth inning and knocked Mr. Clemens from the game, leaving us ruminating on how he was feeling about the prospect of this being his final moment as a player. But when Mike Mussina cleaned up the mess he inherited and Jason Giambi homered in the Yankees' fifth, Wally began citing comebacks of the past, from the Marlins two nights earlier all the way back to the Mets' pair in that '86 World Series.

But as Mr. Mussina worked in the sixth inning, Felix Heredia, who had walked in the go-ahead run a day earlier, began warming up in the Yankee bullpen, and the old Wally briefly returned.

"Why Heredia?" he asked.

I pointed out that the Red Sox had two tough lefty hitters coming up and Mr. Mussina might be tired.

To which Wally replied, "If Mussina tells you he can't go anymore, you kill him." Mr. Mussina retired the side in order, however.

Mr. Martinez didn't seem to be throwing as hard as usual, but he was holding the Yankees at bay. When he retired Derek Jeter for the third time in the bottom of the sixth, Wally said of the Yankee shortstop, "He's having a bad night."

"Maybe Pedro's having a good one," I replied.

"We'll get him with the 7th-inning stretch," he responded, referring to the unusually long interlude to allow Mr. Tynan to sing "God Bless America" followed by "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "Cotton-Eye Joe" that the Twins manager had blamed for one of his pitchers' meltdowns in the previous playoff series.

"Pedro's liable to brush back Ronan Tynan," I said.

Giving Pedro Rope

Mr. Giambi hit another homer in the seventh to cut the deficit to two runs, but with two Yankee runners on base, Mr. Martinez gathered himself to strike out Mr. Soriano for the fourth time and escape serious trouble. He had thrown nearly 100 pitches and it seemed certain that Boston manager Grady Little would turn the game over to his bullpen, which had been impeccable all series, to start the eighth. But after David Wells came out of the Yankee bullpen to allow a David Ortiz homer that pushed the lead back to three runs, Mr. Martinez came back out to resume pitching.

Nick Johnson popped up to shortstop, and Wally said ominously, "Five outs." Mr. Martinez, however, didn't get any of them. Mr. Jeter doubled, Bernie Williams singled him home, and Mr. Little came to the mound. The Red Sox manager had forsaken the opportunity to give set-up man Mike Timlin the ball at the start of the inning with a three-run lead; now, it seemed, he would bring him in with the tying run at the plate.

Amazingly, however, he let Mr. Martinez, who it seemed had been pitching on fumes an inning earlier and now was out of fumes and working on sheer guts, stay in the game. Hideki Matsui lined a double to right, and then Jorge Posada blooped a hit into shallow center to score the tying runs and we were hollering and hugging.

Now, finally, Mr. Little went to his bullpen, first to Alan Embree, then to Mr. Timlin, who got the final out when Mr. Soriano's bases-loaded grounder struck the mound, slowing it enough to turn what looked like a two-run single into a forceout. To us, it didn't matter: the score was tied, Mariano Rivera was entering the ballgame, and victory seemed imminent.

We left the upper deck to look for seats downstairs, the better to get out of the Stadium and beat the traffic if the Yankees scored in the bottom of the ninth. Neither team scored over the next two innings, and when Mr. Rivera went through the Red Sox in an unaccustomed third inning of work, the Yankees' half of the 11th seemed to take on some urgency, since if they didn't score it was likely they would have to bring in another pitcher.

An Unexpected Boon

Aaron Boone had entered the game in the 8th inning as a pinch-runner and was leading off against Tim Wakefield, who had come on in relief the previous inning after stifling the Yankees with his knuckleball to win two earlier games as a starter. During the first game of the series, Mr. Boone had hit a hard grounder with two runners on that just barely kicked foul against Mr. Wakefield, but he had been pretty much an automatic out throughout the postseason.

Sitting now just to the left of home plate downstairs, I turned to my wife and said, "Boone's been pretty much hopeless, but you always gotta hope maybe he's due."

Wally, with his gift for striking up conversations with total strangers, turned to the guy standing next to him and offered a more optimistic pronouncement. "I think it's gonna be an Aaron Boone day," he said.

Wishful thinking became reality on the first pitch, when Mr. Boone drove a hanging knuckleball into the lower left-field seats, the ultimate ending to a playoff series. We whooped, we hollered, but mainly we ran for Wally's car, parked at a loading dock under the Major Deegan, looking to beat the traffic and figuring we could watch the post-game celebrations on the highlights shows later.

Wally's Epiphany

When Wally dropped us off a half-hour later, his elation was more tempered than usual. He hadn't felt gloomy the entire game, he said; hadn't needed to walk off by himself to find the elusive lucky spot. Just as noteworthy, he hadn't had a single beer.

It was as if he realized that for too long he had been reacting like a Cubs or Red Sox fan mired in years of defeat and frustration, always convinced something bad was going to happen. Rather than his usual practice of being raised from the depths of despair to a point past exuberance, Wally had watched the game with the outlook of someone whose team had a recent history of success built on salvaging games that seemed lost, and which had long ago found the key to the baseball universe in Mr. Rivera's gifted right arm.

Fans like him went to the games and rooted so hard, Wally said to us, looking not so much for victory as for a signature moment, something that would live in their memories decades from now. We'd had one of those moments.

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