My hopes for game six were pretty simple. I wanted John Lackey to pitch a gem, and I wanted to see Stephen Drew get a bit of his mojo back.
Amazingly, both of those things happened.
Lackey was both a bad-ass mothereffer AND the horse he rode in on, shutting down the Cardinal bats on a night when he didn’t seem to have his A game and threatening Farrell to keep him in the game even when he probably should have hit the pine. The guy’s a gamer and with a victory in the clinching game of the World series, he’s cemented his place in Boston lore. I picked the guy to win 20 games; somehow, I think even he’d agree that this is better.
Meanwhile, Stephen Drew got his own jolt of redemption when he ended an amazing hit-free streak by belting a home run into the bullpen. If you didn’t find yourself jumping up and down and high-fiving everyone in sight while Drew ran the bases, you have no soul. And Al Qaeda welcomes your application form.
And on top of all of that, the Red Sox won the World Series for the third time in ten years.
It was an insane night at Fenway, one that put the exclamation point on perhaps one of the greatest Red Sox seasons ever. A season that literally saw the Sox pull themselves from the shithouse to the penthouse, shaking off 2012’s lost season and about $200 million in bum contracts to re-capture this city’s heart and provide the emotional outlet we all needed after the marathon bombings.
This was a team that was crazy resilient in the postseason. In the ALDS, we beat Matt More and David Price. In the ALCS, we beat Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander (much, we are sure, to FOX’s chagrin). Now, in the World Series, we beat Adam Wainwright twice, and knocked Michael Wacha out in the fourth, tagging him for 6 runs.
The only sad thing about tonight is that there’ll be no more new Red Sox baseball for five months. But we’ll always have this GIF of Jon Lester hugging John Lackey.
Thanks for reading, people. Thanks for being part of this madness.
