Edition: U.S. / Global

Sports of The Times; Red Sox Moments Create a Big Hole

Published: October 3, 2003

THE Oakland A's move decisively from year to year, making the best of their scrappiness and small-budget wits. The Boston Red Sox float high and dip low, like a Tim Wakefield knuckleball, burdened by the weight of a history that ultimately sends them careering to earth.

The A's bullpen has a new Foulke hero named Keith, who pitched three innings in Game 1 and hours later closed Game 2. The Red Sox have Byung Hyun Kim, who pitched two-thirds of the ninth inning Wednesday night and went off pouting with a fresh psychological playoff scar.

Here in the first two games of the American League division series, the A's made game-altering defensive plays. The Red Sox have had Manny Ramirez stumbling around in left field, trying to catch the ball in a tin cup.

Yesterday, Ramirez's futile and pitiful pursuit of a drive by Eric Byrnes, Oakland's No. 9 hitter, keyed a five-runs-on-two-hits second inning off Wakefield that culminated with a two-run throwing error by Red Sox second baseman Todd Walker. An inning later, Oakland's Jose Guillen calmly tracked Ramirez's long drive to left center, the same windy sun field, with two on, a run in.

Such was the competitive contrast in the contest as Barry Zito mastered the vaunted Boston attack and the Red Sox surrendered listlessly, 5-1, after insisting that their Game 1 nightmare was gone, forgotten, and everyone back home should move on, too.

''The game has to end somehow,'' Red Sox Manager Grady Little had reasoned after midnight yesterday morning at the Network Associates Coliseum.

Although as a rule I try to avoid participating in the never-ending television ratings obsession, I couldn't help but wonder what percentage of New England homes was still aglow at 2:45 a.m., when Ramon Hernandez dropped the bunt that may eventually be recalled, like Bucky Dent's blast, as a defining Red Sox moment.

Judging by the voluminous amount of e-mail messages one Boston newspaper columnist claimed to be receiving, it was a bleary-eyed Red Sox Nation that trudged off to work and school. ''They were literally throwing up,'' the columnist said. ''Sick to their stomachs.''

We can't say Game 1 cost the Red Sox the pennant, much less the series, not until tomorrow. But given how their bullpen let the game slip into extra innings, how it eventually was lost, who could resist drawing thematic parallels to disasters past?

Who could fathom Kim walking the eighth-place hitter and hitting the ninth while trying to close the game in the ninth inning? Who could accept Ramirez's trotting break off second, helping Eric Chavez beat him to the bag with a dive after stopping Gabe Kapler's smash? Who could stomach Derek Lowe letting Chavez steal third in the home 12th without so much as a look to keep him close?

Even in the wee hours, who could sleep after the marathon climaxed on a bases-loaded squeeze play by Hernandez, the catcher, of all people, on a team that prides itself on loathing the bunt?

Who, above all, could see the sun shining again on the Red Sox after Pedro Martínez threw 130 Game 1 pitches and came away with nothing to show for it, and with the Game 3 starter, Lowe, pushed to contribute 42 pitches in emergency relief?

Well, the few dozen Red Sox fans welcoming their team back onto the field near their dugout, among them a woman holding a sign that read: ''The Bostons believe.'' Maybe this rare show of October optimism was the benefit of being on the left coast, where professional sports produce only sparse amounts of the panic felt in New York when the Yankees fail to reach the Fall Classic, or the dread in New England of another classic fall.

In New York, the Yankees' owner issues commandments to win. New England is convinced the Red Sox never will. Somewhere between these extreme and unhealthy attitudes are the A's, with their colorful history tempered by modern financial realities.

''I think the media is putting a lot of emphasis on yesterday's game,'' the A's manager, Ken Macha, said before Game 2. ''I don't think there is any momentum, one way or another.''

This was the mind-set of a manager who will be pitching Ted Lilly tomorrow in Boston, whose team is no offensive juggernaut, who knows it has its own playoff baggage to haul. Three years running, the A's have lost fifth games in the division series. Two years ago, they took two from the Yankees in New York but then Jeremy Giambi didn't slide, Oakland's own version of a Red Sox moment.

''I've been on the other side,'' said Boston center fielder Johnny Damon, who was on that A's team. ''It seemed that we got tight when we were up, 2-0.''

This could happen again, is what he was suggesting. ''The hardest game to win is Game 3,'' first baseman Kevin Millar said in the quiet Boston clubhouse.

''We know it can be done,'' catcher Jason Varitek said, citing the Red Sox' climb from 0-2 in the 1999 division series against Cleveland.

If two games don't make a series, as they were saying, how, then, can one?

How? Ask the sleep-deprived Red Sox fans who cursed their team's Game 1 ninth-inning resolve and waited long into the night for an unlikely reprieve.

Three time zones east, it never came in the morning and it didn't come in the evening. All they knew yesterday in New England was this: one more defeat, and Ramon Hernandez turns immortal.

Photo: Members of the Boston Red Sox reacting late in the game yesterday as the Oakland A's were cruising to a 2-0 lead in their division series. (Photo by Associated Press)