Sox look to Schilling for Game 6
BOSTON – Before the bloody sock, Curt Schilling was a pitcher in ruin: injured, ineffective, unsure whether he would help the Boston Red Sox reach the World Series, much less win it.
With his ankle disintegrating beneath his once-powerful push-off, the right-hander was chased from a playoff outing after three innings and scratched from his next start in the 2004 A.L. Championship Series against the New York Yankees.
What Schilling did next is part of baseball lore.
“He really shouldn’t have pitched,” Boston manager Terry Francona said Friday before putting the team’s season in Schilling’s hands again. “And I can’t remember one moment ever thinking he wouldn’t pitch. And not only that, but that he wouldn’t win. And it probably wasn’t fair. So I guess that kind of sums up how I feel about Schill.”
That more than sums up Boston’s attitude about sending Schilling out to pitch Game 6 of the ALCS against Cleveland tonight, one week after the second-worst start of his postseason career. Fausto Carmona will also try to overcome a shaky Game 2 start and pitch the Indians into the World Series.
“It’s very simple now,” Schilling said. “I go out and do my job tomorrow and we win, or I don’t and we lose. I don’t think that that’s too much pressure or too little. It’s just reality.
“We put ourselves in this position, and I helped put us in this position, for better or worse. I’ve got the ball tomorrow, and if I can do what I know I’m capable of doing and I can execute, we can win. And if I don’t, then it’s going to be very, very tough.”
Schilling and Carmona both made it tough on their teams a week ago, when neither made it out of the fifth inning. The Indians won that one when they scored seven runs in the 11th, and they put the Red Sox on the brink of elimination before Josh Beckett beat Cleveland for the second time Thursday.
The Red Sox returned to Fenway Park after the game, but the Indians waited until Friday to fly. Other than that, manager Eric Wedge gave his team the day off.
“We weren’t going to the ballpark expecting to lose,” he said. “We were going to the ballpark expecting to win, so if it didn’t come out we were going to come in today.”
Schilling gave up five runs in 4 2/3 innings in Game 2, then spent six days watching his team try to extend the series long enough to give him another chance.
But that was only the second-worst playoff start of Schilling’s career: The worst was in Game 2 of the ‘04 series against the Yankees, when Schilling gave up six runs and limped off the mound, unable to come out for the fourth inning or his next scheduled start, either.
With his ankle tendon sutured in place and blood seeping out of his stitches, he held the Yankees to one run over seven innings to force a decisive seventh game. After Boston won that one, Schilling repeated the procedure with six solid innings against the St. Louis Cardinals to put the Red Sox on the road to a World Series sweep.