National Sports Journalism Center

Millions of people watched Game 2 of the 2007 World Series in Boston.

Thousands of fans crowded into Fenway Park.

Hundreds of sportswriters worked there.

They all saw what happened.

Only one man wrote it.

Yes, 2007 was a long time ago, at least a thousand years ago in TwitterTime. I bring it up now because on the way to looking up something else – amazing, the things you learn while looking up something else – I came across a note about the Game 2 story that ran in the Boston Globe of October 26, 2007.

"THIS," the note said, "is baseball reporting."

The note was reference to the heart of a game story written by Gordon Edes. The Globe’s baseball man reported the anatomy of a critical play in the eighth inning when the Red Sox held a 2-1 lead. Forgive me for allowing this excerpt to run on, but these paragraphs report such remarkable detail that I – as a sportswriter and failed shortstop – can’t help but revel in Edes’s work and his baseball instincts. On deadline, he wrote:


The Sox won their sixth straight Series game and fifth straight of this postseason with one never-before-seen wrinkle. [Boston relief pitcher Jon] Papelbon, who had not picked off a runner since he broke into the big leagues in 2006, nabbed Matt Holliday straying off first base to close out the eighth inning. Holliday had nearly taken out both Papelbon and second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a line single up the middle, his fourth hit of the night. The ball appeared to glance off Papelbon’s leg and caused Pedroia, who gloved the ball with a sprawling spot, to writhe in pain after he landed heavily on the left shoulder he’d dislocated already once this postseason.

At the plate was Todd Helton, the signature player in Rockies history. But he never saw a pitch in the eighth, as Papelbon whirled and picked off Holliday.

"Probably will go down as one of the biggest outs of my career," Papelbon said.
 
It was not happenstance. Holliday was intending to steal – he confirmed so after the game – and the Sox had a strong suspicion he was going.

They knew that the Rockies were scouting them in the Division Series against the Angels, when Howie Kendrick stole second and third unchallenged against Papelbon in the eighth inning of a tie game.

"If you were advancing us, you would have said the same thing, that Pap is 1.8 [seconds] to the plate, and he doesn’t pick," [Sox bench coach Brad] Mills said. "But it was a different situation in the game against the Angels. We didn’t care if he stole, because we had confidence in Paps getting the hitter and we didn’t want to take anything away from him to try to get the runner on that situation….

"We know they’re advancing us, they’re watching it. That night I was talking to Pap in the shower about that exact thing, and about what was to come. [Bullpen coach] Gary Tuck was talking to him about it, [pitching coach] John Farrell talked to him about it, about different things we were going to do."

When manager Terry Francona went out with trainer Paul Lessard to check on Pedroia, Mills noticed that Glenallen Hill, the Rockies’ first base coach, never stopped talking to Holliday. Mills also had a color-coded chart he keeps on every player, that showed that Holliday likes to steal on the first pitch with two outs. "It was right there in my pocket," Mills said.

Indeed, it was right there on the chart, multiple steal attempts Holliday had made on the first pitch with two outs.

"You put all those things together, and it comes up, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick once to see where he’s at, and then we’re going to slide-step.’ And, we were watching. I got a big lump in my throat because he kept inching, inching, inching off, and Pap did a great job of holding the ball, letting him get off there. And then I’m sitting there, with a lump in my throat, hoping he doesn’t throw [it] away."

Papelbon made the play, Mills said. "He made the great pick."

But while it was nowhere as dramatic as Kirk Gibson knowing that Dennis Eckersley was going to throw a backdoor slider on a full count before Gibson hit one of the greatest home runs in Series history, it was a stunning example of how inside knowledge and paying extraordinary attention to detail can turn a Series.

"There are a lot of times we don’t want him to throw over," Mills said. "But in this situation with Helton and [Garrett] Atkins coming up, we couldn’t afford it, and it just happened to work out."

Even in 2007, when newspapers still cared more about journalism than tweets, that was exceptional work. This is Gordon Edes’s 30th year in the business, most of his time spent in ballparks covering the Dodgers, Marlins, and Red Sox. As it was not happenstance that Papelbon made his move to first base, neither was it happenstance that Edes, and Edes alone, reported the backstory of the move that ended the Rockies’ most serious threat (and, as it happened, set the tone for the entire Series, a Red Sox sweep).

Because Edes had been in the clubhouse and dugout, on the field and in the executive offices, in the press room and on the road, because he’d chatted up players, coaches, trainers, secretaries, groundskeepers, batboys and – for all we know – the ghosts of Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio, someone knew Edes well enough to come to him at the end of Game 2 and say, "Mills had a lot to do with that pickoff."

Nothing more.

Just, Mills had a lot to do with that pickoff.

On a World Series game that ends right up against your newspaper’s deadline, the game-story writer has about 1.8 seconds to make every decision on reporting and writing. So if you’re Gordon Edes and the Red Sox have won, 2-1, with Papelbon throttling the Rockies in the eighth and ninth innings, do you chase down the tip on Brad Mills? Mills is the bench coach. What could he have done?

A lesser reporter worried about writing on deadline would have been happy to get Papelbon quotes and be done with it. Edes was not that reporter. He knew that seeking out Mills might cost him valuable time. But he also knew that the manager, Terry Francona, had said nothing about Mills at his post-game press conference. So if Mills in fact had something important to add, it would give a fresh twist to Edes’s game story.

"The coaches’ room is across a hall from the players," Edes told me this week, "so I had to ask somebody, ‘Could you go get Mills for me?’"

Maybe Mills would have come out of the coaches’ room for any reporter. Probably not. If he did come out, there’s little chance he would have gone into the detail he shared with a reporter he had known during his four years with the organization. But with a veteran journalist asking a question that showed he had cultivated good sources inside the clubhouse, Mills was thrilled to spell it all out.

"He was exhilarated, that the pickoff had worked," Edes said. "So the story turned out to be so much richer than I could have thought. The thing about talking to Pap in the shower, the color-coded card . . ."

The more they talked, Edes said, the more he prayed.

"I kept praying," he said, "that nobody would see me talking with Mills. The odds of getting stuff at a World Series game that nobody else has – with 500 reporters there, who gets stuff nobody else has? I wanted to ask him to show me the color-coded cards, but I was afraid he’d have to go get them, so there was the stealth factor there, too. I didn’t want anybody to see me waiting around for him."

For Edes, all this was two kinds of fun.

First, he reported a story that no one else had.

Second, he got to sit back the next day and watch everyone chase Brad Mills.

Sweet.