Pound Pup Legacy

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/7301360?MSNHPHCP&GT1=10539

Kevin Hench
FOXSports.com

Like most people with obsessive compulsions or debilitating addictions, I'd just as soon be rid of mine.

In fact, I'd given myself a deadline to kick it sometime this month. Well, that's not entirely accurate. I didn't give myself a deadline. A deadline was thrust upon me. Or, uh, let's just say, there was thrusting and there was a deadline.

A due date, to be precise.

Since all our friends who had waited into their dotage to get started on a family had had to resort to fertility shots and IVF, I wasn't exactly keeping one eye nine months down the road when we pulled the goalie, stepped into the batter's box and began mixing more than our metaphors.

When my wife nonchalantly walked into the kitchen a month later and announced she was pregnant, I was too overcome with Luke Skywalker-piloting-Red 5, "I nailed it" pride to think about any conflicts my trust-in-the-force bulls-eye might have created down the road.

It wasn't until the mother-of-my-child-to-be announced our due date of October 18th that I thought, uh, that could be potentially problematic.

You see, far across the country from our home in L.A., unbeknownst to ovum and spermatozoon, the Red Sox were building what looked like the best team in baseball. And for the best team in baseball, Oct. 18 can often be a workday.

Ordinal out of range

Reggie Jackson hit three home runs to finish off the Dodgers on Oct. 18, 1977. Bruce Hurst beat the Mets 1-0 in Game 1 of the 1986 World Series on Oct. 18. David Ortiz beat the Yankees with a 14th-inning base hit to send the 2004 ALCS back to New York on Oct. 18.

Oct. 18 was not a date on which to be otherwise engaged.

But while my wife was charting her temperature and making demands accordingly, the Red Sox, too, were having a goal-oriented '06 holiday season.

Using a proven method, battle-tested by the team they'd finished behind in the American League East for 11 straight years, the Red Sox were throwing huge amounts of money at the problems that had doomed their 2006 season.

The loves of my life were both making preparations for October.

• Boston shelled out $103M for Daisuke Matsuzaka, even though no Japanese starter had ever won more than 16 games in a single Major League season.
• My wife and I began the OBGYN search, where I got to learn what an episiotomy was and realized fainting was not out of the question on the big day.
• The Red Sox committed $70M to J.D. Drew, banking on the proposition that OPS would trump EKG and that it wouldn't matter that he'd never displayed a perceptible heartbeat in a Major League game.
• We began meeting with doulas. A doula, from what I understand, is a woman who gets paid $1,200 to make your wife feel more supported. (This is money well spent in the 50-50 likelihood the husband passes out.)
• The Sox signed Julio Lugo for $36M, hoping against a woeful repeat of the last shortstop they signed to a four-year deal (Edgar Renteria) who couldn't handle playing in a city where some of the fans were committed and the rest probably should be.
• We shell out $12.99 for the Dog Meets Baby CD to prepare the feral dogs we adopted for the arrival of what we're praying they don't see as their most fascinating chew toy yet. (How hysterical is it that you can sell a CD of a baby crying and screaming? How much for the dirty diapers?)

It was shaping up to be an incredible year. I was so excited by the Sox's wonderfully reckless $209M investments that I actually picked them to win the World Series, something I'd never done in any prior preseason picks column for various superstitious, pessimistic, child-of-divorce reasons.

Never mind that all three of those big-ticket signings would largely disappoint. We were on a collision course. Me, the Sox and my as-yet-unnamed wunderkind who will not, under any circumstances, lift his or her chin on ground balls, shy away from taking charges or back off on 50-50 balls on the soccer pitch.

I had crossed the Rubicon, and, as Caesar said, "Alea iacta est." The die was cast, indeed.

It was time to grow up. I had all summer to shed my title as the craziest Red Sox fan anyone had ever met.

Don't get me wrong, there are Red Sox fans more devoted than I am. My buddy Rosie would risk discovery and humiliation to sneak into Fenway as a fake beer vendor. My buddy Rath flew to the Dominican Republic for a spring training game against the Astros. My buddy Erik's mom is a pillar of unyielding faith. Not even mathematical elimination can shake her resolute belief that the Townies will come through.

But no one can approach the black rage I immerse myself in after a loss. "Hate is the heat that disinfects my soul," as Cyrano de Bergerac said, and no one hates losing like the Henchman. Sometimes five hours after the last out of a June regular season game I'll feel my upper lip twitching, my brow knitting, my anger swelling and I'll wonder why I'm so distressed.

Sometimes I'll even wonder out loud, "I don't know why I'm in such a bad mood," and my wife, with a no-duh air of exasperation, will helpfully remind me.

Oh, right. Bases loaded, nobody out, couldn't score.

But this won't do as a parent. I need perspective, a sense of propriety.

July. August. September.

I am not mellowing. The "event" is going down. Despite the mildly resentful appraisals of the way she's carrying by the stockier members of her gender, my 5'9 wife has a comical protuberance that is stretching out even my extra-large Man Show t-shirts.

That little person is coming, gender unknown in accordance with the carrier's wishes.

And I am largely ready.

Birthing classes. Check.

Three-hour lactation seminar even though I can't lactate. Check

Three-hour vaccination seminar even though we'll ultimately do what everybody else does. Check.

Hospital tour. Check.

Birth plan with the doula. Check.

Meet the OBGYN's partner in case he pulls a "Knocked Up" and is out of town. Check.

Pediatrician interviews (plural, even though the first doc was the obvious call). Check.

Relaxation recordings loaded onto our iPods. Check.

"30 Rock," "The Office," "Heroes," "The War" and the "Sarah Silverman Program" season passes loaded into the DVR. Check.

If only I could cross off this one other thing. If only they hadn't made the playoffs. Sure, blowing a 14-game lead would have been excruciating. But it's not like I haven't dealt with that before. At least it would be done. I could have raged and wailed and grieved and then greeted my first child like a sane person. The poor innocent wouldn't have had to witness Crazy Daddy until Manny air-mailed the cutoff man in April. But by then it would be a teaching moment.

I look at my wife, carrying low, baby's noggin at the hatch, all systems go. I watch Josh Beckett, that 2003 look in his eyes, chillingly indifferent as to who the batter is, since it's all on his terms anyway.

These trains are on the same track. Oh, God, please don't let the baby crown with two outs, runners in scoring position and Jason Varitek at the plate.

I lean on my friends. They should be able to help me, some tip, something to stop the trembling or at least to make it about the baby and not Hideki Okajima's possibly "tired arm."

My buddy Tuli serves the tri-purpose of being a parent, a Red Sox fan and a doctor. He should be my ultimate resource.

Tuli grew up in Reading, Mass., and is no sunshine patriot when it comes to his Sawx. When I e-mailed him to let him know that Clay Buchholz was not long for Double A and would be making a start in Norwich, Conn., a mere 40 minutes from the Tulikangas home in West Hartford, Tuli piled daughters Christine, Anne and Bridget into the car. Mere months before his big league no-hitter, the Tuli girls saw the skinny phenom pitch the Portland Sea Dogs past the Connecticut Defenders (whose pitching coach is Bob Stanley as Tuli learned at the hot dog stand after The Steamer had been ejected for arguing balls and strikes).

But Tuli can't help me. Why? Because he's not nuts. He didn't have to call his folks when we were in college to let them know he wouldn't harm himself after Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. And I'm guessing his mom didn't just FedEx him a bottle of Manny Being Merlot (which, under the right circumstances, will taste every bit as delicious as the Veuve-Clicquot Rath, Simmons and I sipped in 2004.)

My mom also got me bottles of Tim Wakefield's Caberknuckle and Schilling Chardonnay. This is why she is the greatest. But also why she may not be the best guide for my overdue epiphany of perspective.

And Pops? I watched him in 1975. I was a wide-eyed 8-year-old, up past my bedtime, and I knew something was terribly wrong. (I didn't know at the time he had also bet a considerable sum in 1975 dollars on the Red Sox.) But I knew he was profoundly bummed out. And it wasn't because his marriage was crumbling. It was because Tony Perez had hit that stupid Eephus pitch out of the park. (I'd like to say I avenged my father's heartache 18 years later in a men's league in Vermont, but I grounded out to second in both my at bats against Bill Lee.)

No, my dad can't help me. He gave this to me. With every ground ball he hit me. With every story he told me about Ted Williams lining foul balls at hecklers. With my first trip to Fenway when Jim Rice homered twice to pass Gorman Thomas for the AL home run lead.

And like all DNA, I will pass it on to my kid. I'd just like to be able to do it with some composure. I've read Dr. Janov. I know what long-term effects my child could suffer if he or she witnesses one of my tsunamis over a poorly-located 0-2 fastball.

I join my wife for her now-weekly checkup. It's the first time I've been in the room when our male OBGYN has been doing the prodding and I have to reluctantly concur with my wife's assessment that he is indeed "dashing." Awesome. Please, by all means, make yourself at home with my wife's lady-parts.

He assures us that my wife's cervix is — like the rest of her — extremely competent. This leads him to think that despite the baby's eager positioning, we may make it to our original Oct. 18 due date. But, he casually adds, she could go into labor at any time.

I am not worried about this last, "on the other hand" tidbit. Of course my first child is going be born during Game 5 of the ALCS with the Red Sox desperately needing a win. How could it be any other way?

My wife has graciously given me the thumbs-up to name the kid Manny if it's a boy. Wow. She must have mistaken me for some arrested adolescent with a Fred Lynn poster on his wall, the cork from Derek Lowe's '04 champagne bottle on his desk and an unopened David Ortiz Wheaties box on a shelf in his office.

That ain't me. I could never name my first child after Manny Ramirez.

Unless, of course, he welcomes the newest Red Sox fan into the world with another walk-off home run.