by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Faithful recounts the 2004 Major League Baseball season of the Boston Red Sox the year they won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Stephen King and cowriter Stewart O’Nan kept diaries of the preseason, season, and postseason in real time. They made the deal for this book before anyone knew this would be the year. They thought the team had a chance, but what Sox fan hasn’t hoped “this is the year” many times before. This was a hell of a gamble and it just worked.
O’Nan wrote the introduction. I’m very forgiving of King as I’ve committed to read all his books in order. It creates a bias in me when it comes to his collaboration partners. O’Nan feels like an interloper in my reading. Maybe I’m an interloper on his and King’s diaries of being longsuffering fans of this team.
One author’s contributions were in bold text and the other in plain text. I couldn’t tell who was who at first. That was until O’Nan says he can’t afford something, and I figured the unbolded sections are “not King.” Lots of footnotes which belong to the author of the section notated unless otherwise indicated in the footnote itself.
King makes a Nazi joke in one of the footnotes that weirdly lacks context or lead up.
Stephen King was doing edits on the final Dark Tower novel when he almost hit in the face with a hard foul ball. It missed him by inches. Someone yelled at him to get his head in the game. King is living in Florida for a portion of 2004. At one game, someone called out at Stephen King, “Hey, there goes Stephen Spielberg.” King says this happens far more often than you’d think. King has had the same driver to games and around the big cities from the same limo company since his kids were little, and now he’s taking grandkids sometimes.
The governor of Massachusetts at the time, Mitt Romney attended a game. The Giants got Eli Manning in the NFL draft this year. The sitcom Frasier ended its run on a bad night in May for the Red Sox. The movie Day After Tomorrow comes out. The same day Ronald Reagan dies in June, King, his son, and grandkids are looking to go to the new Harry Potter movie. Reagan was 7 years old the last time the Red Sox won the World Series before 2004. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 came out. In game 2 of the World Series, O’Nan sat near Jimmy Fallon and behind Eagles QB Donavan McNabb. After the World Series win, Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore kiss with cameras rolling for the filming of the movie Fever Pitch. For that same film, King walked out to throw the first pitch for a mock-up of opening day. He predicted the Red Sox would lose the real game that day and he’d get blamed for it. That’s what happened.
John Kerry, then running for president against the sitting president George W. Bush, is at Fenway in May on “Vermont Day”. At a game late in July, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Senator and astronaut John Glenn, Tom Brokaw, and Tim Russet are at a game at the same time as O’Nan on a day people are giving out “Sox Fans for Kerry” stickers. A fan throws a ball for Kerry to sign and hits Katie Couric. O’Nan throws one for Kerry to sign and almost throws it onto the field, which would have been bad. Kerry extends and snags it. The two point at each other in recognition. Kerry signs it and throws it back on point for a perfect catch. They point at each other again. Vice President Dick Cheney attends a game in Yankee gear. This defines a clear line between the evil empire of the Yankees and the scrappy underdog heroes of the Red Sox for King.
Toward the end of the book, King references the Iraq War and the war on terrorism as he puts baseball into perspective with the rest of the world. He discusses the increases in security that resulted from the September 11th attacks a few years earlier during a few games.
The book includes the transcripts of email exchanges between King and O’Nan on the games, the season more broadly, and baseball in general. In one such exchange, O’Nan argues that in reality, the Yankees have not been in the way of the Red Sox as much as those stoking that rivalry would like to believe. King pushes back against this and they go back and forth on it for a little while.
King’s sections are better written and more interesting. There are fewer of them. O’Nan isn’t a bad writer, but he tended to sink into the minutiae of play by play in the individual games. It got to be a drone for me at times. Less casual fans and readers looking for those types of details would enjoy it more, I suppose. I’m probably an oddity in terms of readers who would engage this work. I’m not so much the target audience and I felt that. There’s just no way I can keep all this play by play in my head even though I was following the season to a degree that year. As we get later in the book, I’m having to read two descriptions of the same action from the same game back to back, and this is even before we get to the postseason games. “Yeah, O’Nan, King just told me about that exact play in the previous paragraph there in bold. Let’s move on.”
O’Nan shares the story of a stretch of games where he brings a fishing net with him to catch balls from batting practice. Eventually it is banned. Over the course of the season, even without the net, O’Nan collects enough baseballs from batting practices and foul balls to fill a garage. He doesn’t say this outright, but by my informal count, it sounds like a garage full.
King mentions a story idea that he tags with the temporary title of “Spectators”. I wondered if he had done anything with it. It turns out he cowrote the short novella A Face in the Crowd with O’Nan, his cowriter for this book. It’s only available in ebook or audio formats. I bought the cheap and short ebook, loaded it on my Kindle for PC, and plugged it into my #StephenKingRevisited reading schedule between 11/22/63 and The Wind Through the Keyhole. More pages to finish before I finish. Sigh!
An employee at one of the stadiums inquires after King’s health since a van accident in 1999 and a bout of pneumonia just prior to Spring Training. After King indicated he was doing well, the fellow asked him, “Do you thank God?” King responded, “Every day.”
The authors struggle as fans through the June swoon of losses. July and August aren’t smooth sailing either. June swoon, usually always. The Sox get way behind in the race for first place of their division against the Yankees. They are struggling for the Wild Card spot too. Fans get depressed along with our authors here.
Nomar, King’s grandson’s favorite Sox player, is traded to the Cubs before the trade deadline. The boy says, “I guess I like the Cubs now.” King approves of this decision.
The key to every sport, maybe every endeavor, the authors speculate, is consistency. The Sox lack that in a lot of areas in 2004, but mostly in defense by August. King quotes a beloved players’ much-repeated mantra to the press, “Hey, man, we just got to keep going.”
A hurricane results in a Yankees vs Diamondbacks game with an official attendance of zero. Imagine what they would have thought, if the authors could have looked forward to the abbreviated 2020 season during the pandemic.
They are living large after a three-game sweep of the best of five match-up with the Angels to kick off the playoffs. Then, things get ugly in the championship series against the Yankees. No MLB team has come back from a 3-0 game deficit in a playoff which the Red Sox dug themselves into in 2004 against the Yankees. The authors gloss over how perilous that game 4 really was. King was interviewed during the game before things turned around and it was doom and gloom. He doesn’t mention that and it’s my most vivid memory of that series. After the game, O’Nan stood in the street and flipped off the Yankee bus as it passed.
Schilling becomes a hero as he pitches with an unsheathed tendon sutured in place. Blood formed on his sock and became a symbol of perseverance. I’m not sure the team doctor was completely on the up-and-up about how safe that procedure really was.
A girl was killed by a pepper-spray ball fired by police in Boston after the championship series win in New York.
For the World Series game 4, after Boston wins the first 3 games in a row against the Cardinals, there is a lunar eclipse. The network shows a montage of past Boston failures that O’Nan blocks with his hand, forming his own eclipse against it. O’Nan cancelled an anniversary dinner to watch the game.
They do a good job of wrapping up the emotions afterward. One of Stephen King’s grandsons says, “Is this real life or are we living a dream?” This becomes the theme for the closing out of the book.
My next post in this series will be Before The Colorado Kidd which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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