talented and ambitious sportswriter’; and of fan superstition (April 23rd)
* The Sox-Yankees rivalry (April 18 th)71—‘… baseball is a game of history....” In this section,
virtually an essay, King mentions his friend, ‘the late Stephen Jay Gould, who somehow
managed to root for both teams (maybe in the end that was what killed him, not the cancer)’72
* ‘Here’s what I understand about hockey: Bulky men wearing helmets and carrying sticks in
their gauntleted hands skate around for a while on my TV; then some guy comes on and sells
trucks. Sometimes chicks come on and sell beer.’ (Footnote to May 13th)
* His first visit to Fenway was ‘at the age of eleven or twelve, on an afternoon when the Tigers
were their opponents and Al Kaline was still playing for them....’ (May 21st); or more
specifically ‘since my first one in 1959’ (June 9th)73
* The dour and pessimistic nature of New Englanders (July 13th)
* ‘Boston sportswriters are for the most part mangy, dis-tempered, sunstruck dogs that can do
nothing but bite and bite and bite.’ (August 6th)
* King loses faith for the first time this season—‘It can be done but I doubt it can be done by this
team.’ (August 7th)
* King refers to visiting (without naming) ‘old friends (he’s the physician’s assistant who has
helped me with medical stuff in a dozen books, most notably The Stand and Pet Sematary, she’s
a retired nurse)’. These are Russ and Florence Dorr74 (August 12th)
* The stress around the decision to throw out the first pitch at Fenway for the movie Fever Pitch
(September 4th and 5th)
* 3-0 down in the ALCS: ‘We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight.’ (October 17th)
* ‘… eventually the Red Sox did what no team has ever done before, which is to come back
from a 3-0 deficit to tie a postseason best-of-seven series...Ruth King’s boy is going to New
York City.’ (October 20th)
* ‘We’re going to the World Series. It starts in Boston. And it matters. It’s part of American life,
and that matters a lot.’ (October 21st)
* ‘He was awesome last night.’ (October 25th). If you don’t know who ‘he’ is you must read the
entry!
* At 3-0 up in the World Series King can smell land, ‘Not just any land, either, but the sweet
Promised Land I’ve been dreaming of ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap
and stuck it on my head in the summer of 1954. “There, Stevie,” he said, blowing the scent of
Naragansett beer into the face of the big-eyed seven-year-old looking up at him. “They ain’t
much, but they’re the best we got.”’ (October 26th)
* ‘At last!’: the headline from King’s local paper the morning after the Red Sox finally won it
all. King’s grandson Ethan asked his father, ‘Is this a dream or are we living real life?’ To King
the answer, ‘it seems to me this morning, is both.’ (October 28th).
There has been one excerpt of King’s work from the book printed to date, as a promotional device,
when Boston magazine printed The Comeback in December 2004. An excerpt (King’s entire entry for
5 March; along with O’Nan’s for the previous day) also appeared at:
www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/0743267524-excerpt.asp.
Faithful is dedicated, ‘For Victoria Snelgrove, / Red Sox fan’. Boston police accidentally killed
Snelgrove, a 21-year-old college student. She and thousands of others were celebrating the Red Sox’s
Game Seven ALCS victory when a pepper spray projectile struck her in a near-rioutous crowd
outside Fenway Park; she died in hospital the next day. Boston player Trot Nixon is reported to have
said he would trade the win over the Yankees to have her back.
Red Sox and other Baseball Writing
Of course Faithful was not King’s first work detailing his life-long obsession with the Red Sox
and baseball in general. Most likely his first published piece on baseball was a King’s Garbage
Truck column published on October 23, 1969 (see our Early Columns—King’s Garbage Truck
chapter). Following is a series of prose pieces in newspapers, magazines and books over a period of
two decades.
Red Sox Fan Crows About Team, But May Have to Eat Chicken (May 17-18, 1986)
This article appeared in the ‘Guest Column’ section of the Bangor Daily News Maine Weekend
newspaper for May 17-18, 1986.
King opens, ‘I go back a lot of years—almost 20 of them—with Bob Haskell of the NEWS staff
(I was a UMO campus columnist who worked for both Bob and David Bright)...But since I go back
with the Red Sox 30 years or so (I was a Dodger fan until they deserted Flatbush for L.A.), I just can’t
resist twitting him a little about his column (BDN, April 8) following the opening day game...I also
want to offer him a small wager...In your column, Bob, you predicted the Red Sox would be out of
contention for the AL East pennant by Flag Day, June 14. While I love you too much to see you eat
real crow...I propose that one of us eat symbolic crow on the lawn of the Bangor Daily News offices
on July 1 of this year.’ King’s suggestion was a chicken dinner, ‘but one more thing. / The loser has to
eat it in his underwear.’ King is confident Haskell won’t take up the wager, but a final Editor’s Note
reads: ‘Bob “Bucky Dent” Haskell accepts novelist King’s challenge.’
King also relates that ‘only weeks before I had, for the first time in my life, invested...in a
season’s ticket for a seat as close to the first-base bag as the security forces allow....’ The reason he
gave for this ‘investment’ was his prediction the Red Sox would finish second in the AL East (to the
‘hated Yankees’). In fact, both King and Haskell were conservative (we will see below that King
becomes much more accurate in future years)—the Red Sox won the division, beat the California
Angels in the American League playoffs and went on to narrowly lose the World Series, to the New
York Mets.
Copies of Bangor Daily News articles (there are many more in this chapter) may be secured
from the microfiche files at the Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono (at no charge, if
you actually visit), from the newspaper direct (at a significant fee), and from visiting the Maine State
Library in Augusta.
King Awaits His Chicken and Haskell Should Shop for Shorts (23 May 1986)
This article appeared as a ‘Guest Column’ on the Editorial page of the Bangor Daily News for
May 23, 1986. In it King tells of an imaginary conversation with a ‘Smitty’ (supposed friend of Bob
Haskell—see the entry above for Red Sox Fan Crows About Team, But May Have to Eat Chicken),
in which King is needled into extending the deadline for the Red Sox ‘to swoon—which they will not
do—and another couple of weeks for Bob to save his pants,’ until July 1. Apart from the banter the
column contains little of note other than a couple of personal points and one showing King’s
committed fan hatred of a previous high-riding Sox team’s nemesis: ‘In my book, Bucky Dent is the
worst of the worst, the lowest of the low. The serpent that crawled into the Garden of Eden and the
one that crawled into Fenway Park on October 2nd, 1978, and managed to hit a cheap popfly home
run that kept the Red Sox out of the playoffs look about the same to me.’75
King writes: ‘I don’t worry about calls I don’t know about, but I can no more listen to a phone
that’s ringing than I can look at a crooked picture hanging on the wall.’ King once said that his über-
character, Roland Deschain, was the sort of man who would straighten crooked pictures on hotel
room walls (a habit he seems to have picked up from his creator, which won’t surprise readers of the
later Dark Tower novels). In a second personal note King purports outrage when ‘Smitty’ calls him
‘Stevie’: ‘ “Don’t call me Stevie!” I shrieked. “I hate it when people call me Stevie!” ’
The reference to ‘shorts’ in the headline refers to the continuation of King’s supposed rant:
‘ “And tell Bob I think he’d look good in some of those Calvin Klein’s, or maybe some of those
Dior bikini briefs! Tell him red! Like his face is gonna be!” ’ All this, of course, refers to the loser
of the wager having to eat a chicken dinner on the newspaper’s lawn, in their underwear.
In fact the banter between King and Haskell created more than just a few columns. King expert
Tyson Blue reports: ‘As the season stretched on, the Red Sox maintained their lead. Haskell
maintained his confidence in an editorial entitled “The time is nearing for Stephen King to get out his
boxer shorts.” Deciding that some good could come from letting BDN readers in on the action,
Haskell then allowed people to place their own bets on the outcome of the race, charging a minimum
of two dollars to take part, said money to be donated to the Jimmy Fund, a longtime New England-
based charity favored by the Red Sox, and devoted to research to prevent cancer in young people.’76
According to Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter for August 1986 the promotion raised
$2,250 for the Jimmy Fund (the issue prints a photo of King feeding the ‘proverbial crow’ to
Haskell).
Red Sox Stretch Out to the World Series (12 September 1986)
This article appeared in the Bangor Daily News for September 12, 1986. King begins by
chronicling the Red Sox season, Bob Haskell’s disastrous prediction about the Red Sox and his
subsequent bet with King (see the two articles directly above). He reports that on ‘July 3: Haskell
eats symbolic crow in front of the Bangor Civic Center, technically fulfilling the bet by coming
decked out in Yankee pinstripe underwear (which actually looks more like what Grandma might wear
on an evening when she’s unhappy with Grandpa). Stephen King, your humble correspondent, dressed
to the nines in his tuxedo (which still almost fits), watches with supreme happiness. As a baseball
fan, this is the best day of his life...Haskell declares the Sox will fade and the Yankees will triumph.’
(Neither performed as Haskell predicted).
In possibly his own worst baseball prediction King looks forward to the playoffs—suggesting
the Sox would beat the Angels in seven (they did); but meet the Chicago Cubs in the World Series
(they did not). ‘If they face the Mets, however, it will be more fun than a free trip to Disneyland: You
can relax in front of your TV and watch the Shea boys go down in four straight...The Mets are ripe,
fat, and as ready to pick as an October apple in Washington County.’ Oh dear, as we will discover in
How Much Am I Hurting? below. According to an Editor’s Note: ‘Stephen King loves baseball. (He
also writes novels.)’
’86 Was Just the Ticket (October 6, 1986)
This article first appeared in the Boston Globe for October 6, 1986, in a lift-out ‘Special
Section’ titled Literati on the Red Sox. Other writers in the section included George F. Will, John
Updike, Robert Parker, David Halberstam and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The lift-out celebrated the
Red Sox entering the play-offs against the California Angels (their first such progression since 1975).
The Sox would go on to defeat the Angels 4-3 but fall to the New York Mets in the World Series,
also in the seventh and final possible game.
The subtitle of King’s contribution, written before the first playoff pitch, was ‘Wrong formula,
right result’. He opens by telling the tale of requesting season tickets at Fenway Park through his
Boston limo driver, Dan Casey77 the previous December based on his feeling that the late-season
surge by the 1985 Sox heralded ‘some rocking and reeling’ the following year. Despite odds-makers
consigning the Sox to a likely ‘one place out of the cellar’ King expected them to finish five games
behind the Yankees on the back of their pitching, which ‘had a chance to be not fair, or “pretty good,”
but really good for the first time since dinosaurs walked the earth—or, at least, since Babe Ruth
swapped his red hose for a pair of pinstripes.’ Briefly reviewing the season’s performance and the
Red Sox’s strengths and weaknesses he writes, ‘I was glad I was around to dig’ the season when,
against those apparent odds, the Sox had topped the Yankees and won the Division.
Original newspaper appearances of King’s fiction and non-fiction are generally very difficult to
come by, as few people keep newspapers. This item is something of an exception because of its
baseball collectable value and perhaps because other well-known writers were included. However,
copies come to market rarely. Microfiche copies of The Boston Globe can be secured at certain
libraries.
The easiest access point for readers will be its reprint as ’86 Was Just the Ticket: Right
Formula, Wrong Result in The Red Sox Reader: 30 Years of Musings on Baseball’s Most Amusing
Team, edited by Dan Riley.
The Opera Ain’t Over… (October 14, 1986)
This article appeared in the Bangor Daily News for October 14, 1986. Here we find King
writing he is ashamed of himself for giving up on the Red Sox the previous Sunday: ‘For the first time
in my life I gave up on ‘em.’ Despite telling his children a game is never over ‘until the fat lady sings’
King found himself giving up on the televised Sox and returning to a book with one out in the bottom
of the ninth inning, while son Owen kept the faith. Ultimately they rallied and went on to win the
game. King says Owen reminded him that the fat lady ‘classic response’ was in fact a truism; and that
another old saw was also true—‘you’re never too old to learn.’ The piece is charming in that it
mostly deals with the two Kings’ reactions to the events unfolding on the television and the bonds
between father and son secured by their love of the game, and team.
In giving his reasons for the lapse into a lack of faith King relates the horrors visited upon the
Red Sox of 1967, 1975 and 1978. Of the latter year’s Bucky Dent homer he says, ‘I was teaching at
UMO that year, and I left a note on my office door that said: “All classes cancelled for the rest of the
week. I’m having a fugue.” It was no joke; that game cast a pall not over my autumn but my entire
year.’
‘How Much am I Hurting?’ (1-2 November 1986)
This article first appeared in the Bangor Daily News Maine Weekend for November 1-2, 1986
(note that the quotation marks appear in the original headline). King begins with a baseball saying: ‘It
hurts more to lose than it feels good to win’ and goes on to describe how much he’s hurting over
Boston’s losing the seventh and deciding game of the World Series to the New York Mets. He
reminds readers how close the Red Sox came to the holy grail: ‘The Sox twice came within a strike
of winning Game 6 and couldn’t do it’; and ‘They led 3-0 in Game 7, then trailed 6-5 with a man on
second and couldn’t get him across.’ Yet, he is a gracious losing fan, noting the team probably should
never have made as much from the season and did so on ‘guts’ and ‘the equivalent of Tinkerbelle’s
magic dust’ before succumbing. ‘My God, what a year! / Thanks, guys. / Thanks a million.’
Of how many men the Sox left on base during the Series King writes: ‘(I dunno if it was a record
or not, but as the venerable Case78 would have said, you could look it up)’. This is apparently a
favorite quote, as King reused it often in Faithful.
A Look at the Red Sox on the Edge of ’87 (March 28-29, 1987)
This article first appeared in the Bangor Daily News for March 28-29, 1987; and was reprinted
i n Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter for July 1987. The News says, ‘King’s articles on
these pages during the last baseball season were roundly enjoyed’ by its readers and: ‘Today’s
article proves he has lost nothing off his fastball.’
King is concerned the team’s near-success in 1986 has bred ‘a combination of arrogance and
touchiness’ in the face of what he sees as near certain disaster: ‘How many futile grabs at the golden
ring does it take before the team doing the grabbing starts to believe it will always be futile to make
that grab more than a token effort.’ He sees off-season salary disputes leading to disaffection among
the players; uses the ‘great white whale’ analogy that would later reappear in 1999’s Fenway and the
Great White Whale (see below); and claims the word ‘LOSER’ is pasted all over the 1987 Sox. His
final prediction: Red Sox for fourth in their division and again he was close to accurate with the Sox
actually falling to fifth that season.
Following the Sox—in the C-C-C-Cold (May 4, 1988)
This article first appeared in the Bangor Daily News “Midweek Edition” for May 4, 1988 (the
subheading on the second of two pages is King reports: Red Sox have clout). King says it was his
wife Tabitha’s idea to spend April 16 to 24 following the Red Sox, mostly because it was their son
Owen’s spring vacation. ‘She knows the only fan in the house more ardent than I am is my son
Owen....’ The Kings intended to see three games against the Rangers at Fenway, three in Detroit and a
further three in Milwaukee. ‘How was it? Well, brothers and sisters it was c-c-c-cold’, as a result of
the weather the Kings saw only five of the scheduled games. Most of the article is reserved for praise
of the team’s early-season pitching. King feels their ‘prospects look good’ and fearlessly predicts
they will win the American League East that year, as they did. We will see King get his predictions
exactly right in both of the following years as well (in 1988 they went on to lose the American League
Championship Series to the Oakland Athletics 4-0).
Red Sox Put Fans Through Yearly Ordeal (4 October 1988)
This article first appeared in the national newspaper USA Today for October 4, 1988 (the
headline on the second of two pages reads Red Sox Fans Hope For Best, Ready For Worst).
Somehow, this article became known in the King community as Why Red Sox Fans Believe.79
Previewing his team’s playoff chances against Oakland King begins by claiming, ‘All Red Sox
fans are insane. That is the key to understanding the mystery of Boston’s long-term case of Baseball
Disease (medical name: fenway infectus)...We are lunatics. / And we have good reason to be the way
we are.’ He goes on to describe a throwing error that cost the Red Sox a game and his resultant ‘cry
that woke the whole house. At the time I believed this to be a cry of surprise and outrage. After a
good deal more thought...I have decided it was actually a cry of satisfaction—the sort of cry to which
only the utterly unbalanced can give voice.’ Reiterating the sad history of Red Sox near misses he
writes: ‘For this is the way it must be, the lunatic fan inside claims with utter assurance.’
King wonders why the Red Sox have the ‘loser image’ in baseball, even over teams that have
not even made it to a World Series for many more years. Yet, these teams ‘do not raise one’s hopes to
such horrendous lengths as the Red Sox do on a more-or-less regular basis.’ Only the Sox, apparently,
give ‘perfectly good, perfectly logical reasons to hope’ before collapsing to the inevitable tragic
opposition homer, or home team wild pitch, or fielding error. ‘In a way, being a Red Sox fan is like
being Charlie Brown when Lucy offers to hold the football. You know she is going to pull it up at the
last moment because she always pulls it up at the last moment...And yet she smiles sweetly and talks
you into it...and you are doomed to do it again...and again...and again.’ (King uses this analogy often
when writing of his favored team.) Concluding, he argues that the BoSox cannot possibly beat
Oakland but advances various tactics designed to set up a meeting with and victory over the New
York Mets: ‘You’d have to be a lunatic to believe any of those things could happen. / And so, of
course, I believe them all.’ (He was right—the Red Sox were swept by Oakland).
Copies of USA Today on microfiche will be available at selected major libraries. The actual
newspaper comes to auction, or becomes available through secondhand sellers, only rarely.
Red Sox Fan Happy With Third (April 5, 1989)
This article first appeared in the Bangor Daily News “Midweek Edition” for April 5, 1989 and
is subtitled (on the second of two pages) King not counting on another Bosox pennant this year. In a
very interesting note leading this article the newspaper’s editors state of King, ‘He claims he owes a
debt of thanks to his son Owen, another baseball fan extraordinaire, for helping to prepare this year’s
Mid-week essay.’ Owen King is now an accomplished short story writer. 80
King writes that there would be two premieres on 10 April—the movie Pet Sematary, ‘for the
first time in its completely finished form’, showing to 370 invited guests at the Bangor Mall cinema;
and the ‘somewhat less finished 1989 Red Sox will play their first home game’. He continues in
humorous vein, contrasting the film and the team, their similarities (‘costly to produce’) and
differences (one is ‘supposed to be a horror show’, the other ‘a baseball team’). This year he predicts
the Red Sox will finish third in their division (as indeed they did, King once again proving his
baseball pedigree) and gives a detailed reasoning. He also says this of Boston sportswriters (who
would also come in for a panning in Faithful): they ‘have been eating their own young for decades
now. I don’t have the slightest idea what prompts such perverse cannibalism, but it exists.’
A Fan’s Thoughts on the Red Sox (April 9, 1990)
This article first appeared in the Bangor Daily News for April 9, 1990. The author is described
as ‘a horror fiction writer whose fanaticism for the Red Sox may seem appropriate to most sports
fans’ (some horribly mangled English there).
We learn the source of King’s proposed tombstone, as provided in a slightly different form in his
March 17th Faithful entry (noted earlier). Referring to the events of 1986, ‘when the Boston Red Sox
once more managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, a Boston radio talk show host ordered
and paid for his own tombstone. He wanted his name, the dates of his birth and death, and the
following inscription: NOT IN MY LIFETIME. Red Sox fans, he told his listeners, would
understand.’
King then claims to have vilified all other Boston sporting teams, ‘and the day I go down to
Foxboro to watch the Patriots will be the day it rains chocolate drops.’ Entitled to change his opinion
as he is, King by the early 2000s was actually attending Patriots home games, yet there are no known
reports of such Fortean weather events as raining chocolate!
The main point of the article though is his predictions about the Sox and their likely performance
in the 1990 season, which he rates as, ‘Pretty good, actually’; and a short comment on the previous
year (‘No one player cost the Red Sox the divisional title in 1989. If there was a villain, it was bad
luck....”). King concludes, ‘The Red Sox will finish the 1990 season in first place, a game-and-a-half
ahead of Baltimore and three ahead of Toronto. / Postseason, you say? We’ll burn that bridge when
we come to it.’ For those interested King was right (again)—the Sox did finish first in their division
but, as in 1988, lost the ALCS 4-0 to the Oakland Athletics.
Head Down (April 16, 1990)
Head Down first appeared as one of ‘The Sporting Scene’ columns for The New Yorker, in the
April 16, 1990 edition. The original title of this essay (as indicated on the manuscript at the Fogler
Library) was ‘The Boys of Summer’.
It represents the only piece of non-fiction King has chosen to publish in one of his mass-market
collections, in this case Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993). In the Introduction to that volume King
says he’d included it after a great deal of thought as, ‘I probably worked harder on it than anything
else I’ve written over the last fifteen years.’ In the Notes to the same book he writes that his link with
the Bangor West All-Star team at the time of its championship run was ‘either luck or pure fate...I
tend toward the higher power thesis, but in either case I was only there because my son was on the
team.’ On the point of ‘fate’, King’s second decision to commit to diarizing a baseball team’s
‘season’ would be that of the magical 2004 Boston Red Sox, in Faithful. Fate?
King also says in the Nightmares & Dreamscapes Notes that ‘Chip McGrath of The New Yorker
coaxed the best nonfiction writing of my life out of me.’ Staying in baseball mode, the work following
Head Down in Nightmares & Dreamscapes is King’s elegiac poem Brooklyn August. Apart from the
three dedicated volumes this is one of King’s lengthiest non-fiction works at 38 pages in the first
edition hardcover.
The piece has also been reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing, 1991; and Baseball: A
Literary Anthology, (2002). We agree with King—it does represent one of his best non-fiction pieces
and we recommend you take a few minutes out now (yes, now) to enjoy it.
Now you’ve read Head Down we can keep our review short. As you discovered, ‘Head down’
was a coaching call at batting practice for members of the Bangor West Side team in Little League
play. The team included King’s son Owen (at twelve already six-foot-two inches tall, ‘two hundred
or so pounds’, ‘broad-shouldered and heavily built, like his old man’). King follows the fortunes of
the team as they first win their half of the Maine District 3 Little League (with a three-run, two-out,
two-strike shot in the bottom of the last inning), then the District championship itself. This qualifies
them to play in the 1989 Maine State Little League Championship Tournament in Old Town (Tabitha
King’s hometown), ‘where bigger and better teams from the more heavily populated regions
downstate will probably blow them out’. We learn that ‘a local writer of some repute...tossed out the
obligatory first pitch (it sailed all the way to the backstop)....’ and West Bangor makes the final,
against favorites York. On the ropes in extra innings, and almost in the manner of high fiction, West
Bangor wins that game on the back of another three-run homer and are crowned Maine State
champions. In a brief closing note King relates the team that finally stopped West Bangor did so in the
second round of the Eastern Regional championships.
King moves from a deep understanding of baseball, what it is to be young and playing the sport,
through some philosophical views of the game and its impact, and on to powerful sports reporting
(for those who don’t know the result of the games the usual King suspense is in play, helped not a
little by the amazing twists and turns of the team’s season). This is a purist’s tale first—one for those
with a love of sport at least. But it is also a very strong piece of prose —Chip McGrath did his job,
as had the boys of West Bangor and their coaches. King often claims of his fiction to be simply
recording a pre-existing tale for his readers—in the case of this piece we can say he unearthed a real
story —that of the magic boys of summer.
One of the young players, Matt Kinney81, would go on to be drafted by the Boston Red Sox
organization (in 1995, and traded away three years later); and a Major League baseball career as
pitcher for the Minnesota Twins (2000 and 2002), Milwaukee Brewers (2003-4), Kansas City Royals
(2004) and San Francisco Giants (2005). However, he spent much of this time in the minor leagues,
playing 103 MLB games over the five seasons and owning a 19-27 record with a 5.29 ERA as of the
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