LONG VOYAGE HOME.

It wasn't all pretty. Yes, it's Sox triumphant--the Sox won; the Red Sox are World Champions; it happened, it's over--so why remind ourselves that this year's World Series, a four-game Boston sweep over the St. Louis Cardinals, was a certified clunker, the flattest classic in memory? Much of its action was compressed into the first game, a prolonged 11-9 embarrassment at Fenway Park that ran four hours but felt like six, with its eleven pitchers, fourteen walks, and five errors--four by the winning Sox, who blew a five-run lead and then a two-run lead along the way. "That was not an instructional video," said Sox manager Terry Francona when it was done. The game's prime moment wasn't the decisive and popular eighth-inning, two-run homer by Mark Bellhorn, which ticked off the friendly Fenway right-field foul pole, but a sensational play by Boston's Manny Ramirez in the top of that same stanza. The sensation was helpless laughter, when Manny, belatedly rushing in from left field for a sliding catch of Larry Walker's low liner, caught his spikes instead and was flipped half-upright again, hands out and suddenly--yow!--face to face with the ball, which miraculously caromed off his shoulder instead of his noggin and continued along into left, as the tying Cardinal run came home. Replays don't show Ramirez's face as he hurried off after the ball, but I bet he is laughing, too. Defense and self-consciousness are not a problem for Manny, who posted forty-three home runs and a hundred and thirty runs batted in this season, enjoying himself as never before, and he was probably not much surprised when, despite the comedy, he was voted Most Valuable Player for the Series after its quick conclusion. Because the Sox won, Manny's goof will barely register in Sox fans' winter memories, when compared with their images of him rubbing headmops with Pedro Martinez in the dugout, or once again sloping up to the plate and loosening his voluminous uniform, so loose himself that there's plenty of time--more time than other batters are given--to look at the incoming pitch and think it over and, well, O.K., why not, give it a rip.

The Red Sox managed four errors the next night as well, but were never threatened in the course of a 4-2 win, behind their patched-together ace Curt Schilling, and the Cardinals, with a famous offensive lineup, brought home but one lone run in the third game and none at all in the last. Albert Pujols, the Cards' next Hall of Famer, made some dandy plays in the Series and hit a little, but to small avail, and the family-crowd scarlet-garbed home Cardinal rooters fell into museumlike silences. Derek Lowe, a towering, down-on-his-luck Red Sox veteran, had lost his starter's slot late in the year, from ineffectuality, but, reluctantly called upon in the post-season after attrition had worn out the other Boston arms, he magically rediscovered his sinker, here throwing seven innings of three-hit, shutout ball and coming home with the win. Lowe had also terminated the Yankees with one hit in six innings in that prior finale, on two days' rest. An upcoming free agent this year, he is emotional and realistic in equal parts, and beneath the beard and clenched concentration on his long face you could see the excitement struggling to break free as the outs and innings rolled by. "Games like this can make or break your so-called career," he had said, and with these two outings alone he is believed to have improved his value on the market by eight or ten million dollars.

The Redbird collapse can probably be laid to weak pitching, unless you decide that the baseball gods, a little surfeited by the cruel jokes and disappointments they have inflicted on the Boston team and its followers down the years, and perhaps as sick of the Curse of the Bambino as the rest of us, decided to try a little tenderness. This notion came to me in the sixth game of the scarifying American League Championship, when Gary Sheffield, swinging violently against Schilling with a teammate at first, topped a little nubber that rolled gently toward Sox third baseman Bill Mueller, then unexpectedly bumped into the bag and hopped up over his glove: base hit. Nothing ensued, as Schilling quickly dismissed the next three Yankee hitters, but the tiny bank shot, which is not all that rare in the sport, was the sort of wrinkle that once could have invited a larger, grossly unfair complication and perhaps even a new vitrine next to Buckner's muff or Boone's shot in the ghastly Sox gallery. ...