Long before Boston Red Sox second baseman Pokey Reese threw to first base off a grounder by New York Yankees pinch hitter Ruben Sierra in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 in the 2004 American League championship series, the talk about curses, demons, what ifs and what-should-have-beens had been ingrained in Bostonians and others who lived and died with the goings on of their favorite team.
The list of excuses for the Red Sox not winning a World Series since 1918 was as long as a CVS receipt, but fans kept showing up season after disappointing season.
A new documentary premiering Wednesday on Netflix chronicles how Boston stormed back from that improbable 3-0 series deficit to the ‘Evil Empire’ and attempts to tell how they did it.
What you will see in ‘The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox,’ a three-episode foray that is part documentary, part psychology couch confession, is by-the-numbers storytelling, interesting characters, and an appeal to a casual fan, all part of what makes good documentaries – or at least ones the viewer can tolerate for more than a few minutes at a time.
Luckily, ‘The Comeback,’ helmed by Colin Barnicle (Carol & Johnny, This Is A Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist), is complete with colorful language, never-before-heard stories, and surprising thoughts (especially from pitchers Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe) and a lot of hurt feelings that two decades later have yet to heal.
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Martinez, David Ortiz, and Kevin Millar, as well as the team’s former managers Grady Little, Terry Francona, former general manager and vice president Theo Epstein, former Yankees manager Joe Torre, plus others, share narratives and their perspectives about the 2004 drama-filled season and the tension between the two teams.
What you won’t see among the more than 30 people interviewed are two key pieces of those Red Sox teams, Manny Ramirez and Nomar Garciaparra, as their participation is only shown in the more than 100 hours of footage used to help navigate through some sluggish parts of the film. The project began in earnest last winter, with most of the interviews conducted during the spring.
When putting together a documentary, especially about a subject well-known to sports fans, Barnicle said he wanted to answer basic questions. The concept doesn’t deviate much from 2010’s ‘Four Days in October,’ ESPN’s 30 for 30 episode on the same subject, but differs in superior execution.
‘How did the Red Sox organization change who they were to get to the point where they could come back from three down,’ Barcnicle, a clubhouse attendant for the Red Sox during the 2006 and 2007 seasons, told USA TODAY Sports. ‘How did they change? They were eight decades of their losers… So they had to change their culture and where did it start?’
History can reveal a lot, and longtime sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy describing Game 6 of the 1986 World Series as ‘Boston sports’ Kennedy assassination’ drives home the point when looking at the near misses, like just how close Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane came to joining Boston and of course, Alex Rodriguez’s flirtation with the team before joining the Yankees before the 2004 season.
Those who are die-hard fans will find nothing earth-shattering here, and because Boston has won three more World Series since that 2004 triumph, revisiting that time during ‘The Comeback’ will sting more for the Yankees fans.
There are some gems for quotes throughout, like this one from Little describing how he felt about analytics at the beginning of the ‘Moneyball’ era, which new ownership wanted to utilize, and they made it clear that strategy and philosophy didn’t match up with their manager, with chairman Tom Werner even saying his perception of Little was that ‘at some point, he was gonna make a huge mistake.’ (A clear bit of foreshadowing.)
‘It’s like my wife and I go to the beach and we see this lady walk in front of us with a bikini on. She shows me a lot, but she don’t show me everything… I guess I wasn’t their cup of tea,’ Little said.
Well, OK.
Or this one from Epstein when describing a fight between Jason Varitek and Rodriguez during a July 2004 series:
‘I couldn’t believe Tek put his hands in his face like that. I have a perfect angle when he goes down to scoop him up. I thought for sure he was gonna, like, Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, just body slam.’
Barnicle’s own thoughts about his previously long-suffering team, which he says that about 70% of it is about the building up of the story before it even gets to the actual comeback in Part Three, gives the story a personal validity that doesn’t feel like an infomercial without context.
‘It was continuously driving a car up to a yellow light, and you’re like, can we get through? Or Is it gonna turn red, and you just have that fatalistic approach? It’s gonna stop at some point,’ he said. ‘It’s gonna stop, and this season’s gonna be over because that’s what always happens.
So come for Curse of the Bambino, Bucky Dent, Aaron ‘Bleeping’ Boone, Curt Schilling’s Thanksgiving dinner, and the curious case of a microphone in the ceiling of Boston’s clubhouse, and stay for a story that’s sometimes about more than what happens on the diamond and has some real heart and truth to it.