Stories like the 2004 Boston Red Sox’s championship, the first for the the team since 1918, are compelling for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the narrative of “The Curse of the Bambino” that had all but taken over the discourse about the team over the previous 20 or so years — probably right as the ball trickled under Bill Buckner’s legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series against the Mets. But the 2004 team, from ownership to the front office to the players, didn’t buy into “The Curse,” and a new docuseries examines that team and their unprecedented comeback versus the New York Yankees in the ’04 ALCS.
THE COMEBACK: 2004 BOSTON RED SOX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Scenes from Game 3 of the 2004 American League Championship Series at Fenway Park, where the New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 19-8, taking a dominating 3-0 lead in the series. To that point, no team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a 7-game postseason series.
The Gist: Every baseball fan knows what happened next: The Red Sox won four games in a row, the first two being stunning comebacks, to finally beat the Yankees and go on to the World Series, where they won it all for the first time since 1918. That team, and the miracle comeback they engineered, are remembered in the three-part docuseries The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox, directed by Colin Barnicle.
Combining archival footage with interviews with members of the ’04 Sox, including David Ortiz, Kevin Millar, Pedro Martinez, manager Terry Francona and general manager Theo Epstein, the series briefly discusses “The Curse of the Bambino,” when the Sox essentially sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919, the year after the last championship they’d win for 86 years. It goes through the narrative that the Sox ran out of luck numerous times, losing four World Series game 7s, while the Yankees went on to win 26 championships. There were also times when the Sox lost when the teams went head to head, like the 1978 one-game playoff for the AL East that made “Bucky Fucking Dent” public enemy number one in Boston.
But in reality, the team had many down years and were generally managed like it was “a country club,” as journalist and EP Howard Bryant puts it. When the Yawkey family sold the team to John Henry, Tom Werner and others in 2001, the mentality around the team changed, starting with the hiring of Epstein, a protege of “Moneyball” guru Billy Beane and at the time the youngest-ever GM in the team’s history — he was only 28 years old.
Epstein made bold moves, bringing in high on-base-percentage players and people he thought were of high character who could light a fire on the team, including Millar. In 2003, Ortiz, released by the Twins the previous winter, started to make an impact. But they still couldn’t get past the Yankees.
The first episode culminates in the 2003 ALCS, an epic 7-game series that included former Red Sox ace Roger Clemens and Martinez trading beanballs, a bench-clearing fight in Game 3 where Martinez threw seventysomething Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer to the ground, an epic pitching performance by the late knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, and finally, an extra-innings pitch from Wakefield to “Aaron Fucking Boone” that became the series-winning home run for the Yankees.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Comeback has the feel of many baseball-related docuseries, like The Captain, only with more f-bombs.
Our Take: Let’s admit something right off the bat: I’ve been a Yankee fan since I was 8 (and that was a long time ago), and the 2004 ALCS was painful for me to watch. But as painful as it was and is, the story of the Sox’s comeback, and how the members of that team laughed in the face of “The Curse” and how intimidating the history of the Yankees was, is compelling as hell. And 20 years after that epic comeback, the story and the personalities that populated that Sawx team are still eminently watchable.
Barnicle, who produced the series with his brother Nick — they’re the sons of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, so they are well-versed when it comes to Red Sox history — knew it was imperative to get all of the major players for the ’04 Sox. It was imperative not just because Martinez, Ortiz and Millar were some of the most important players on the team (Manny Ramirez, one of the team’s other stars, didn’t participate), but they also have entertaining personalities. They brought the looseness and determination that previous Sox teams didn’t have.
Barnicle even managed to talk to Grady Little, the Sox’ manager in ’03, who left Martinez in Game 7 after when the future Hall of Famer admitted he was gassed, confirming that a guy who goes with his gut as much as he did wasn’t the right guy for the team. His firing allowed Epstein to bring in Francona, a baseball lifer who mixed gut decisions with analytics. It’s interesting when Little is pointedly asked what Martinez might have said to him during the late going of that game, he says it was so long ago he doesn’t remember. The look on his face says otherwise, and it Barnicle captured just how annoyed Little gets when Game 7 of the ’03 ALCS is brought up.
While it seems cliche for Barnicle to talk to Boston newspaper columnists like Dan Shaughnessy, he also talks to legendary New York sports radio host Mike Francesca, in order to get the perspective of just how Yankees fans thought that they were invincible, especially in an era where they won 4 championships in 5 years. And taking an episode to discuss something as painful to Sox fans as the ’03 ALCS sets up just how much the ’04 Sox were on a mission and how sweet it was for them to finally put “The Curse” to bed for good.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: “This is where it gets real,” says Millar as we see a key scene from the ’04 season, involving the Yankees’ newly-acquired superstar Alex Rodriguez and Bosox catcher Jason Varitek.
Sleeper Star: Anyone who watches MLB Network knows how much of a talker Kevin Millar is, but it becomes more than evident in both his interview and the archival footage how much the Bosox needed a talkative guy with a DGAF attitude.
Most Pilot-y Line: Gotta be honest with you: We’d be happy if we don’t see Shaughnessy being interviewed about the Sox for awhile after this. He was one of the people who leaned so heavily on the curse narrative over the years, especially in ’03.
Our Call: STREAM IT. As painful as it is for us to write this, The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox does a great job of capturing just how the ’04 Red Sox were different than other Sox teams, how they were built, and why they were perfectly suited to make the miraculous comeback against the hated Yankees.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox’ On Netflix, Which Details How The Sox Beat “The Curse” And The Yankees With A Comeback For The Ages appeared first on Decider.
