Life-saving blown save? SF Giants pitching coach Bailey reflects on 10th anniversary of Boston Marathon bombings
SAN FRANCISCO — Ten years have passed and the details are fuzzy. But this much is clear: It was the most important blown save in baseball history.
The pitcher who blew the save, Andrew Bailey, is now the pitching coach for the San Francisco Giants. But on April 15, 2013, he was pitching in Boston for the Red Sox.
Bailey’s most enduring memories of that day are the terror he felt after the game. The frantic phone call to his wife, Amanda, her whereabouts unknown. The Red Sox players being escorted by police to the team bus minutes after the deadly explosions one mile from Fenway Park.
“I remember the game. I remember blowing the save. I remember all our wives were going to go down to the finish line,” Bailey said this week.
Marathon Monday is typically a festive celebration in Boston. It’s tradition to catch the early-morning Red Sox game at Fenway, which sits near mile 25 of the 26.2-mile race, then wander to the finish line, where people stand 20 deep to cheer the runners.
It’s about a 20-minute walk typically, but on Marathon Monday, weaving through a crowd of buzzing (and often intoxicated) participants, the walk can take 40 minutes or more.
Bailey had been called out of the Red Sox bullpen to preserve a 2-1 lead in the ninth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays. But, with a runner in scoring position, he threw a lousy fastball that Ben Zobrist blooped into left field to tie the game. The Red Sox scored in the bottom half to win.
The game ended at 2:08 p.m. The victory celebration, preceded by the blown save, had kept most of the 37,499 people at the ballpark an extra 30 or 40 minutes.
Enough time to save somebody’s life.
At 2:49 p.m., two bombs exploded 12 seconds apart at the Boston Marathon finish line.
Bailey heard about it in the clubhouse. He wanted to call his wife, Amanda, who had been planning to take their 1-year-old daughter to the finish line with other wives of Red Sox players. But cell service was spotty. Too many other people were making the same frantic phone call. Texts weren’t going through.
“There were a lot of wives going down there with plans to meet up,” Andrew said.
But Amanda Bailey wasn’t there. She had decided to head back to their Connecticut home to avoid the marathon traffic and was on the road with their daughter, Teddy.
“We snuck out before anything happened,” she said. “We were going to stay, but I was like, ‘It’s the marathon, let’s get on the road.’ He called me freaking out because he didn’t know where I was. He kept cutting out. I just heard, ‘bombing … marathon’.
“I finally got home and put the TV on.”
An 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, along with 29-year-old Krystle Campbell and 23-year-old Lu Lingzi, were killed. Authorities estimated that almost 300 people were injured and 16 of them, including a 7-year-old girl, lost limbs from wounds suffered by pressure-cooked bombs filled with BB-like pellets and nails.
“You just don’t know how many more people could have been down there,” Bailey said. “By saving an extra 30, 40 minutes …”
“When Andrew blew that save, it definitely could have changed the course of peoples’ lives,” Red Sox president Sam Kennedy said. “The Andrew Bailey story really is amazing.”
Said Bailey, “A couple weeks later I had people come up to me and say, ‘You saved my life.’ It’s happened on more occasions than you’d think. It was the best blown save I ever had.”
Telling the story 10 years later, Bailey still gets chills.
“I’m not a hero,” said Bailey, 38. “Fortunately our loved ones weren’t down there. But unfortunately, there were other peoples’ loved ones who were.”
When the Red Sox returned from Cleveland four days later, their game was canceled because of a shelter-in-place order in effect across the city and several adjacent towns. A manhunt was underway for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers suspected of the bombings.
Friday night, police captured Dzhokhar Tzarnaev in nearby Watertown. His brother had been killed by police the night before.
The Red Sox were cleared to play on Saturday afternoon, an emotional day made famous when David Ortiz grabbed the microphone in a pregame ceremony and declared loudly and profanely, “This is our city and nobody is going to dictate our freedom.”
The Red Sox carried a 4-2 lead into the ninth inning that day against the Kansas City Royals, and Bailey was called out of the bullpen to get the save.
This time, he converted.
“That day was the beginning of the healing,” said Kennedy, and the Red Sox went on to win the 2013 World Series that October.
Bailey recorded five more saves that year. He threw his last pitch for the Red Sox on July 12 before undergoing season-ending thumb surgery.
“Boston is a hard city to win people over,” Amanda Bailey said. “It is a very hard city. But they remember him. They talk about that game, the first game back.”
Andrew made comeback attempts with the Yankees, Phillies and Angels, but never fully recovered. He last appeared in a big league game in 2017, joined the Los Angeles Angels’ coaching staff in 2018 and was hired as the Giants’ pitching coach in 2020.
In the Giants’ clubhouse, Bailey’s story isn’t widely known, if at all.
“I don’t ever talk about it,” Bailey said.
Sometimes when Bailey signs autographs for fans, he’ll notice them holding a picture of him wearing a white Red Sox uniform with “Boston” across the chest. He’s clutching his fist in celebration after converting the save on that unforgettable Saturday.
“That was the day,” he said. “That picture always resonates with me.”
Five days earlier, he had thrown a lousy fastball that a pitcher would regret most times.
Not this time.
It turned out to be the greatest blown save in baseball history.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/Syw8Hlq
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