Pedro Martinez and Charlie Nagy squared off in this one and it was a doozy. Pedro went nine innings, allowing four hits without a walk and fanning twelve, but Brian Giles drove in two runs with a homer in the third and a single in the eighth. Through eight, Nagy scattered eight hits and a walk with eight strikeouts while blanking Boston. In the ninth, Nagy struck out Darren Bragg in between three singles that brought in a run and put runners at first and second for Nomar Gariciaparra. Mike Jackson came in and allowed a single that loaded the bases, bringing on Paul Assenmacher to face Reggie Jefferson. His sac fly to center tied the game, but John Valentin struck out and the game proceeded to the tenth.
Cleveland got Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez singles off Tom Gordon, but the rally ended there. Boston quickly had runners at the corners with singles from Mo Vaughn and Troy O’Leary, Damon Buford was intentionally walked, and Bragg singled to walk it off.
Some oddities in my scoresheet: The tenth was kept on a separate piece of paper in a sprawling fashion that would have been hard to maintain for a marathon game. I noted extra inning substitutions on the main sheet, and had not yet adopted the common sense solution of referring to mid-inning substitutions by referring to the lineup box (as I was already doing for pitchers, e.g. “Gordon 4-10” meaning Gordon entered the game to face the #4 hitter in the tenth inning), so instead I have clumsy notation like “2B 10 Thome” meaning that John Valentin moved to second base for Jim Thome’s tenth inning at-bat.