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John Vampatella. The Forgotten Game: Game 5 2004 ALCS Yankees at Red Sox. New York: Permuted Press, 2021. 225 pp. Paperback, $17.00.
During the Major League Baseball broadcast of Game Five of the 2004 American League Championship Series, color commentator Dave O'Brien said of the game, "It's gonna find its place among the great playoff games in Major League History." To anyone watching, O'Brien's statement seemed like an inevitable prediction. Game Five began fifteen hours and forty-five minutes after David Ortiz ended Game Four with a twelfth-inning home run. Five hours and fifteen minutes later he would walk off again, this time with a single in the fourteenth inning. It was, to that point, the longest postseason game ever played and certainly a game for the record books. In the collective memory of baseball, however, Game Five would be grossly overshadowed. Dave Roberts's Game Four steal is often lauded as the most famous steal in Red Sox history, and Ortiz's home run in that game was the launching point for Big Papi's reputation as a clutch-moment god. Game Six became the famous "bloody sock game," in which Curt Schilling threw seven innings, allowing only one run on a Bernie Williams solo home run. Sandwiched between two of the most memorable games in modern baseball history, Game Five became, as John Vampatella would title his book, The Forgotten Game.
Vampatella offers an inning-by-inning microscopic retelling of the fourteeninning game, with each inning getting its own chapter....