E-Mail This Article to a Friend Training days (continued)

I GET TO City of Palms Park the next day at 12:30, seven hours ahead of this ostensibly apocalyptic confrontation. It’s far too early. Given the circus that was last year, I’d expected a buzzing crowd of fans and cameramen. Live radio broadcasts. The scores of Japanese media who follow Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui everywhere he goes. But the only people in sight are the concession workers and maintenance men. And, of course, the scalpers. Hovering like vultures outside the closed ticket window, they sidle up to anyone who walks past. "Tickets. Tickets. Got ’em? Need ’em?" Scalpers! How I’ve missed them since last fall. (Indeed, I recognize a few of these hard-bitten faces from Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street.)

A gangly kid with glasses approaches me when he sees my reporter’s notebook. "You in the news media? You should write about those guys over there who are trying to rip everybody off." His innocence is touching. His story, however, is a huge bummer. A Floridian who loves the Sox because they’re "our local spring-training team," he had lined up at the ticket window not long after I’d left the evening before, waiting all through the chilly night for tickets. No sooner had he bought three box seats, however, than his boss called to tell him he had to work that night. After about an hour of trying he finally unloaded the tickets, but, to his chagrin, the buyer turned out to be a scalper. "As soon as I sold him my tickets he turned around to his friend and started making the ‘money’ sign," he says. So, filled with righteous anger, the kid starts talking loudly about the guy, vociferously advertising his less-than-savory line of work. The scalper, rotund and red-faced, ambles over to the kid and grabs him by the elbow. "C’mere," he says, leading him across the street. I cringe, figuring the kid’s going to get a nasty talking-to. But in seconds he strides back, grinning. "Write about that! He just paid me off to shut up! Thirty bucks!"

By late afternoon, there’s still not much going on, so I kill some time in the Red Sox souvenir shop. It’s hopping. Footage from the team’s official 2004 DVD plays on flat-screen TVs. Dawdling tourists in loud pants and ugly sunglasses paw through the innumerable styles of Sox T-shirts. They flip through commemorative World Series books and try on caps. I opt to save my cash, not having much use for a Red Sox mouse pad, a Red Sox Matchbox car, a Red Sox Monopoly board game, a Red Sox night-light, or a Red Sox rubber ducky.

As game time approaches, I bump into Stewart O’Nan, the co-author — with Stephen King, who’s also at the game — of Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. Peering through green mesh hung on a chain-link fence, we watch David Wells throw a side session to a recuperating Bill Mueller. O’Nan’s been down in Fort Myers since late February, and he’s really got the lay of the land. He points out Bronson Arroyo’s teal-green Hummer in the parking lot. He informs me that the bass-booming black SUV I’d seen piloted by en fuego Sox prospect Hanley Ramirez the night before belongs, in fact, to pitching prospect (and Boston native) Manny Delcarmen. He tells me that relief pitcher Lenny DiNardo — a rare indie rocker in a sport where tunes usually hew to R&B and today’s hot country — was listening to Television’s Marquee Moon in the clubhouse earlier today.

That’s a fact I might have learned on my own, had I been a properly accredited sports journalist, with all the up-close access that affords. But I am not. I am a lowly scribe from the alternative press, doomed to wander the periphery, glimpsing players from afar, gleaning knowledge secondhand. (The press pass I’m issued for tomorrow’s game against the Minnesota Twins allows me access to the park, but not much else; the word CLUBHOUSE is emphatically crossed out.)

So I mingle with the rabble. Which isn’t such a bad thing. The game itself — featuring an uninspiring pitchers’ match-up between minor-leaguers Abe Alvarez and Chien-Ming Wang — is a more-or-less underwhelming 9-2 loss. By the middle innings it is, for all intents and purposes, a game between the franchises’ minor-league clubs, the PawSox and the Columbus Clippers (with Matsui and Jason Giambi, who both play all nine innings, helping out with a home run each). One almost wonders if it was engineered this way to counter outlandish expectations. At any rate, the crowd, 7700 strong, is more entertaining than the game. When Giambi steps to the plate, for instance, the alleged steroid abuser isn’t just booed vociferously and showered with the predictable chants ("BAAALCO! BAAAAALCO!"); one guy stands up and mimes — in great detail and at great length — injecting himself with growth hormones.

"Me and Canseco will be in the bathroom!" his buddy howls with relish. "Come meet us!"

Maybe it’s my imagination, but after last October’s crushing loss, it seems that the good number of Yankees fans who’ve made the trip from Tampa seem a lot meeker than is their wont. Emasculated, even. Or maybe it’s just that Sox fans are suddenly flush with arrogance.

"I’m lookin’ for those Yankee fans," one guy hisses with a devilish grin and wild eyes. "You seen any? THEY’RE AROUND!"

"Why don’t we go ovah there where the Yankees ah," says another dude, gesturing toward the visitors’ dugout. "I’d like to go give ’em some crap."

The fans are, of course, decked out in every piece of Red Sox paraphernalia conceived by man. Varitek team jerseys. Ortiz T-shirts. YANKEE HATER T-shirts. YANKEES SUCK T-shirts. WORST COLLAPSE IN BASEBALL HISTORY T-shirts. IT HAPPENED IN MY LIFETIME T-shirts. I SUPPORT TWO TEAMS: THE RED SOX AND WHOEVER BEATS THE YANKEES T-shirts.

There are fans who go above and beyond, too. Jim, an Amesbury firefighter, made himself a modified fire helmet emblazoned with WORLD CHAMPS ’04 and signed by the motley trio of Damon, DiNardo, and Larry Lucchino. But the fan of the night by far is a skinny kid with a long, stringy mullet halfway down the DAMON 18 on his back, a marker-scribbled beard on his cheeks and chin.