Search

This article reports on the important feats and incidents of the 2003 Major League Baseball season, with specific focus on the efforts of Florida Marlins pitcher Josh Beckett and his teammates. Moreover, after a perfect storm of a postseason goosed TV ratings--the accursed Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox each waited until they were five outs away from the World Series to kill the suspense--the game's next televised images were of ballplayers walking into a federal building in San Francisco to testify before a grand jury looking into a nutritional lab that cooked up "supplements," the athletes' potent potables. The New York Yankees' Clemens won his 300th game, recorded his 4,000th strikeout and left the mound for the last time (or so we thought, given his subsequent daydream to pitch for the Houston Astros) after the seventh inning of World Series Game 4. Even after three famous swings of the bat--Sammy Sosa's cork job, Barry Bonds's homer off Randy Johnson in his first game after his father's death and Randall Simon's whack at a racing sausage--Beckett took 2003. True, the speed and power of the game would amaze former Boston Red Sox pitcher Cy Young. When Boston's Fenway Park opened in 1912, for instance, the year after Young retired, people wondered if it would be possible to hit a baseball over the leftfield wall. The thick-handled, heavy bats of antiquity would be useless against the tall, broad power pitchers of today.