“It’s kind of hard when you’re neither fish nor fowl, you haven’t declared, you’re in the middle,” Duquette said. “You don’t know whether to unload or add players. But it was easy for us because we were out of the race. It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be in contention the rest of the way.”

On the morning of July 30, 1997, the Red Sox were 50-56 and trailing by 11 games for a playoff spot. The Mariners were in first place in the American League West and happened to be playing at Fenway Park, where they took a 7-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning.

A procession of overmatched relievers — Bobby Ayala, Bob Wells, a fading Norm Charlton and Edwin Hurtado — turned the game into a ghastly 8-7 loss that exposed a chronic Mariners weakness. Right in the middle of it, Slocumb pitched a scoreless ninth inning for the Red Sox.

“He threw the ball great, and I think Lou Piniella liked him,” Duquette said, referring to the Mariners’ manager, who was famously competitive and impatient. “Lou had seen him perform well against his team. Slocumb had a pretty good slurve to go with his fastball, and he’d pitched as well as he could pitch against Seattle.”

Generally, though, Slocumb was not pitching well; after blowing the save in Kansas City the next day, his E.R.A. rose to 5.79. But he had saved 63 games in the prior two seasons, and the Mariners were scrambling. Earlier on July 31, they had traded their top prospect, outfielder Jose Cruz Jr., to Toronto for relievers Paul Spoljaric and Mike Timlin.

“I called up Woody, and I said, ‘Does that Spoljaric trade take us off the table?’” Duquette said, referring to Woody Woodward, the Mariners’ top baseball executive. “He said, ‘Not necessarily.’”