Every sportswriter started out, in my case long ago, as a sports fan. Much of the affection disappears along the way with the succession of inevitably bruising intersections of reporter and athlete. Of those, baseball often produces the most combustible. I’m not sure why, but I have a theory. Basketball, football and hockey players are all so drained by their exertions that by the time we impose on them in the locker room after their games, they usually just want to say their short piece and escape. Baseball players may have taken a dozen swings, run 200 feet and chased three fly balls. They have a lot of pent-up energy to get out of their system. When you ask them about that last fly ball, the one they dropped to cost the team the game, it’s likely not to be pretty.
Still, my affection for baseball is largely undiminished. It could be because Fenway is the first place I ever saw a pro game of any kind. My dad took me when I was 9 years old and on most special occasions thereafter. Fenway and the Red Sox reconnect me to all kinds of precious family memories. Red Sox pitcher Hideo Nomo’s no-hitter Wednesday night, for example, reminded me that the last Boston no-hitter occurred in 1965, the day my father was driving me off to college. We were listening to the game en route and losing the radio station along the New York State Thruway, when my dad made the call: college could wait. We pulled off the highway, and we heard the no-hitter through to the end.
Fenway was where Dad told me the facts of life, which in our family had nothing to do with girls-only with the immutable truth that the Red Sox would cause me incalculable pain. It was the most prescient thing he would ever tell me and my brother. It is not simply that Boston has not won a championship in 83 years. The Chicago Cubs, of course, have gone longer. But the Cubs are nothing but a story in futility. The Red Sox are masters of torture. They come agonizingly close-and then inevitably betray.
The Red Sox have played in four World Series since Babe Ruth pitched them to victory in 1918. Each went seven games and, of course, each ended badly (some of them more badly than others). The Red Sox have played in two pennant playoffs (and lost them both). They have contributed some of the truly immortal moments in baseball history: a few good ones like Carlton Fisk’s home run; more of them horrors like the home run by the Yankees’ Bucky “Bleepin’” Dent (as he will forever be known in these parts), and Bill Buckner’s imitation of a croquet wicket against the Mets. That so many of these indignities have been perpetrated against the smug, triumphant purveyors-of-all-that-is-evil (mostly the New York Yankees, but above all New York and its fans) only adds to the poignance.
But ever resilient, we the Sox faithful will head out tomorrow to cheer and beer and, of course, wonder what Job-like test is in store for us this year. The season is less than a week old, and already we have endured wrist surgery on batting champion Nomar Garciaparra and the hobbling of Sox megabucks acquisition Manny Ramirez. What more could be lying in wait? We try to imagine, so as to prepare ourselves, worst-case scenarios. Picture once again a seventh game of the World Series. Only this time the Sox would have the game’s greatest pitcher, Pedro Martinez, on the mound. Maybe on his way to the park, Pedro gets swallowed up in the unnavigable maze of tunnels, pits and traffic congestion we Bostonians know as The Big Dig. His car will be found in a snowbank sometime around the Super Bowl.
The Red Sox unleash those hidden demons in the deepest, darkest recesses of the mind. And the truth is that tragedy is so very much more interesting than comedy. Anybody can win. The Minnesota Twins did it twice in the ’90s. The Florida Marlins, with no discernible baseball tradition except that it rains a lot at their park, won it too. But not the Red Sox. They’re the Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear of baseball all rolled into one amazingly compelling, always shatteringly disappointing, team.
Ain’t there a certain majesty in all that failure? Winning, after all, isn’t all it’s cut out to be. Ask the fans of the hockey’s New York Rangers. They went more than five decades without taking the Stanley Cup. The team won, everyone had a party and a parade-and then all the steam, all the fun, went out of that team. That’s why I’ll be in the stands tomorrow, not in the press box where I could claim a perch. I prefer to be where the fans are-in those seats that, like the airline variety, seem to get smaller every year. But as I sit there tomorrow with my pals, imploring the Sox to win and launch their miracle run to a championship, a part of me will be pleading-silently and secretly-“Please, don’t ever let that happen.” This is too much fun exactly the way it is.
