Somehow the denizens of this most Democratic of American cities have not been charmed by the virtual lockdown that the Secret Service is imposing on our city. Nor by Mayor for Life Tom Menino, who has offered a decidedly mixed bag of counsel to locals: stay home, but enjoy the city and this wonderful spectacle of democracy in action.
Admittedly Boston is a city that has elevated moaning and groaning to a fine art. After all, it is embedded in our heritage. Do you think the Pilgrims were happy campers? They kvetched–though they might not have used that word–about everything from the miserable English they left behind to the lousy spread the Wampanoags contributed to the first Thanksgiving.
Here’s my own No. 1 complaint. I had to spend a week in Anaheim, Calif., at the Olympic gymnastics trials, which were originally scheduled to be held in Boston’s Fleet Center in June. The Greeks assure me I have nothing to worry about from explosives in Athens because they can sweep any venue in 24 hours. But somehow the Feds needed a month with a stranglehold on the Fleet to ensure the Dems’ safety.
Still, we are all supposed to put aside our personal grievances because this will be a great showcase for our beloved city. Even as a settlement is imminent in the city’s dispute with police, it’s not exactly clear how police pickets, the threat of which have already shut down some festivities, would have revealed Boston as a destination city. I confess to being somewhat amused that Democratic delegates, some of whom, I bet, manned the barricades against police in Chicago’s Grant Park 36 years ago, now regard a police line as something sacrosanct and inviolable.
The only folks who might possibly be enjoying this civic fiasco are the Boston Red Sox and only because, absent the convention, the city’s considerable wrath might be directed at the team. I have arrived home after a month on the Left Coast to discover our long baseball honeymoon is over. After more than a year’s enchantment with the team’s new ownership, the 2004 Red Sox appear something of a mess–and a totally unappealing mess at that. As my local Yankees guru told me, “Don’t blame us this time. You’ve done this to yourself.”
In truth, ownership isn’t totally to blame. They recognized the problem in the off-season when they tried to jettison both Manny Ramirez and Nomar Garciaparra and import a star with impeccable temperament to Fenway Park. But now A-Rod comes here only in pinstripes and the team’s ownership is stuck with the three superstars, all of whom appear to be major contributors to team dysfunction. Let’s take them one by one.
Manny Ramirez: OK, he is one whale of a hitter and has a certain giddy, Harpo Marx charm. On the down side, he can be a menace in left field and is a brain-dead base runner. If that were the entire equation, Manny would measure out a plus. But sure as he doesn’t have a clue who John Kerry is, Manny doesn’t possess the passion necessary to play the game in this savvy baseball city. Last year he sat out a critical Yankees series with an illness that didn’t keep him from socializing at night with one of his Yankee pals. This season he has outdone himself. He missed the game just before the All-Star Game with a leg injury, managed to play in the All-Star Game and even hit a home run, then basically sat out a big four-game series with the Angels with the same injury problem. My honest view is that he doesn’t know any better. But that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Pedro Martinez: In his previous six seasons with Boston, he has been unparalleled as a pitcher and a virtuoso prima donna. But the donna is far less appealing when his performance flags. Is there any other player in baseball who used the All-Star break for a nine-day vacation? Manager Terry Francona insists it was the team’s idea to give Pedro’s weary shoulder an extended rest. Wouldn’t eight days have been enough? Then perhaps he could have helped jump-start the second half of the season and be on the mound this Sunday night for the nationally televised game against the Yankees. Instead, Derek Lowe got bombed and is odds-on for a repeat shelling from New York this weekend.
Nomar Garciaparra: I’ve seen most of the movies made by Ingmar Bergman and trust me: none of the characters appeared to be quite as depressed as Nomar is playing for the Red Sox. He is hardly the first person, not even the first superstar, who wound up stuck with his team after it tried to dump him. While there were salary considerations involved, that effort was dictated more by personality. It’s not that Nomar is a bad guy. But he is so nervous and twitchy that it makes everybody in the clubhouse uneasy. Now everything has been compounded by the insult he endured, resulting in one endless sulk. And his brood is powerful enough to overwhelm whatever remained of last year’s “cowboy up” era of good feeling.
The cumulative effect of this new era of bad feeling has the Red Sox buried far behind the hated Yankees, who are winning their merry way despite losing their top two starters. Note the syncopation once again this season with the other favorite team of baseball nostalgists, the Chicago Cubs; touted every bit as much as the Red Sox in the preseason, a Cubs-Sox series was regarded as a real prospect rather than a punch line–Chicago is even further behind the Cardinals than Boston trails the Yanks, and they’re sinking even faster.
The truly amazing thing about Boston’s baseball woes is that the team actually remains in contention, barely off the wild-card pace. But nothing suggests that, as Red Sox brass marketed it, “this is the year.” Hard as it is to imagine, the Red Sox actually appear to be less championship material than our man John Kerry is presidential timbre. And there’s no cowboy looming on the horizon to turn the tide “up.”
The Democratic convention has served as a focal point for local discontent. But all the politicos go home next Friday. And once the balloons and banners are swept away, the locals are going to focus on the garbage performance by our hometown team. And trust me, it ain’t going to be pretty. Their reaction is likely to make Bush-Kerry resemble a lovefest.
