Boston’s Fenway Park is about a six-minute walk from where I work. The “Green Monster” is not really visible from my office on Bay State Road, but come April I know that the academic year is ending, and the baseball season starting, when I see Red Sox nation heading to that legendary field of dreams—dreams that never quite came true until this past autumn. Thanks to my job, I also have what every Bostonian would kill for: a parking space near the park.
By rights, I too should be a Sox fan, and last autumn should have been the most joyful of seasons for me. The self-styled “idiots” finally pinned the pinstriped, blue-capped monster from the Bronx that had been making them miserable (or giving them an excuse for misery) since 1920. That was the year Babe Ruth left the team for the New York Yankees, not without allegedly bequeathing the dreaded “curse of the Bambino” that the faithful have long yearned to reverse. But I am about as likely to root, root, root for the Boston home team as I am to convert to another religion. For me, shifting allegiances now would be a lot more ignominious than blowing, as my beloved New York Yankees did, a 3-0 lead in last fall’s American League Championship Series (ALCS).
It could have been different, I know, and it almost was. What if Yankee pitcher Mariano Rivera had not given up a lead-off walk to the Sox’s Kevin Millar in the ninth inning of game four at Fenway? What if Tony Clark’s long shot into right field hadn’t bounced into the stands for only a ground-rule double, thus preventing Ruben Sierra from scoring what might have been the winning run for the Yankees?
Great writers can get away with imagining counterfactual scenarios, but historians are discouraged from indulging in “what-if” speculation; finding out what really happened, and why, is hard enough. So a friend and colleague, a triumphant Sox fan, reminded me the day after we (the Yankees) lost the chance to play in the World Series. Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but those who depend on history may be doomed to regret it: the only seeming ghost who showed up at Yankee Stadium this October was an old man dressed in a white sheet with Ruth handwritten on his chest. He was a heartening sight, but he didn’t pitch and couldn’t bat—which is more or less what happened to my team at the end of the 2004 pennant race.
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As with most of us, my baseball loyalties go back to the early days of childhood, the age before we become too embarrassed or ambivalent to choose sides. Even so, making a choice was not simple for me. I was the product of a mixed marriage: my mother rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers and my father for the New York Giants. Growing up in Brownsville, she had had an easy time of it: she could pick the Dodgers, the Dodgers, or the Dodgers. My father, who was not to the diamond born, had more complicated allegiances. In Germany, where he grew up, baseball was not an option; but then, for a Jew, neither was staying in Mutterstadt, where his ancestors had lived for two centuries. Luckily he made it to America in April 1938, landing in New York and ending up eventually in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Then so full of German refugees that it was nicknamed the “Fourth Reich,” the area is now home to baseball-loving, Spanish-speaking immigrants like the star Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez. In classic fashion, my father learned to be an American while rooting for the Giants at the Polo Grounds, not far from his apartment.
Where did this leave me, born in the early 1950’s? I may not have been a great diplomat by nature, but I was smart enough not to choose one parent’s team over the other. I took the third option—the Yankees—which also happened to be the best. When in due course the Dodgers decamped for Los Angeles and the Giants for San Francisco, both my parents and younger twin brothers followed my lead. Since then, we have all been Yankee fans, passionate and devoted. My most prized childhood possessions were the baseball glove I oiled, tied, and never tired of using, and my Yankee uniform. I wore it when I played ball, and sometimes I donned my pinstripes and cap just because I felt like it.
Nothing mattered to me the way the Yankees mattered. On weekends during the season, I watched every game I could on Channel 11 or, if necessary, followed the play-by-play on my portable RCA Victor transistor radio. Red Barber (the old redhead), Phil Rizzuto (Scooter), and Mel Allen (the man without a nickname) were my guides. Even today, never a smoker and not much of a drinker, I can still remember fragments of the cigarette and beer commercials: “My beer is Rheingold the dry beer/You can find it wherever you buy beer/It’s not bitter, not sweet. . . .”
Night games were a problem: I couldn’t stay up to watch, but I couldn’t wait to find out the score. So my parents hit on a compromise that helped me avoid flunking out of P.S. 130. On the little aluminum vinyl-topped table that sat next to my bed at 10 Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, they wrote the results of the game on a piece of paper. I was usually up so early to get the score that the only thing on television was a test pattern—this was, after all, the late 1950’s.
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“The Bronx, no thonx.” Ogden Nash’s famous quip would have been heresy to me, but the truth is that I usually traveled to the Bronx for one reason only: Yankee Stadium. I began going as a child, often for twilight doubleheaders, with my father in one hand and my glove in the other. I grew up with the great teams of the late 1950’s and early 60’s, when the batting order seemed indistinguishable from the cosmic order: Richardson, Kubek, Maris, Mantle, Skowron, Berra, Boyer, and Howard, followed by the hurler of the day. Whitey Ford was my favorite pitcher because, like me, he was a lefty. In the great home-run derby of 1961, I favored Roger Maris over Mickey Mantle because Maris was shy—like me, and unlike the irrepressibly popular Mantle. I had a special feeling for Elston Howard because he was “colored” and my parents had made clear how tough that was in America. I liked Ryne Duren (“Blind Ryne”), the relief pitcher who wore thick glasses as I did. I knew that the outfielder Enos “Country” Slaughter was the oldest man on the team, but didn’t know that, while playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, he had earned his nickname by dashing all the way home from first base to beat the Red Sox during the 1946 World Series.
As a child, I played ball most days before shuttling upstairs to do my homework. Rarely, if ever, did I escape an anxious warning from my maternal grandmother: “Don’t get overheated.” Did Sandy Koufax, that righteous non-Yankee, have to put up with similar warnings at home? But I turned out to be a pretty good and very determined player, batting lefty, throwing lefty, and alternating positions among the pitcher’s mound, first base, and the outfield. A good catch, a skillful pitch, or a clutch hit went a long way in my friends’ eyes to make up for my being a “good boy,” quiet and bookish.
I continued to follow the Yankees even as my family joined the great migration of the 1960’s that took us from Brooklyn to Little Neck and then, finally, to Great Neck, the promised land on the north shore of Long Island. Supporting the New York Mets, the team founded in 1962, never even occurred to me. I remained a Yankee fan throughout college and graduate school, and did my best to keep up with the team while in London working on my dissertation. Only in the early 1980’s, when its fortunes flagged and I took a teaching job at Arizona State University, did my interest begin to wane.
“It’s warm there, isn’t it,” my grandmother always said when I called her from Phoenix. She was right. It seemed far too warm to play baseball. I wished the Diamondbacks well when they came to Phoenix in 1998, and I liked the design of Bank One Ballpark, but I was just too puritanical to feel comfortable in a stadium that looked as if its mother were a baseball diamond and its father a shopping mall.
Besides, by the mid-1990’s my love of the Yankees revived as a new dynasty arose: Paul O’Neill and Bernie Williams, Joe Girardi and Tino Martinez, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, Scott Brosius and Jorge Posada. I had never been an admirer of Roger Clemens in the days when he pitched for the Red Sox, but once “the Rocket” became our rocket, all was forgiven. (Brushing guys off the plate is part of the game, right?) As for the Diamondbacks, I never took them seriously—a mistake, as the 2001 World Series proved when they beat the Yankees in the ninth inning of the last game.
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By then, though, I was living in Boston, in the midst of the only other recognized national entity on the American continent. A defining characteristic of Red Sox nation was its pathetic inability to get over the fact that its team, which won five World Series championships from 1903 until 1918, had failed to win a single one thereafter. Its second defining characteristic was hatred of the Yankees. My only comfort, baseball-wise, was the presence of a fair number of other Yankee fans, mostly transplanted New Yorkers like me, and some quieter than others about their loyalties.
Having lived in Cambridge a decade earlier, I knew Boston well when I moved back there in the summer of 2001. I surely knew how detested the Yankees were. On a rainy day during that earlier sojourn, I was walking along Massachusetts Avenue en route to Harvard Yard, wearing my Yankee cap in lieu of an umbrella. Suddenly a man a little younger, a little shorter, and a lot angrier than I crossed the street. “You must have a lot of guts to wear that hat here,” he accosted me in an unmistakable Boston accent. “Yeah,” I replied, “I do. But I took it off a dead Yankee.” “Good for you!” he screamed out jubilantly. “Good for you, man!” And he slapped me on the back.
I could hardly believe what had happened. How crazy were these Sox fans, anyway? And yet, in contrast to the customary tone of life in the environs of Harvard, there was something refreshingly honest, if primitive, in Red Sox Man’s reaction to an enemy helmet on his turf. Such proud aggression was a lot more straightforward and less hypocritical than the usual forms of CV-envy, bibliography-anxiety, and let-me-tell-you-about-my-work-disorder that was the rule in Cambridge, where size (of ego as of publications) really does matter.
As I walked into Widener Library, an altogether more serious hat encounter slipped into my mind. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud recounts an incident told to him as a child by his father Jakob. The elder Freud had gone for a walk one Saturday in the streets of his birthplace when a Gentile came up to him and with a single blow knocked his new fur cap into the mud, shouting, “Jew, get off the pavement!” What did Jakob do? He went into the roadway and picked up his cap. His son, who was about ten or twelve when he heard this story, remembers being dismayed by the “unheroic conduct on the part of this big strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand.” He could not help contrasting his father’s response to a historical example that “fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father . . . made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.” Myself, I took no such pledge, but while continuing to wear my Yankee hat when I felt like it, I also redoubled my daily routine at the gym.
Now, some of my best friends are Red Sox fans—really—and I could certainly make my life easier by conforming to the preferences of the “compact majority.” But I’ve never been a when-in-Rome kind of guy. I’m proud of my minority status. When interviewed for my present position at Boston University, I fielded a slew of questions about scholarly things and “vision” things; luckily, no one asked me about baseball. The closest we came was during dinner when Jeff Henderson, a classicist born and bred in New Jersey, averred that he thought it possible to root for both the Yankees and the Red Sox—though not, of course, at the same time. Nothing doing, thought I. Culturally I may be a pluralist, but I come from a long line of stubborn monotheists. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” was one commandment that stuck in my mind. But this was a job interview, so I just smiled and said nothing.
Sports in general are not in particularly good repute in the academy these days. And sports metaphors are basically verboten among the ranks of the politically correct. Even among those who secretly believe that “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”—and most secretly do—the Vince Lombardi School of Management is in official disfavor. Worse, the trendy field of cultural studies has managed to take the fun out of sports through obscurantist analysis and horrendous writing—surefire paths to making something academically respectable.
Still, there was no mistaking where the loyalties of my Boston friends and colleagues lay, and I was therefore all the more grateful that, by and large, they were able to keep a lid on their indignation when (coming out of the dugout, as it were) I openly declared my Yankee sympathies. In the early days of the 2003 season, I arrived at work one morning to find a Yankees Suck poster on my door. I was able to laugh it off because I knew the culprit was a friend—and he knew better than I who had won 26 World Series championships and who had struck out, year in and year out, since 1918.
But 2003 was also a year in which the Sox made it to the playoffs for the American League pennant. Not until late in the seven-game series did it begin to seem possible that they might actually defeat the Yankees, causing feverish expectancy in Boston and corresponding alarm in my household. After the sixth game, my daughters, Alexandra (eight) and Caroline (six), were especially disconsolate. They felt duty-bound, and Daddy-bound, to root for the Yankees and to make no bones about it, but they were taking a lot of flak in school. “I hope the Yankees win,” Alexandra said with particular intensity as she headed up for bed soon after the final game began. “Win one for the girls,” I silently urged—and for my father, who had died two years earlier and who would have loved to be watching the game with his granddaughters.
It certainly didn’t seem my wish was going to come true in the early innings, as the Red Sox opened up a 4-0 lead. But then came the bottom of the eighth, when hapless Grady Little, the Boston manager, inadvertently joined the long list of Red Sox martyrs who let balls slip through their legs and games slip through their fingers. He allowed his pitcher, Pedro Martinez, to keep going past his optimal limit of about 100 pitches. Neither Grady nor Pedro could keep the Yanks’ Hideki Matsui from slapping a double into left field or Jorge Posada from dropping a bloop single into right. Tie score and extra innings.
The game was bound to end with a dramatic home run, but whose? New York’s Aaron Boone ended the speculation, and the series, with a “towering shot,” as we used to say, off the Boston relief pitcher Tim Wakefield. It landed fair in the left-field grandstands. Game over, Yankees win 5-4.
The homer hardly could have made me happier if I had hit it myself. Even so, I confess to feeling sorry for Wakefield, who walked off the mound with his head down and sat for a while in the visitors’ dugout. He and the Red Sox had been beaten again—beaten by a stray knuckleball, beaten by a great swing, and beaten by an assist from the unflappable ghosts of the Yankee past who sometimes come out in October.
Driving into the office the next morning, weary but ecstatic, I couldn’t resist listening to Boston sports radio. It was only then that I began to appreciate the full extent of bitter anger that Grady Little had unleashed and the depth of disappointment felt by Red Sox nation. I thought of one of my favorite poems, W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters; how well they understood/Its human position; how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” This time, however, Auden was off the mark For Red Sox nation, the disaster had not taken place at the edge of a wood or in a corner. The “dreadful martyrdom” had been played out in front of millions of despairing spectators.
When I arrived at Bay State Road, I went straight up to the office of my friend Jon Roberts, the most ardent Red Sox fan I know. Grace under pressure and humility in victory have always struck me as admirable guidelines, though I’ve often fallen short of displaying them. I commiserated as best I could. “Two very evenly matched teams,” I said. “The Sox were great.” “Could have gone either way.” “Terrific game.” I said it, and I meant it. “Thanks for being so gracious,” he replied. All was right in the world.
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Last year was different. Before the 2004 play-offs began I was already fearful that this time the Sox would win. But as the Yankees hammered the pitcher Curt Schilling (a former Arizona Diamondback), I gained confidence. I watched the start of the second game with Caroline, now all of seven. Both she and Alexandra remembered Pedro Martinez from last year. “Who’s your Daddy? Who’s your Daddy?” The roar from the Yankee Stadium crowd made little sense to Caroline, who takes questions of paternity seriously, until I explained what Pedro had said about tipping his hat to the Yankees and calling them his Daddy. Then she too joined in the chant as she danced in front of the television set.
Soon afterward, my wife came home from her weekly yoga class. Laura is a regular Jane Austen heroine, but she has one major fault: she doesn’t like baseball, in part because she grew up in England and in part because she has too much else to do in life. “It’s the most literary of sports,” I insisted, but Laura can spot and splatter a rationalization at 50 paces. So I dutifully switched from game two to the second round of Bush v. Kerry, sneakily listening to the play-by-play on a newly purchased radio with discreet earphones.
The radio came in handy again the next evening when I took the girls to their karate class. I had brought along a briefcase full of books, but I wasn’t in the mood to take notes. As my daughters and their compatriots happily rehearsed the “74 motions,” I tuned to sports radio. The talk-show hosts were ripping into Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, and assorted local clergy for having publicly asked God for a Red Sox victory in the World Series. “It’s been 86 years, Lord. . . .” What was next, animal sacrifice on Revere Beach?
The prayers failed to stop the Yankees from shellacking the Red Sox 19-8 in game three, a Saturday-night massacre. I watched the next game, which took place in New York, with my mother, in the chair where my father would have sat if he were still alive. In the ninth inning, only three outs away from a four-game sweep, the Yankees let the Red Sox off the hook and lost the game. Suddenly I became worried, and did what any other grown man would do: I looked to my mother for reassurance. “They’re not going to blow the series, are they?” “Of course not,” she calmly replied.
Indeed: how could the Yankees, still ahead of Boston by three games to one, go on to lose four post-season games in a row? All too easily, as it happened. By about 11 p.m. on Tuesday, the series was tied three to three and the final game was in the offing.
“Is there really a curse, Daddy?” Alexandra asked as we sat down to watch. It was my turn to be reasonable. “There’s no such thing as a curse, girls. But if you believe there’s a curse, you may act as if there really is a curse.” Naturally they demanded clarification, and I tried again, to somewhat better effect. By the end of the second inning, though, the distinction became irrelevant; the Red Sox were leading 6-0. “Girls, the game’s not over yet, but I don’t think we’re going to win this one. The Yankees are a great team, but even great teams sometimes lose.” Small consolation. Angry and frustrated, Caroline said, “I want to beat every one of those Red Sox—now.” Her big sister added, sadly: “I’m depressed.” So was I. The children went up to bed after telling me how sorry they were. When Laura came home she added her own words of consolation.
The only hopeful moments took place in the seventh inning when the Sox manager brought in Pedro Martinez (who else?) to relieve Derek Lowe, who had pitched brilliantly. Why Pedro? Repetition compulsion? A death wish? Who knows? The result, heart-lifting for me, was a double from (again) Matsui and a single from Williams. But this time Pedro got out of the inning, and then the Sox second baseman Mark Bellhorn put the Yankees out of contention with a two-run homer that for a moment felt like the end of everything. Final score: Red Sox 10, Yankees 3. Series result: Red Sox 4, Yankees 3. Red Sox to the World Series and the Yankees to therapy, with me shortly to follow.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Red Sox celebrate or listen to the post-game analysis. Argos, our labrador, needed to go out and so did I. As we walked along Centre Street we heard car horns beeping and Boston College students partying. I went to sleep very late, wondering what had gone wrong. The next morning Alexandra came bounding into our bedroom as she had done after every game. “Who won?” (No scores on bedside tables in our house.) “The Red Sox,” I told her. “They played very well and we just didn’t manage to beat them.” Caroline shook her head. “Kids are really going to get in my face today.” Before sitting down to work I sent Jon Roberts a congratulatory e-mail. He was as generous as he had been the previous year, but a lot happier. “Either team could have won,” he wrote. “They’re just so evenly matched.”
True. But somebody always loses, and I had come to the unsurprising realization that I really hated being that somebody. “Show me a good loser,” as Coach Lombardi said, “and I’ll show you a loser.”
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As the World Series got under way, the signs declaring Believe were unavoidable. Friends canceled our Saturday-night dinner date to attend the first game—and who could blame them? By then, Laura had to acknowledge that I wasn’t the only person in America watching baseball. Even her yoga teacher turned out to be a devoted Sox fan.
So was our rabbi, a native New Yorker and a relatively new addition to Red Sox nation (in other words, a convert). On Sunday, I took the girls to religious school and stayed for “Family Connection,” where parents study themes and texts in tandem with their children. Faced with the task of explicating Martin Buber, the rabbi started the session by invoking Boston’s Curt Schilling. Earlier, a pupil had asked whether there was something “talmudic” in the question Schilling had posed at the start of the 2004 post-game season: “Why not us?” (Schilling’s motto is now available on a T-shirt at fine stores near you—if you happen to live in metropolitan Boston.) After game six of the playoffs, won by the Sox, Schilling also announced that, as a believing Christian, he prayed to God before the start of play for the strength to do his best.
Nietzsche was wrong: God isn’t dead, He’s just very busy during sports season, offering encouragement to, and receiving thanks from, hordes of professional athletes. But Schilling, to give him credit, did not pray for a win; he prayed for the means to do his best and to endure the pain that might be in store for him. It’s hard to fault his heartfelt words, uttered quietly after a courageous and skillful outing.
As for Schilling’s question, was it in fact talmudic (whatever might have been meant by that term)? You don’t have to be Jewish to feel beleaguered and persecuted, or to believe that your time has come. In class, I suggested that Red Sox nation’s emphasis on keeping the faith might owe less to the Talmud than to the strength and character of Boston Catholicism. As it is written on Argos’s huge green food bowl: “Every dog has its day.” If so, why not the faithful servants of Red Sox nation, who had wandered from stadium to stadium in search of a championship for more than twice as long as the Israelites wandered in the desert?
The appeal of sports, in any case, is ultimately ecumenical, a form of instant, if passing, affiliation, open to everyone. If you have the money you can buy a ticket, and if you don’t you can still show the spirit. Thus the notice that came home from my children’s elementary school: “Red Sox Spirit Day,” it was headed. “Tomorrow is declared Red Sox spirit day. Show your support for our hometown team by wearing Red Sox clothing and caps of Red, White, and Blue. Go Sox. Go Sox.”
I didn’t want to be a Yankee Scrooge, but I did feel a bit put out. Minority rights, anyone? To be sure, the school, Mason Rice, is an enlightened place, full of hard-working teachers and parents a little too convinced that their children are geniuses. At the start of the ALCS series, the principal had made it clear that children had the right to support whichever team they deemed fit, and my daughters came home smiling and grateful for their adored Mr. Springer’s considerateness.
But Red Sox Spirit Day was hard on Alexandra and Caroline, prematurely principled girls who love their school but wanted to support the Yankees and their Daddy, too. “It’s unfair,” they had pointed out the night before. “Don’t they know that not everyone is a Sox fan?” “Do what you want,” I replied. “If you’re more comfortable wearing red to school, wear red. It really doesn’t matter.” But my heart wasn’t in my words.
In the morning the girls came to see me after they were dressed. Caroline was wearing all blue, the color of defiance. “It’s still baseball, Daddy,” she declared, “but it’s Yankee baseball, not Red Sox baseball.” Alexandra sheepishly appeared in the color of affiliation, a red T-shirt emblazoned with a salamander. She felt guilty and so, immediately, did I. “Daddy, I can’t decide if I should wear this shirt or not. It’s hard to be the only one who’s different.” That’s for sure; but this was not the moment to lecture her about the evils of peer pressure. It was my job to tell her that she looked great, that the color of her shirt didn’t matter, and that I wasn’t even a little disappointed by her choice. She came to a compromise on her own: “I’ll always root for the Yankees against the Red Sox, but if the Red Sox win, can I root for them?” Later she added: “Even though I’m still a Yankees fan, I want to cheer my friends on.” Sure, I said, trying hard to sound convincing. Why not us?
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Do I really believe that? If so, I should have been rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals, the National League champions, to win the World Series. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that, but I wasn’t about to cheer for the Sox, either. And yet it was hard to begrudge them the victory over the Yankees that they had just worked so hard for.
The Yankee manager Joe Torre, asked how he felt about losing to Boston, had naturally confessed to disappointment. But he also knew how much the Red Sox success meant to Tim Wakefield, who had given up the winning home run to Aaron Boone in the previous year’s seventh game. “There are two sides to the story,” he said. It was one of the first big lessons my parents had taught me.
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On Wednesday, October 27, with the Red Sox ahead by three games to none over the Cardinals, I attended the final day of a conference at my university commemorating 350 years of Jewish life in America.
Inevitably the subject of baseball came up in conversation; well, I brought it up with several of the participants. Of the Americanist Leonard Dinnerstein, whom I had known in Arizona, I asked: “You’re a Yankee fan, aren’t you?” “No,” replied Dinnerstein, a Bronx native, “I’m a contrarian, and I’ve been a Red Sox fan since 1946.” Even contrarians occasionally need hats, it seems.
But was baseball good for the Jews? That was an issue impossible to ignore at a conference that considered whether the Jewish experience in America was fundamentally different from its European counterpart. The answer turns out to be: not always. As the baseball writer Glenn Stout has shown, the “curse of the Bambino” had an anti-Semitic subtext. Harry Frazee, the New York showman who owned the Sox and sold the Babe to the Yankees, was vilified not only for doing what he did but also for what he allegedly was: a Jew. On September 10, 1921, Henry Ford’s house organ, the Dearborn Independent, suggested that the Sox had been “placed under the smothering influence of the ‘chosen race.’ ” The sportswriter Fred Lieb described Frazee as “an evil genie,” another heinous anti-Jewish stereotype.
What sort of Jew was Harry Frazee? No sort at all. He was a Presbyterian of Scotch-Irish extraction. For that matter, the “curse of the Bambino” was itself a later invention, thought up by imaginative sportswriters (probably New Yorkers) in the mid-1980’s. Until then, the Sox had just lost on their own steam, or lack thereof. Which is hardly to gainsay the grateful eagerness of Red Sox nation in seizing upon the idea of a curse, which expresses resentment of one’s fate while neatly disclaiming responsibility for it.
That night, the night of a lunar eclipse no less, the long-eclipsed Red Sox awoke from the nightmare of their history. The game took place at Busch stadium in St. Louis. A lead-off homer by Johnny Damon in the first inning, just to show the Sox meant business, was followed by a double by Trot Nixon to drive two more runs home. By the ninth inning, I was rooting for the Cardinals. “Do something, guys. Don’t let the Red Sox sweep you!” But when Boston’s Keith Foulke picked up a short hopper to the mound and scurried over toward first for the final out, the game was over—and so was the curse.
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In truth, the Red Sox victory was more of a testimonial to the power of pitching than to the power of prayer. But it did answer the prayers of those who had asked, with Curt Schilling, why not us? Somewhat to my surprise, I was (momentarily) happy for my friends and neighbors who had longed for redemption, as I was for the players who had made it happen. Babe Ruth finally had the night off. Chalk one up for Red Sox nation, past and present, for the great ones like Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio who are gone, and for those like Johnny Pesky and Carl Yastrzemski who lived long enough to see the curse undone.
I won’t ever be a member of Red Sox nation, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When it comes to baseball, I’m content to remain a stranger in a strange land. And I also feel professionally constrained to point out that we have not exactly reached history’s terminal point. “All empires end,” announced Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino after the Yankees’ defeat. But empires strike back, and dynasties return to life. Losing one ALCS to the Red Sox won’t destroy the Yankees, and I can live with a Red Sox world championship every 86 years or so.
So I am looking forward to the first Boston home game this month, when Red Sox nation troops back to its baseball heaven. As the championship flag is raised in Fenway Park for the first time since 1918, the Yankees will be in the opposing dugout and their pitcher Randy Johnson, the Big Unit with the Big Left Arm and the Big Salary, may be on the mound. April isn’t the cruelest month, after all. Whatever their respective problems, my home town and my adopted town remain places where we can still pursue our own American dreams with varying degrees of passion and success, on and off the green fields where, win or lose, the boys of summer play, sometimes into extra innings, and the rest of us enjoy the freedom to worship, or not to worship, as we choose.
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