It happens every year. The winter drags on, snow piles up, the wind whips down from the Arctic, and it seems that February will never end. But in my heart, I'm wearing shorts, the sky is clear and the breeze is warm. This morning on TV, I saw a clip of a pale Johnny Damon, swinging his bat languidly in the Florida sun, laughing behind his sunglasses as he shagged flies in the outfield. Baseball is back.
Something like this gets written, in one permutation or another, a hundred times every year. In the sporting wasteland between the Super Bowl and the NCAA Final Four, we turn our eyes to the south, and as our parents and grandparents did, gird ourselves to cheer for our heroes. Everywhere, even in Detroit, fans look at the boys of summer playing amongst the palm trees, and say to themselves, "Well, if Smith pitches like he did last September and Gonzalez comes back from the knee injury and Lee improves like he should ... well ... we can win it all!"
Everyone is aware that only one team can win the World Series, but everyone, at least in February, can hope this is The Year. Everyone, that is, except for me. You see, I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. I know that this is The Year.
The Red Sox are a franchise perhaps unique in all of sports. For those of you who've just moved to New England or have been living in a cave, a little background might be necessary. Boston hasn't won the World Series since 1918, which was also the last year we had Babe Ruth. Ruth was the greatest player of his time, perhaps of all time, and on the strength of his left arm the Red Sox had won several championships and looked (he was only 24) to win more. But in 1919 the team's owner, needing funds for his theater business, sold Babe Ruth -- sold him like a racehorse! -- to the unimpressive New York Yankees, for $125,000. Since then the Yankees have won the World Series 25 times and have been the dominant team in American sports.
The Red Sox, in the meantime, have done their uttermost to drive their fans insane. Rarely a bad team, they're always talented enough to give everyone involved realistic ambitions of October glory, and after an impressive spring and summer they lose, usually in heart-breaking fashion. The word "fall" really has two meanings around here. For a few days after the Sox's elimination from the playoffs, New England walks around in a black mood -- it's usually getting colder then, too -- and then takes heart. There's always next year.
This cycle has been going on literally since my grandfather was a boy. In other places, like Green Bay and Montreal, sports certainly matter to the population, but nowhere has a professional team affected a society the way the Red Sox affect New England. For me and millions of others from Maine to Connecticut, this baseball team has fostered a regional psychosis. We are different people because of the Boston Red Sox.
The Red Sox instill New Englanders with a fatalistic optimism known only to foreign aid workers and prisoners of war. Every year, we know in our heads that we can win if things go all right, but in our hearts, we know that we can't win, that we never win, and that something, inevitably, will happen to destroy us, just as it always has. But every year, on a deeper level, somewhere beyond rationality or emotion, we believe that this year is it. We see burly Manny Ramirez cranking home runs, one after the other, over the Green Monster, and the swashbuckling Nomar Garciaparra grabbing impossible ground balls and flinging darts across the diamond to first base, and the slightly-built assassin Pedro Martinez throwing his curveball as if he had a remote control, and we believe. We believe that these men could never fail; we believe that last year they were betrayed by lesser mortals and umpires; we believe that this year they'll win that last game in October. We believe.
This psychosis affects not only baseball, but every other thing in New England's life as well. We are pessimistic about everything, from the winter to the weather to how long it takes to drive to Bangor, but we don't move or become hermits. If we hold on long enough, everything will come out right, and we'll be rewarded. We hold on to our articles of faith with an almost dog-like loyalty. This is particularly true in romance. A Red Sox fan is much less likely to break up with a partner than any other sort of fan; Yankees fans get divorces just for a change of pace. There may be some disappointments, some hard times, but these are just what we need to go through on the way to happiness. We see things through, no matter how hard they may be, and from this comes our strengths and weaknesses, inextricably bound up with a baseball team in Boston.
In my reflective moments, I shake my head at this. It doesn't make sense, feeling happy or sad over the fortunes of a group of professional athletes, most of whom have nothing to do with Boston or New England except for working here right now. Next year, every year, some of them will leave, and new ones will come in. In the words of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, "We cheer for laundry." And even if they were from New England, how would their ability to hit or throw a baseball help our lives? It's irrational. But all religions are. The actual reasons not to care about baseball fade to nothing next to our tradition, our history, our passion for the Red Sox. As sure as the leaves falling in November, the Sox are a part of us, a team embedded in our souls. They make us what we are, and I for one cannot wait to see Pedro Martinez record the final out later this month in the World Series.
