By Ryan McGowan
I ran into Dan Shaughnessy, sports columnist for the Boston Globe, a few weeks ago while I was waiting for an order at a Chinese restaurant in Newton. “Shank” is somewhat of a personal hero of mine, not as much for his writing ability (though I do think he is a good writer, even if many disagree with what he has to say) but more so for his status as a fellow Holy Cross graduate/ex-writer for the HC Crusader student newspaper. As there were only four people in the restaurant at the time (myself, Jennifer the Lovely Better Half, and two restaurant employees), you can imagine my startled expression when I was interrupted from reading a crusty 2001 back issue of Newsweek and listening to Muzak versions of “Sweet Home Alabama” by the grand entrance of a tall, lanky, curly-haired man, surrounded by his family, whose face I have seen countless times on TV and headlining the Globe columns bearing his name.I walked over and quickly said hi, introducing both myself and Jennifer as fellow Crusaders, said I liked his work and hoped he enjoyed his dinner. It was a small, forgettable conversation for him; he probably runs into a few people every day who stop and have a conversation with him, probably of both the friendly and scathing varieties. But for me, it was a regrettable encounter, not for what I didn’t say then, but for what I wish I would say to him now if I ran into him: Dan, you’re wrong about the A.L. East. The Sox have a chance to win the division. Until further notice, there should be absolutely no mention of the words “Wild Card” under penalty of being forced to listen to a ten-hour tape of “Motivating Yourself the Al Gore Way.”
I am referring to a NESN “Sports Final” appearance from Friday night, August 27, that featured Shaughnessy and Nick Cafardo of the Globe, along with ex-Sox infielder and all-around guido John Valentin (who is pretty good on TV, by the way, and would be even better if he learned how to avoid throwing in the phrase “ya know” every seven or eight words), hosted by the inimitable, permanently-drunken-looking Bob Lobel, Channel 4 sports anchor. At the time, the Red Sox had cut the Yankees’ lead in the AL East to 5 ½ games, down from 10 ½ games just 10 days before. The Sox were surging; they were clicking on all the proverbial cylinders. As this column is written, they have had their starting pitcher go for at least five innings in every game since July 17. They have won 12 of 13. Since Jason Varitek punked the Ambiguously Metrosexual A-Fraud Rodriguez and Bill Mueller humbled Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth on July 24, they have gone 24-9. Since they traded You Know Who, the Sox are 20-7. It’s an era of good feelings in Boston; the weather, the traffic, the hassles of city life all seem to be a lot less tiresome when the Sox are on a winning streak. So what does doomsayer Dan Shaughnessy try to do on “Sports Final”: spoil everyone’s fun, of course.
Shaughnessy insisted that it is futile and self-destructive to speculate on catching the Yankees, that our energies would better be served looking in our rear-view mirror at the Anaheim Angels, the Texas Rangers, possibly the Oakland Athletics (if either Anaheim or Texas takes over the AL West lead), and maybe the Devil Rays. (Hey, they ran off one 12-game winning streak earlier this year, why not another one to get right back into the thick of things in the playoff hunt?) He basically implied that if Sox fans even let the temptation of thinking about catching the Yankees enter our minds, we are setting ourselves up for a major letdown, and might lose sight of the singular goal of the season: get into the playoffs and take your chances at making the World Series. He cited the Yankees’ potent lineup, their strong bullpen, their track record in September, the Red Sox’ September schedule, and the nature of the supposed fragile psyche of Sox fans. He says that focusing on the Wild Card (where the Sox are currently on top of the Angels) is more realistic. He sees the current fan fad of pining for the division title as another fanciful, idealistic, unattainable goal held by the (admittedly) most over-reactionary fans in sports.
So what? Isn’t that what being a Red Sox fan – what being a REAL sports fan- is all about? Hoping for the best, and not wanting to settle for second place if you can help it? The chase of fanciful idealistic goals… isn’t that what is supposed to be fun about following a team?
Local columnists, WEEI talk show hosts, and radio callers alike ripped the Sox last year, and rightfully so, for their excessive, over-the-top celebration on the day they clinched the Wild Card playoff berth. With the amount of booze both on the field and in the locker room, it is a wonder that Billy Joel and Vin Baker didn’t mosey on down to Yawkey Way. Hey, it seemed like everyone else was invited to the party. It was ridiculous; it looked like the locker room of a World Series or pennant champion (or possibly the Portland Trail Blazers), not one of a good team that backed into the playoffs, Celtics-style, and hadn’t anything of consequence yet to show for it, unless you count those pathetic “WILD CARD” t-shirts the players and management were wearing that night. The point is that if a wild card berth isn’t an achievement to celebrate, then it certainly shouldn’t be a goal to strive for, unless we want our mentality to continue to be that of a second-best, inferiority complex, with us playing the role of the perennial Ahab fixated on the Yankees as the white whale. We as fans (and the Sox as an organization) need to get over that mentality if we expect to be winners.
I am not saying that the mentality of the fans always has a direct effect on the performance of the team. Sometimes, it is good that the team doesn’t pay attention to most of our reactionary, yahoo drivel. However, there can be a powerful symmetry when the confidence and expectations of the fans (both in the stands and around the area) matches that of the team. The Yankees have seen the results of this symbiotic relationship for years; the team is confident, and the fans believe that it is their birthright to win. As much as I hate to compare baseball to football, our own Patriots have also enjoyed this symmetry recently; in last year’s playoffs, did you know any Pats fans who actually felt as if the team were going to lose, especially in Gillette Stadium in Planet Hoth-like conditions? (I walked around town the day of the Titans game and felt like I needed the smelly guts of a Taun-Taun to stay warm, and that was with four or five layers on, and still I had no doubt that the Pats were going to kick Tennessee tail that night in Foxboro.) Baseball is such a mental game; the collective aura and attitude of the fans can certainly affect the atmosphere of a team, and help to spur it on to success.
It would be a lot easier if we could coat Fenway Park with the emotional slime from the New York City sewers from “Ghostbusters II”, and the positive vibes from the fans would translate into positive results for the team. (Unless the ballpark uproots itself and walks across the Charles River to Cambridge, which, to quote Bill Murray from the original movie, “That would be bad.” And if you haven’t seen the sequel: (1) consider yourself lucky, and (2) disregard this entire paragraph.) But since we don’t have any of that slime at our disposal (unless maybe there is some excess phlegm left over from ten years of Big Dig workers breathing in the tunnels), the best we as fans can do is to root for the Sox to overtake the Yankees and win the AL East title, which comes gift-wrapped with a presumed home field advantage in the playoffs, where the Sox have been virtually unbeatable this year, especially in August.
The cynical Sox fans will say, “They’ve been teasing us like this for eighty-six yeeee-ahs, and they’re gonna rip out haaaaaaahts out again this yee-ahh.” They will argue that every year the Sox get close, and every time they blow it. They will call for fans not to be stupid and hope for the impossible, and instead insist that we root against Anaheim and Texas and settle for the WILD CAAAAHD. I say that these people should be outfitted with cement shoes and sent to a clinic at the Buddy Cianci School of Waterskiing. There’s no need for this negativity anymore from Sox fans.
If you fall into the Yankee fans’ “1918!” trap of living in the past and assuming that past results of games played by completely different players (most of whom are now long since retired, dead, or coked up on horse-killing doses of Viagra) have any tangible effect on how Derek Lowe pitches in his next start, then your attitude is just as loathsome as that of the fans wearing “NY” caps. If you flip a coin 99 times and each time it comes up heads, the odds are still 50-50 that the next flip will be tails. If you are playing blackjack and you double down on an 11 twenty times in a row, and you never make 21, the odds are still in your favor the next time to double down. Probability and chance don’t have memories, but sports fans do. Past results don’t influence the future, no matter what some jackass, arrogant, obnoxious Yankee fan tells you about “The Curse of the Bambino” (ironically, the title of a book written by none other than Dan Shaughnessy).
The Curse doesn’t exist. It is a fabricated, cliché hokeyism that was invented by Shaughnessy as a neat, interesting way to describe the bad luck suffered by the Sox franchise since the 1920 sale of Ruth to the Yankees. It has since been publicized by the national media as a cute, simplistic way of drawing a one-dimensional portrait of the manufactured stereotype of a Sox fan as the tortured, self-loathing, miserable, pathetic creature who actually WANTS the Sox to lose because winning would would ruin his entire worldview, in which he presumably hates himself, the city and region in which he lives, his family, his neighbor’s dog, the guy who runs the variety store on the corner, and everyone else he comes into contact with, all because Bucky Dent his some cheesy home run in 1978 and a ground ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986.
The mythology of the Curse is kept alive in great part by the Fox Saturday broadcasts of Red Sox games, as Yankee sycophant and irrational Sox-hater Tim McCarver apparently takes some sadistic pleasure in making sure that the network flashes different infographics every two innings to remind the viewers that yes, in case you forgot, the Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918, and the Yankees have won 26 in that time, so let’s look at some more hackneyed statistics and facts that we are rehashing for the 218th time this season because we want to fully capture and soak in the “torture” that is an existence as a Red Sox fan.
And as sure as the preceding paragraph represents the longest single sentence I have ever written in my life, I assure you that the Fox-perpetuated portrait of the artist as a Red Sox fan is false, inaccurate, and rather insulting to the millions of real fans who exist in the real world and go to real games and have real discussions about the Sox with real friends and strangers alike.
Contrary to stereotypes, people who live here are not all miserable, doom-and-gloom Calvinist Puritans who revel in their abject despair and suffering that is our day-to-day lives. That image is an insult to the real people behind the one-dimensional stereotypes that are too often assumed to be true by others, but it is also an insult to real Red Sox fans. And that is why we should be rooting for the AL East title.
I am tired of seeing the same cliché storylines when the Sox play on national TV. I hope that this October will be the last time Fox ever flashes a “WORLD SERIES TITLES SINCE 1918: BOSTON 0. NEW YORK 26” graphic on its screen. I am sick of hearing “1918” chants, and listening to comments from arrogant New Yorkers that a Red Sox fan’s opinion on baseball isn’t valid because of the team’s lack of titles in the past 86 years. I am fed up with hearing McCarver gloat every time the Sox give up a run, as if it is a manifestation of the never-ending Curse. More than anything, I am tired of being led to believe that deep down inside, Sox fans don’t want the team to win, because that would ruin our self-image as lovable losers.
We should be insulted that the rest of the baseball world associates “Boston” with “Loser.” It is demeaning to the intelligent, passionate fans here, and the rich baseball tradition of the Red Sox, regardless of World Series titles. It bothers me most that Sox fans would even consider rooting for a Wild Card title as if it were the best we could hope for, and we should be grateful for the opportunity to slide into the playoffs. We need to think of ourselves as winners, just like the Patriots did/do under Bill Parcells and later Bill Belichick.
Maybe I’m a little optimistic and idealist, but forgive me if I think it is more fun as a fan to look ahead to a greater goal and not settle for second-best. Being a sports fan is supposed to be fun, and cynicism and realism takes the fun out of it. Maybe I am nuts; maybe I am just setting myself up for disappointment again, just like last year at this time.
But won’t it feel great to expect a high goal and then achieve it? Won’t it be fun to wake up on the last day of the season and see “BOSTON” in first place in the AL East? Won’t it be that much more satisfying if the team reaches the high expectations the fans have for it?
Most importantly, won’t it be nice next season not to hear “1918” anymore? Won’t it be refreshing to watch McCarver squirm and reach for something else to trash the Red Sox with? Won’t the victory parade in November be among the greatest days of your life, right there with Super Bowl XXXVI, the birth of your first child, and the day Britney and Madonna kissed? Won’t you love to read what Shaughnessy has to say for himself the next day? (I bet he has written a few potential columns over the years which he plans on dusting off and publishing if and when the event actually happens.)
Forget the Wild Card. Root for the AL East title. Pull for the pennant. Hope for the World Series. If the wild card happens, so be it. But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy with it.
See you in October…
