Good day. And welcome to part two of my walk down memory lane.
It won’t actually be a walk down memory lane. We did that in the last entry. But I do like to take a moment to remember what an impact October 27, 2004 had on my life.
I’ve written it before and I say it a lot – it sounds almost stupid to say that night changed my life…but it did. I approach being a baseball fan, the single biggest hobby I have, in a completely different way than I did prior to 2004.
The last time a baseball game made me cry out of sadness and frustration was July 1, 2004. You might remember the game. Yankees fans call it “The Dive” game. Red Sox fans remember it as either “The Game When Nomar Stayed on the Bench” or “The Game Where Pokey Reese Made the Same Catch Jeter Did but Didn’t Have to Pretend He Needed to Dive” – in any event, I remember turning the game off and crying myself to sleep.
Not my greatest moment, admittedly.
Then we got the trade, and then Kevin Millar telling all the reporters that he’d see them at his locker in October and then in October he told them not to let the Sox win tonight. We got the walk, the steal, the slap…and then October 27th. And that’s all I needed.
I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember…at least 40 years, but I tended to lean toward being the stereotype of a miserable Sox fan. I never gave up on them, never, but boy I’d complain about them whenever anyone would listen. (I even incorporated complaining about them into the speech I gave at my father’s retirement party back in May of 2001.) October 27, 2004 basically gave me the strength to not be miserable. (Okay, admittedly, I had some miserable moments since I’ve been blogging, especially in the beginning…it took a while for it to take.)
Of course October 28, 2007 & October 30, 2013 didn’t hurt. I genuinely can’t understand any Red Sox fan who doesn’t just appreciate each season for what it is now. We’ve been so fortunate. After 86 years our team has three championships in a span of ten years. We have had good fortune dumped all over us and we’re rolling in it, regardless of what happened in 2014, and we should never, never forget it. To forget it would be a slap in the face to the rest of the fans in MLB who haven’t and won’t ever experience what we have. It would also be ridiculously selfish of us.
So as I do every year, I want to say “thank you” to the Boston Red Sox. My happiness as a baseball fan trickles into all other aspects of my life. Shallow? Maybe. But definitely true.
I’m watching what could be the World Series winning game for the Giants tonight (or the World Series tying game for the Royals) as I write this and it’s fun to be excited for another fan base while remembering how much I love being a part of the fan base I’m in. (Go Royals!)
My first heart break was 1967. While it was pure joy that they won the pennant and impressive that they pushed that great Cardinals team to game 7,it was a bitter disapointment to see them get blown out by Gibson in the end. It should be noted that just prior to August 23rd of that year,the Sox had one of the finest young players in the game in Tony Conigliaro. Yaz has stated over the years that Tony had become a five tool player in ’67, doing everything well. He was a great clutch hitter and was only 22. He already had 100 plus HR”s at the time of his beaning. The Sox, as would happen 8 years later with Jim Rice, had lost a key young player before the Series. Whether either would have altered the outcome of each series will never be known,but I’ll bet that one of those Series would have been won had they been in the lineup.
Amen, Cyn 🙂 I wish we New England folks were not the manic-depressive fan base that we are–it’s as if those 86 years were so deeply engrained in the collective DNA that not even three championships in a decade could dislodge the knee-jerk response to a tough year, month, week, or day: the vocal among us tend to insist either that our team is the Greatest Ever or that it’s a piece of unmitigated garbage and Heads Should Roll For The Debacle Of It All. What horse hockey. We’re extremely fortunate to have an ownership group that invests heavily and intelligently in the franchise, year in and year out, so that we have a really good shot just about every year to not only go to the big dance but win out (see Championships, this decade, three). It’s a small ball park, the tickets are expensive. Yup. But the ball team is most precious. And February, thank God, is not hopelessly far away. Pitchers and catchers will report. And if the brain trust can make a couple of effective deals over the Stove and beyond that have faith in the kids they’ve worked so hard to protect this far. . . the future should be way fun.