by Steve Almond
Thus, I tolerated Sox fans as a minor irritant, something like the college students who seize the local street corners every September, spewing smoke and nonsense. Many of these fans were my friends, and therefore difficult to escape. But it’s also true that I became quietly and horribly fascinated with the sports talk radio stations of Boston, and specifically WEEI, which broadcasts an array of noisy blowhards genetically incapable of pronouncing the letter r. I listened to these gentlemen mostly in the car, and found their indignation oddly soothing while I was mired in traffic.
Then something bad happened. In 1999, the Sox made it all the way to the AL Championship, where the Yankees summarily thrashed them. The ensuing uproar was not soothing. It was more like the inconsolable wailing of many children betrayed. I could hear, in each rant and squall, the echoes of my own doomed loyalty. It might be said that I had met the enemy and they was me.
This was not how I saw things, of course. Sox fans did things I would never do. They booed their own players. They hassled fans from out of town. They waddled about righteously in shirts bearing logos such as “Yankees Suck.” Most annoying of all, they regarded themselves as underdogs, forever pitted against George Steinbrenner’s “Evil Empire” (their term, not mine). To those of us who root for poor teams from small markets, the notion that the Red Sox would lay claim to the holy mantle of underdogdom is beyond loathsome. A friendly reminder: the team has the second-highest payroll in baseball.
No, it was my team who represented the little guy. What I couldn’t figure out is why the LGS kept smiting them. For three years running (2000–2002) the A’s reached the playoffs only to collapse in the first round. They blew six straight clinching games, three against the Yankees. It was as if the LGS wanted to see Goliath stomp David, as if he were gazing down at me through his cruel oculus and cackling, Having damned the citizens of Red Sox Nation, I shall make you feel the sting of their lamentation!
AS THE 2003 season opened, I was in no shape to listen to more moaning, particularly because the Sox had just nabbed our gutsy center fielder Johnny Damon by offering him a perverse salary of the sort the A’s cannot afford to pay.
My foul mood was exacerbated that spring by another event, which I cannot fairly neglect: The United States was in the midst of invading Iraq. This was a discretionary war, launched under false pretenses by foolish cowards and covered with reflexive obedience by all available media, which confused the war—an event in which the resources of our vast and powerful nation were mustered to murder the people of a much smaller nation—with a sporting event. Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sandswept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.
As an opponent of the war, I felt an oddly familiar sensation watching all this. It was like being a disgruntled fan, helpless before the slaughter. Although it was worse than that, because I had played a distant but undeniable role in the proceedings. As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.
The man we (almost) elected president in 2000 bears much of the blame,8 but I’m going to tread lightly here, as I’ve got my own crucifixion to attend. The point is that another season in hell was upon me and I was in my car, enduring war propaganda, then Sox propaganda, then more war propaganda, and this, compounded by my own choker-identification-misery, caused me to snap. On April 10, 2003, I published the following, uh, editorial in Boston’s alternative weekly:
A couple of weeks ago, at my weekly poker game, the host, a guy we call The Big Ruskie (though he is, in fact, a mid-sized man of German/Irish extraction) looked at me during a lull and said: “You know, Stevie, I’ve never believed in ESP or any of that kind of crap. But I really do have a feeling, a deep feeling, a feeling in my soul, that this is the year the Red Sox will win the World Series.”
I love the Ruskie. But looking at him across that poker table I felt I was gazing into the bloated, half-cracked heart of every single Red Sox fan on earth. Because every single Red Sox fan on earth (whether or not they say this out loud, though most of them do) truly believes that this is the year the Sox are going to vanquish the Yankees, break the curse, win it all. So let me be the first, on the eve of yet another opening day, in this blessed year of 85 A.S. (After Series), to deliver to the entire Red Sox Nation the same simple but timeless message: Shut up.
Shut up about Pedro and how he’s the greatest pitcher on earth if his shoulder holds up. Shut up about Manny Ramirez not running out ground balls. And for God’s sake, shut up about how we got nothing in return for Roger Clemens seven years ago.
Shut up.
Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up.
Now look: I’ve been a sports fan my whole life and rooted for the Oakland A’s during the darkest days of that franchise. I am on intimate terms with the agonies of fandom. What’s more, I’ve traveled this fine country of ours and witnessed the behaviors of numerous sports habitats. It’s true that most fans are prone to complaint. But I hope you’ll believe me when I observe (with no intention to offend) that I have never encountered a group of fans as whiny, sanctimonious, and unforgiving as Red Sox Nation.
I have, of course, asked Red Sox fans to shut up on an individual basis. I have frequently asked my friend Zach to shut up. This is especially important because Zach is that saddest species of Red Sox fan: the rabid optimist. Last year, when the team leapt out to a 27–9 record, he was ready to set the rotation for the playoffs. Then, of course, the team did its usual late-summah swoon.
This is generally how it goes with the Sox. They start strong and finish weak. Part of the reason for this—according to me—is that the players simply get tired of listening to the fans, who are always one strike out, one bonehead error, one gopherball away from crying bloody murder. In short: The players would like the fans to shut up.
They can’t say this, though. Because if they did, the fans would go into that self-righteous how-dare-you-I-pay-good-money-to-watch-you-spoiled-brats mode that is even more tiresome than their usual tirades.
And here I think of my pal Artie, who actually does pay good money to see the Sox and occasionally (senselessly) invites me along to games. Oh, Artie! How sad it is to watch his transformation, from the guarded optimism of May to the disconsolate rage of August. This is a man, after all, who tapes every single Red Sox game he can’t watch live and gets furious if you tell him the score before he has a chance to watch.
Artie is the more common kind of Red Sox fan, the fatalist, and he knows he’s locked in a terrible cycle of self-punishment, but he’s helpless. He’s given a significant portion of his heart to the Sox and they have inflicted the standard crack down the middle, and there’s nothing he can do but yell at his television in blind aggravation.
The thing is, to a true Red Sox fan, the idea of shutting up is simply impossible. It’s become the entire raison d’etre of their allegiance. To allow the team’s flagrant and repeated misdeeds to go uncriticized would be, by their own twisted logic, to let the team down.
And the sort-of-beautiful-but-really-more-pathetic thing about being Red Sox fans is that they’ll never run out of things to bitch about. Because baseball is a game of endless mistakes, miscalculations, misfortunes; so sure, Varitek may go three for five on Tuesday with a nifty basket catch in front of the backstop. But on Wednesday, he’ll muff the throw down to second and the ball will go bounding into centerfield and Red Sox Nation will rise as one to denounce him.
It’s such a dysfunctional relationship.
In closing, I’d like the Red Sox Nation to consider a simple exercise in logic:
a) The Red Sox do not seem to improve when bitched about.
b) You bitch about them incessantly.
If you agree that a and b are true, then:
c) Shut up.
Which is why, as autumn came to New England, as the maples rid themselves of leaves, turning the sidewalks as bright as Van Goghs, I found myself in the dank interior of Casey’s Bar and Grill watching the A’s take the field against the Sox. (I was not watching with one of my Soxchotic friends, because we had all agreed—without exactly discussing the matter—that I had best seek other venues.)
Game One was a humdinger, pitting our ace Tim Hudson against his counterpart Pedro Martinez (known to Bostonians as Saint Pedro of the Contract Holdout), a wily flamethrower with a Jheri curl that dripped duende. The A’s scrapped out a run in the ninth9 to send the contest into extra frames where, in the twelfth, with two outs and the bags full, catcher Ramon Hernandez did something no A’s player had done since the heyday of Dwayne Murphy: He laid down a bunt of transcendent beauty. The ball dribbled down the third-base line. The entire bar let out a howl. Eric Chavez scampered home for the winning run, a walk-off bunt.
The clientele at Casey’s was by this time quite drunk and ex tremely belligerent, though I’m not sure that’s ever not the case, and I was careful to hold off on any celebration until I hit the sidewalk, at which point I ran down the street windmilling my arms and pounded the hood of my car repeatedly.
I switched bars for Game Two. The A’s pitched Barry Zito, whom I refer to as Baked Zito, based on my wishful theory that he smokes a lot of dope. Zito throws the most beautiful pitch in all of baseball, a curveball that loops toward the batter’s frontal cortex before diving into the strike zone. It’s a great deal of fun to watch a Zito curve, because hitters often buckle as they fight the impulse to bail out of the box. The Sox spent most of the afternoon in this mortifying posture. Zito struck out nine, and the A’s breezed.
I had enjoyed the first two games about as much as a human being can enjoy two sporting events, a pleasure prolonged by listening to the meatheads on WEEI, who, taken as a single sound track, produced the ferocious whingeing of a large machine with broken gears. It took a great deal of willpower for me not to call the station.
I watched Game Three in the lobby of a hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont. I was in Brattleboro for a literary festival, and this meant I was eating dinner with a large group of writers, some of them cute lady writers. It seemed to suggest some sad, uncultured things about me that I would choose to watch a baseball game rather than flirt with cute lady writers. And so, as is often the case in my life, I watched on the sly, sprinting back and forth from the table to the TV at the bar, offering as an excuse an unspecified family crisis, which, pathetically, for my dad and me, an A’s playoff game does constitute.
Of the many strange plays in this game, the strangest of them occurred in the sixth. Eric Byrnes, who had replaced Damon in center for the A’s, wound up on third with one out. The Fenway masses absolutely reviled Byrnes. This had something to do with his ostentatious high-kneed gait (the verb “flounce” seems to apply) and even more to do with his flowing blond locks, which I will admit lent him the aspect of a slightly effeminate wrestling villain. Nonetheless, he stood ninety feet away from knotting the game at one, and when shortstop Miguel Tejada hit a high bouncer, he bolted toward the plate, where Jason Varitek awaited him.10
Byrnes came screaming down the line. He had the throw beat by several feet. But Varitek, who was standing in front of home plate, did something, well, evil: At the last second—and I must emphasize this temporal aspect, at the last second—he stuck his left leg out so that his foot, in clear violation of the rules of baseball, as well as common sportsmanship, was blocking the base path. Unable to change course, Byrnes slid directly into the side of Varitek’s foot, which, anchored by his Brobdingnagian thigh, did not budge. Instead, Byrnes’s knee crumpled, and he went tumbling headfirst over home plate. The ball now arrived and bounded past Varitek (understandably distracted by his effort to cripple Byrnes) and skittered toward the backstop. Byrnes hobbled to his feet and initiated a spastic jig behind home plate. He did not pause to consider whether he had touched home plate, or whether he might wish to, for he was in the thrall of a primal playground drama: That motherfucker just tripped me. For ten long seconds, Byrnes hopped around behind the plate, shaking his blond locks in anguish and reaching down gingerly to confirm that his lower leg was still attached to the rest of his body. Nobody could quite figure out what was supposed to happen next. And then suddenly the cameras picked up Varitek, who had run to retrieve the ball and now bustled toward Byrnes and tagged him. In any sane universe, the ruling here would be obvious: Byrnes should have been awarded home plate and been granted the right to administer a lethal charley horse to Varitek. This being Fenway Park, and the opponent being my own A’s, the umpire called Byrnes out.
“Tough luck,” the bartender said.
Luck had nothing to do with it, but I nodded and returned to the table, where the writers were busily flinging bons mots and sniffing each other for coital ambitions.
The game ended in the bottom of the eleventh, when Boston’s Trot Nixon deposited a fastball into the right-field bleachers. Nixon had missed three weeks with a strained calf muscle, and thus the announcers were quick to compare this blow to the Gibson homer of 1986. Nixon himself, interviewed after the game, awarded the RBIs to God. It was Jesus up there swinging that bat, he told America, in the timeworn tradition of athletes who view the Kingdom of Heaven as an upscale suburb of Las Vegas.11
I LEFT VERMONT with my back in spasm (in retrospect, it may have been my soul) and drove directly to an establishment called the Good Times Emporium, which looks something like paradise as conceived by a juvenile delinquent. It is the size of an airplane hangar and contains 50,000 video games, most involving Uzis. Also: pool tables, paintball, batting cages, air hockey, bumper cars, a wide array of fried foods, and a service staff legally required to wear blouses that make visible the tattoos on their boobs. The TVs are the size of billboards.
I was aware of the looming psychological danger. The Lord God of Sport had announced His presence to me the night before in that exquisite tableau of injustice. My hope was that He had gotten it out of His system.
In the second, the A’s loaded the bases with no outs. Byrnes himself stepped to the plate and hit a towering fly ball down the right-field line. The fellow next to me produced a noise like a horse being punched in the stomach. But the ball tailed off at the last instant, and he missed his grand slam by half a foot. Byrnes went quietly, as did the next two batters.
This was a squander of the first magnitude, a very bad sign. But we still had Tim Hudson on the mound. As the A’s took the field for their half of the second, in fact, Hudson had gathered a small retinue around him. And then suddenly, Hudson was trudging toward the dugout while various Boston fans loudly speculated as to testicular endowment. The announcers eventually identified his injury as a strained oblique muscle. This struck me as appropriately oblique.12
On came Steve Sparks, a journeyman knuckleballer who had been released by the Detroit Tigers earlier in the year, not before helping that team set a major league record for losses. He promptly served up a gopher ball to Johnny Damon. It was now clear what was happening, no crystal ball necessary, and I began rooting—rather hysterically—for the Sox to break the game open.
Instead, the A’s fought back and found themselves up 4–3 with six outs to go. At this point, I turned to the least felonious-looking guy at the next table and said, “Don’t worry—the Sox will come back.” I was attempting a move patented by Floodie down in Miami: the rare double-reverse judo jinxball. Keith Foulke, the A’s closer, came on for the save. He retired his first two batters, then allowed the next two to reach
base.
Up came David Ortiz. Because of his girth and jovial on-field demeanor, the Boston DH is often compared to the animated character Shrek.13 Because he is also Dominican, the lily white Fenway rabble have taken to calling him “Big Papi,” one of those charming nicknames that no doubt make them feel very ethnic. Hitless in the series thus far, Papi whiffed at Foulke’s first two offerings. Foulke now drew a deep summoning breath and prepared to slam the door.
But that is not what happened. Instead, Ortiz began fouling off pitches, settling into his swing, timing Foulke. I could see this with agonizing clarity. Foulke, meanwhile, was descending into that invisible panic that afflicts A’s closers on the brink of a win that will deliver me unreasonable happiness. In the end, Ortiz worked the count full, then turned on an inside fastball that went screaming from the shaded infield into the blinding sun of right. Jermaine Dye, stationed ten yards too shallow, sprinted back toward the track. All around me, Sox fans rose to their feet. I could hear them cursing softly, making choked sounds of prayer. Dye turned first one way, then the other. He raked the air with his gloved hand, like a man frantically searching for the ripcord to his parachute. It was a very long line drive. At last, Dye leaped, a valiant and hopeless gesture. Ball met earth at the base of the wall and thudded and jittered. Both men aboard scored and Shrek the Rapist pulled into third, panting.
The entire population of the Good Times Emporium began chanting Paaaapi! Paaaapi! Young toughs of various ethnic flavors, boys who, on any other occasion, might have been happily knifing one another in the parking lot, were instead exchanging high fives and sloppy hugs, while I sat in a putrid cloud, breathing in the fried cheese sticks and chicken wings left to sit and the thousand happy beer burps offered up into the smoky air.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Game Five, I had a dream, and in this dream my father called to say the A’s had lost 7–2, but that it was all right, they would be allowed to go to the Series anyway, an assurance that suffused me with irrational serenity. The amateur psychoanalysts among you will recall that ’72 was the first of the A’s three consecutive championships, and the year my condition was born. Thus, the dream marks the wished-for return to a prelapsarian state in which father and son are reunited and the A’s always win, even when they lose.