Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Aliens in Red Sox Nation

April 3, 2005 ©


It’s Opening Day, and for the first time in years I don’t know how to think about the Red Sox.

Actually, it’s Opening Night, because the reigning Gods of Baseball – i.e., the television moguls – have decreed that the Yankees and the Sox will open the season at 8 p.m. on a Sunday night before the first daffodil has opened in New York City. Happily, the 55,000 fans who show up will not have put away their winter coats.
The absence of sunshine aside, it’s an important and intriguing day for Red Sox Nation, because it’s not just the opening day of the 2005 season – it’s the opening day of a new era. For the first time since 1918, the Sox are World Champions.

I’m a naturalized citizen of the Nation. Citizenship is a birthright for everyone born and raised east of New Haven and north of Fishers Island; the New England gene pool is suffused with loyalty to the Sox, just as an affinity for pork barbecue is indigenous to North Carolina. Naturalized status is offered to fans whose devotion to the Red Sox was implanted after birth – often as the result of attending one of the hundreds of schools or colleges in the area. Successful aspirants generally must display several ticket stubs for the bleacher sections at Fenway Park, be able to identify the team’s current and legendary stars by the numbers on their home uniforms (there are no names), and show proof of having survived two or three especially brutal New England winters.

I first began to think about applying for naturalization in 1969. In February that year I reported to Newport, Rhode Island, where the U.S. Navy hoped, against formidable odds, to transform me from a newly-minted civilian lawyer into a credible lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General Corps. I arrived shaking and fatigued by a harrowing six-and-a-half hour drive from New Haven through a blinding ocean-fueled snowstorm. By the time I reached Providence, drifts covered the fire hydrants. That night, as I shivered in my bunk in a spartan BOQ, plows piled up banks of snow that buried automobiles.

Over the next two weeks, as my unmilitary colleagues and I learned to salute and wear a uniform, the snow froze solid as granite and turned from white to gray to sooty black. Newport’s icy streets were as rutted as wagon tracks. The skies were perpetually leaden. Except on Friday nights, when I drank Guinness with my new friends and listened to a local picker named Roger Sprung play Scruggs-style banjo at a waterside firetrap called The Black Pearl, my spirits were as low as the clouds that hung over Newport.

After about a month a pale sun finally emerged. Under its feeble warmth the rock-hard snowbanks slowly began to shrink, turning the traffic lanes into sloppy sluices that undercoated my car with a corrosive mixture of dirty water and dissolved rock salt. A few hours of sunshine wasn’t much, especially when set against the descriptions of azaleas and dogwood in letters from home and from an on-again, off-again girlfriend in Florida, but it was enough to get me out of my room to run errands on a Saturday afternoon.

As I drove around the sodden, pot-holed streets, I flipped on my car radio. To my utter and pleasant surprise, I was greeted by the soothing Southside Virginia accents of the late Ned Martin, welcoming Red Sox fans to the first game of the spring training season. With the elegant ease that I would quickly come to cherish, Martin chatted with his broadcast partner, Ken Coleman, about the warmth of the Florida sun, the lushness of the infield grass and the hopes of the season to come. In the background I could hear the crack of bats meeting grooved batting practice pitches and the aimless chatter of fortunate fans who had temporarily retreated, or perhaps permanently retired, from the tenacious New England winters.

My spirits rose with Martin’s voice as the Red Sox took the field for the top of the first. In my mind’s eye I could see the players loping out to their positions in their white home uniforms with the red block numbers as plainly as I could see the Newport parking meters emerging from the receding snowbanks. My heart leaped. If spring training had come, could spring itself be far behind?

As it turned out, it could. In North Carolina spring begins around the middle of March (sometimes sooner), reaches its peak in April, and lasts until late May or early June. In New England, I found, it begins around the last day of the Stanley Cup playoffs and ends about a week later. Opening Day in Boston occurs at a time of year when Fenway Park’s grass and left field wall often are the only two green things to be seen in Massachusetts – a circumstance that makes both all the more special.

On that day in Newport, of course, my knowledge of The Truth about Spring lay in the future. What I did know was that Boston was to be my duty station when I completed the Navy’s little finishing school. On a reconnaissance visit the city had seemed a bit decrepit and the traffic terrifying, but my concerns were offset by the knowledge that for the first time in my life, I was going to be living in a major league city. As I realized that the broadcast I was hearing would likely be only the first of many – perhaps very many – mild euphoria swept over me, because in my experience baseball and the radio were inextricably and happily linked.

Growing up in the North Carolina Piedmont hundreds of miles from any city that had a major league team, I satisfied my craving for baseball by learning all the places on the AM dial where, if my tuner was sufficiently sensitive and the weather conditions were right, I could listen to far-off games. Strange as it may seem to those who have grown up in an ESPN world, the only baseball on television in those days was the Saturday afternoon “Game of the Week,” which functioned principally as a showcase for the Yankees and as a vehicle for Dizzy Dean to reminisce with Pee Wee Reese about the 1934 Cardinals. Otherwise, radio broadcasts and newspaper box scores were our only sources of information about the day-to-day exploits of the players whose bubble gum cards we collected and stored in shoe boxes. I mostly listened to games on a modest table radio that my parents allowed me to keep in my room, but in the summer of 1954 my cousin and discovered that our maternal grandfather’s new Chevrolet Bel Air had an especially powerful radio that functioned independently of the ignition. For several humid nights running we sneaked out to the driveway and lay in the front seat turning the dial in search of games. About two weeks after he brought the car home, my grandfather went out to drive to his store in the morning and found the battery dead as Kelsey’s mule. If Pa-Pa ever figured out the cause, it surely wasn’t because we owned up.

No matter what radio we listened to, we knew all of the key spots on the dial. At 1120, KMOX in St. Louis brought the delightful combination of Jack Buck’s cerebral play-by-play and the breathless commentary of Harry Caray, whose Chicago sainthood lay in the unforeseeable future. Buck was always calm and slightly understated, but Caray’s perpetual hoarseness would soar into another register when Stan Musial was at bat with men on base, or when Bob Gibson punched out an opposing batter with one of his 100-mile-an-hour BBs. At 810, WGY in Schenectady carried the Yankees broadcasts, which paired Red Barber’s melodic drawl with Mel Allen’s urbane urgency. My personal favorite, though, was KDKA in Pittsburgh (1020), where Bob Prince and Jim Woods brazenly promoted both the home town beer (Iron City) and the home town team. In those days the Pirate lineup featured a gritty infield that included second baseman Bill Mazeroski, shortstop Dick Groat and third baseman Don (“the Tiger”) Hoak; meanwhile, the incomparable Roberto Clemente elegantly patrolled right field and a good bit of center. Every now and then favorable conditions in the ether would grant us a brief audience with Ernie Harwell in Detroit or Jack Brickhouse in Chicago. In the late 50s and early 60s, long before cable, color or instant replays, I lay in bed and listened to these great voices turn distant double plays and home runs into words that played back as moving pictures in my mind’s eye.

Because baseball players occupy essentially static positions, a skilled radio announcer allows us to see in our heads what he sees on the field. Great radio play-by-play men such as Marty Glickman or Kaywood Ledford could convey the drama and pace of football and basketball, and a Chick Hearn or Bill Currie could evoke the thrill and skill of a great play, but the fluidity and chaos inherent in those sports render our cerebral images impressionistic at best. Our mental movies of a baseball radio broadcast are sharper; stimulated by the crisp verbal cues of a Vin Scully or Jon Angel, our minds can conjure a 6-4-3 double play or a blistered liner down the left field line as clearly and as quickly as images of our own children. In addition, baseball’s congenital pauses allow born storytellers like Martin and Barber to reflect on the mood of the crowd, describe the weather, muse about the future of the rookie just called up from the minors, and establish a million one-way friendships with their listeners.

As I drove around Newport on that day more than 35 years ago, the innate synergy between baseball and radio allowed Ned Martin’s word pictures to draw my mind away from the dreary scene visible through my grungy windshield and see, with him, the sunny symmetry of a Florida baseball diamond. From that day on, my radio was perpetually tuned to WHDH, and I seldom missed a broadcast.

By June 1 I had settled into a nondescript apartment near Boston College and was busy learning the aggressive defensiveness and expanded repertoire of gestures required to survive in Boston traffic. That night I headed for Fenway Park to meet John and Maureen Brennan, friends from Carolina days who had informally agreed to oversee my cultural orientation to one of America’s most idiosyncratic cities. They already had introduced me to Lechmere’s and attempted to explain the vagaries of Massachusetts street-naming; now it was time for my first Red Sox game.

From our seats behind first base I surveyed a scene that I had seen previously only in photos. Like all Fenway first-timers, I was startled by the actual height of the green wall in left field and mesmerized by the Citgo advertisement patiently repeating its neon sequences beyond it. The Jimmy Fund sign on the façade above the Pesky Pole in right field, the brick-red infield, and the outfield’s quirky contours were vivified by greasy odors wafting up from the concession stands and the “beah heah!” shouts of the hustling vendors. I realized instantly that the picture I had carried in my head wasn’t vivid enough; the grass was greener, the lights brighter and the air sweeter than I had dared imagine. With the first swallow of a cold Narragansett, all tension drained out of my body.

Over the next two and a half hours the Sox, bolstered by a 4-for-4 night from local hero Tony Conigliaro, put the Twins away, 5-2. When Conigliaro belted a solo home run off of Jim Perry, a North Carolina native, the sound of the bat on the ball was like scraps of two-by-fours being slapped together. My only disappointment was that Carl Yastrzemski, who had started his professional career hitting .377 for Raleigh in the Carolina League, went 0 for 4; otherwise, the evening was sublime.

Happy as I was, I had no inkling that I would look back on the day as the luckiest of my life. When the game ended, John and Maureen and I debouched through Kenmore Square with the celebrating fans headed for the “T” and continued east, winding up at an oyster bar on Boylston Street. As we sipped our draft beer and waited for our clam chowder, Maureen spied a co-worker from the physical therapy department at Mass General. “She’s really cute,” she said, pointing across the room. “Would you like to meet her?”

“Sure,” I replied, “why not?”

Why not, indeed? I was newly arrived, slightly intimidated by my unfamiliar surroundings, and lonely. The future prospects for my quixotic Florida connection were uncertain at best. I was happy to meet anybody, especially if she was cute, so Maureen waved her friend over. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to meet the person with whom I would spend the rest of my life.

My first meeting with Marilyn was brief, but my recollection of it is vivid. She WAS cute. In fact, she was damn cute – and still is. What struck me instantly was the positivism and good cheer that resonated in her lyrical voice and unforced smile. She was small, animated and friendly.[1] In a time and place where long hair was de regieur for young women, hers was short, like Audrey Hepburn’s. She probably was at our table less than a minute, but in that minute she made a hell of an impression.

My reaction must have been palpable, because as she walked away, Maureen said, “Maybe I could invite the two of you over for dinner.”

“When,” I said, “did you have in mind?”

After a disjointed courtship that included bleacher dates at Fenway, a three-month separation while Marilyn toured Europe with a friend, and a severely broken leg resulting from my first (and last) ski trip, we were married 13 months later. By then the Sox had finished third behind Baltimore and Detroit, selected Dwight Evans in the amateur draft, and led the league in attendance. A new season was underway, but thanks to a May slump the team’s won-loss record was hovering around .500. Meanwhile, the Bruins and Bobby Orr had won the Stanley Cup, thereby relegating the Red Sox and Yaz to the back pages of the Globe’s sports section. I was jogging on the path around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir on Mother’s Day afternoon when Orr, who arguably was the most talented professional athlete in the world at the time, scored the winning overtime goal against the St. Louis Blues. Passersby and picnickers whooped at the news, and within five minutes the surrounding streets and sidewalks were bedlam as people poured out of their apartments and houses to celebrate.

A week after our wedding Marilyn and I arrived at my new duty station in Bermuda. Baseball receded to the back of my mind as we explored the beautiful island, made new friends, searched for (and finally found) an apartment, and tested our new roles as husband and wife. In those pre-satellite days the Bermuda television stations offered only taped programs that were several days old, so the Sox could be followed only by radio and newspapers. At night, powerful AM radio stations on the East Coast could be heard clearly in Bermuda, and one of them, WTIC in Hartford, carried the Sox network. Northwest Airlines, which ran direct flights to the island from Boston, delivered a few copies of the Globe every afternoon. Although these two sources allowed me to keep reasonably close touch with the Red Sox, Bermuda’s and Marilyn’s combined charms made it difficult to pay attention to a team that was on its way to finishing 21 games behind the Orioles, even with Yaz batting .329 and stroking 40 home runs.

The next year was another lackluster season, but in 1972 the Sox came close – closer, in fact, than any second-place finisher in major league history. Owing to an early season player’s strike that canceled 86 games, none of which was rescheduled, the teams played unequal numbers of games. This bizarre circumstance allowed the Red Sox to become the only team in history to lose their division or league race by half a game.[2] I didn’t know it then, but this was not to be the last time a Sox season would end in disappointment on the last day.

Early in 1973, almost four years to the day after I drove to Newport through the snowstorm, the Navy released me from active duty. With a newborn in arms, Marilyn and I arrived in Raleigh to begin a new phase of our lives. No station in the Red Sox radio network had a signal that reached us, so for the next few years we followed baseball primarily through the box scores and brief game summaries in The News & Observer. Television, which we had gotten out of the habit of watching while living in Bermuda, didn’t matter, because baseball coverage was still rare; after all, ESPN was still six years into the future, the Fox network was not yet a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s eye, and Raleigh didn’t have cable anyway. For the Red Sox to be seen on television where we lived, they had to do something special.

In 1975, they did. Sparked by the arrival of Fred Lynn, who became the first player in major league history to win the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards in the same year, the Sox finished 4½ games ahead of the Orioles. During the last month of the season, as the team made its stretch run to the division championship, subscribed to the Globe by mail in order to read the daily game stories by Peter Gammons, who had worked with me at The Daily Tar Heel. We watched on our 10-inch black-and-white set as the Red Sox swept the A’s in the American League playoff series and took on Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in the World Series.

On the night of game six, which was postponed three days from its scheduled date because of rain, we kept a long-standing commitment to go out to dinner with friends who were visiting from England. Our visitors, of course, had no concept of the importance of the Series and no appreciation of my devotion to the Red Sox. Between courses at what was then the only decent French restaurant in the area, I surreptitiously followed the game’s progress by ducking out to the parking lot to catch snatches on my car radio. On the drive home Bernie Carbo tied the game with his two-out, three-run, pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the eighth. We arrived back in our kitchen in time to see Carlton Fisk do his now-famous dance along the first base line as he pleaded for the most famous home run in Red Sox history to stay fair.

Alas, the next day the Sox lost, 4-3. I was beginning to see a pattern that would play out again and again over the next three decades.

In 1978, the Red Sox started hot, stayed hot, and led the Yankees by 14 games in mid-July. Then they began to stumble. The Yankees won a remarkable 52 of their last 73 games to finish 99-63. The Sox, who had fallen behind by mid-September, tied them and forced a one-game playoff by winning 11 of their last 13, including eight in a row to end the season. On October 2, I brought a TV set from home and sat alone in my law office watching Boston’s early lead disappear as Bucky F. Dent’s cheesy little home run, which would have been a routine fly out in any other ballpark, cleared the Green Monster. As we say in North Carolina, it was “like getting bit by your own dog.”

For the next seven seasons Red Sox highlights were few and far between. Except for the strike-shortened 1981 season, when the Sox wound up with the second best won-loss record in the American League, the team floundered. Carl Yastrzemski got his 3000th hit in 1979 and executed one of the most graceful retirements in baseball history in 1983. By the time he stepped down, Yaz had played in 3,308 games – third most in major league history – and had been to bat almost 12,000 times. Although he had spectacular seasons (he won the Triple Crown in 1967, and no one has done it since), the hallmarks of Yastrzemski’s career were durability and doggedness; he showed up every day and gave 100%, even on days when some of his teammates were just going through the motions.

During these years the installation of cable and the advent of ESPN expanded the available coverage of major league baseball, but the Red Sox, whose won-loss percentage hovered around .500, still didn’t get much face time with the cameras. Nevertheless, the team steadily became more talented and seasoned, thanks to the arrival of players like Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens. Absorbed in work and children, and lacking the convenience of radio broadcasts that could be followed with one ear cocked for the telltale noise of the occasional dramatic development, I charted the team’s lackluster seasons primarily through the daily newspaper box scores. (A box score, to my way of thinking, is a schizophrenic device in that it tells you everything you want to know about the game except what really happened.) On our occasional trips to visit Marilyn’s relatives in Massachusetts, however, we made pilgrimages to Fenway. Once we lost Graham in the crowd for several panicked minutes and eventually found him sitting contentedly atop the Red Sox dugout, where a friendly security man had placed him in the confident assurance that his parents would see him and come to get him.

On April 29, 1986 Clemens set a major league record by striking out 20 Seattle batters in a game. He finished the season 24 and 4 and won both the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player Awards as the Sox finished 5½ games ahead of he Yankees in the American League East. In game five of the league championship series the California Angels were one strike away from the World Series when Boston’s Dave Henderson homered with Rich Gedman on first to put the Red Sox ahead, 6-5. The Sox went on to win the game and the league championship, but in game six of the World Series against the Mets, the playoff miracle reversed itself. Marilyn and I sat in an open-sided, thatch-roofed bar in Saint Maarten at watched with mounting anticipation as the Red Sox, who were up three games to two, arrived within a single strike of Winning It All in the top of the tenth inning. I sipped my Mount Gay and thought, “When they win, I’m going to order champagne.” Then our pent-up joy steadily turned to horror as the Sox, who were ahead 5-3 with two out, two men on and a count of two strikes on the batter, let it all slip through their fingers – and under Bill Buckner’s glove.

Here’s how it happened. The game went into extra innings tied 3-3. Henderson led off the top of the tenth with a home run, and the Sox scored another run on a Wade Boggs double and a Marty Barrett single. In the bottom of the tenth, Red Sox reliever Calvin Shiraldi retired the first two Met batters. One more out and the Sox would win the Series. Then Gary Carter and Kevin Mitchell singled. Shiraldi got two quick strikes on Ray Knight. Now one more strike would end it, but Knight scratched out a single, scoring Carter and moving Mitchell to third. Bob Stanley came in to pitch to Mookie Wilson. With the count 2-1, Wilson fouled off three pitches in a row. Then Stanley unleashed a wild pitch, allowing Mitchell to come home and tie the score. Knight moved to second on the play. With the count 3-2, Wilson sent a slow roller down the first base line. I breathed a quick sigh of relief; the score was tied, but we were out of the inning. Somehow, however, the ball slipped under Buckner’s glove and kept on rolling down the right field line. When Knight scored, night fell on the Red Sox’ hopes. Yes, there was another game to be played, but somehow we all knew, deep down, that the Red Sox would lose it. They did, 8-5.

For Sox fans, the years from 1987 to 2004 were seasons of frustration in which brilliant individual performances by Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez regularly were coupled with near-misses by the team. The Sox won their division again in 1988 and 1990, only to be swept in the ALCS both years by Oakland. In 1995, they won the division again, only to be swept again in the playoffs – this time by the Indians, who ran Boston’s playoff losing streak to 13. In 1998, the Sox won 92 games but finished a stunning 22 games behind the Yankees, who won 114. As the wild-card team in the American League playoffs, they broke their post-season losing streak by beating the Indians in the opening game, but lost the series. The next year they closed the gap behind Nomar Garciaparra’s league-leading .357 batting average and Pedro Martinez’s 23 wins, but still finished four games behind New York. After rallying from a two-game deficit to beat the Indians in five games, they lost to the Yankees in the championship series. In 2000 Nomar (.372) led the league in batting again, and Martinez won the Cy Young Award, but the Yankees won the division for the third consecutive season, this time by two and a half games. In 2001 and 2002 the story was the same: the Yankees won the division, and the Red Sox finished second.

Our memories of the dramatic conclusions to the 2003 and 2004 seasons are too recent and too vivid to warrant detailed discussion here. The eleventh-inning, seventh-game walk-off home run by Aaron Boone (whatever happened to that guy?) that ended the 2003 ALCS was a Dent-like stab to the heart that seemingly proved the truth of something I had once written about being a Red Sox fan:

"Red Sox fans are people who have confronted, and accepted, truths that Yankee fans have not (and probably never will): that life has more vicissitudes than victories; that the journey is often more rewarding than the destination; that long-term loyalty is more important than transient glory; that arrogance and vanity are not only unbecoming, but also unreliable; and that misery really does love company."

Then, last year, everything changed. In 2004, the Red Sox won even more dramatically than they lost in ’67, ’75 and ’86. The Curse was vanquished. Next week the World Championship flag will fly at Fenway.

What does this mean? Will Red Sox fans still be bound together by a camaraderie born of shared tragedy? Can I still trust a stranger just because he’s wearing the familiar blue cap with the red “B”? Or has Red Sox Nation been invaded by opportunistic aliens whose hearts have never been broken?

And what about the team? Has the taste of victory champagne dulled their taste for winning? Will Pedro’s departure lessen the creative tension that fueled their competitive instincts? Was “the Curse” a load, or a goad?

As I said, things have changed; I just don’t know how. We’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, play ball.

[1] Over the years friends and colleagues frequently have referred to Marilyn as “pert” or “perky,” but I have eschewed those adjectives in recent years because the former one came to be identified with a popular shampoo and its spokesperson, Dorothy Hamill, whereas the latter usually is applied to Katie Couric and thus has become a synonym for “annoyingly ingratiating” – which Marilyn decidedly is not. She’s just nice.

[2] The Sox finished with 85 wins and 70 losses. The Tigers, who lost to Oakland in the American League playoff series, finished 86 and 70.