My two sports loves are the Red Sox (since 1986) and the men’s basketball team at the University of Illinois (my alma mater), and together they pretty much occupy me year-round. When baseball season ends in October, it’s time for college basketball, and when the Final Four is done, opening day of baseball season is upon us.
You could not write this story any better, and if you tried to pass it off as fiction, you’d get buried in rejection slips. The tale of the 2004 Boston Red Sox – who won the World Series (and the team’s first championship since 1918) on October 27 – is among many other things a beautifully constructed narrative.
Because I haven’t even posted what I wrote about the World Champion Boston Red Sox – yes, a thank-you card is appropriate for that withholding – I offer you this, which effectively captures my emotional state as it relates to baseball. I’m not quite this bad, but … I do seem reticent to move on.
Sports, of course, don’t matter. They never have. Whether your team wins or loses doesn’t change the realities of your life – your job, your relationships, your health. Well, it shouldn’t. But there are contexts in which sports is truly, deeply meaningful.
It’s a chilly autumn night in Boston. Halloween. Game seven of the World Series. And out of the Red Sox bullpen comes … Mike Myers. A nice confluence, eh?
One of the fun elements of baseball (more than probably any other sport) is that it has a statistical richness through which one can completely divorce oneself from subjectivity. Take, for example, my beloved Boston Red Sox, who through May, June, and July were accused regularly of being playoff pretenders, to the point of being more than 10½ games behind the God-Damned, Mother-Fucking New York Yankees on August 16.
In 1999, the person I’d just started dating commented in an e-mail that every time she read the Stephen King essay about baseball, she knew what it felt like to be one of those little leaguers, even though she (at the time) knew little of baseball and less of little league. I was struck immediately: It’s not how I felt in little league.
The irony of the success of Michael Lewis’ wonderful Moneyball is that it should bring the Oakland A’s back to earth. The justice is that Oakland’s demise doesn’t appear imminent. This is baseball, after all, and there’s no reason to change something just because it’s never worked very well.
