Everyone deserves a story like this: on a mild spring morning, Father and Son take a trip into town. The first stop is the dentist’s office, the site of Son’s most recent victory in his ongoing war against the unfamiliar. An explosive tantrum had successfully repelled the enemy from his mouth; ever since, Son has enjoyed peace as he refines his strategy in preparation for the next campaign. Then, without warning, the unfamiliar wages a cunning counterattack: Son is offered a trip to the ballpark, but only on the condition that he lay down his arms and make peace with the dentist.
The ballpark! Son’s battle-hardened resolve disappears at the mention of the word Fenway — a name as fanciful as those with which Father decorates his bedtime stories: Zanzibar, Far Rockaway, Fez. After a moment of deliberation, Son warily accepts the deal and stifles his protests during the check-up. As he and Father leave for the ballpark, the dentist turns to them with a prediction: " Jim Rice will hit a home run. "
The unfamiliar keeps up its end of the ceasefire by generating acts of mysterious friendliness. When Father tells the ticket-seller that it’s Son’s first trip to Fenway, the man winks and conjures up a pair of box seats located just behind the Red Sox dugout. As they reach the top of the runway, Son sees Zanzibar for the first time. His eyes eagerly fall on the symmetries of this perfectly groomed garden, the towering permanence of the skyscraping walls, the steel scaffolds that seem to support whole constellations. Everything is impossible, and yet it’s right there in front of him: the speed of the ball as it’s pitched and hit, the comforting chatter of strangers, the uniformed men who offer soda and candy. Then, just as Son is beginning to get cranky, Jim Rice comes to the plate and hits one up and over, a long weightless moment during which all the anxieties of the unfamiliar calmly dissolve into daydream. Home run.
But no one deserves a story like this: two brothers spend a summer following the Red Sox as the team chases the pennant. Together in their bedroom, the two build a shrine from baseball cards; its arrangement depends on the team’s batting order. These icons form a pantheon wherein each player comes to embody a heroic trait. There’s the tight-lipped strong man, the wily veteran, the painstaking technician, the erratically brilliant space shot. These archetypes, equal parts Greek myth and A-Team, are the center of a homemade superstition: the brothers believe that the players’ powers can be unleashed only if the cards are ritually sacrificed as the targets of their rubber-band gun.
Their supervision pays off, and the Sox are in first place all summer. They win on errors and walks, on batters hit by pitches, on runs scored when two of their base runners end up on the same base, so confusing the fielder that he throws the ball away. On the day the Sox clinch the pennant, the brothers make like the team and throw themselves into a giddy pig-pile. The playoffs stoke their expectations to a frantic level. The rubber-band ritual demands a sharpshooter’s concentration, especially as the team starts losing. With one game standing between the boys’ Sox and the abyss, the team’s centerfielder leaps over the wall to rob the opposition of a homer, only to have the ball — and their hopes — drop from his glove. But then, in a Hollywood reversal that the brothers wouldn’t have dared dream up, the same centerfielder redeems himself by hitting one out of the park in the ninth inning to win the game.
All across New England, disbelief is suspended as the Red Sox come within a game, an inning, an out, a strike, of the World Series. Champagne is brought to the team’s clubhouse. The broadcasters announce that pitcher Bruce Hurst has won the Series MVP award and that President Reagan plans to phone his congratulations. The brothers rejoice as they realize their team has been chosen. They don’t think to notice that the same miracle they’d ecstatically welcomed is slowly being worked in reverse. They can’t imagine the pain that will forever be linked to the names Buckner, Stanley, and McNamara. How could they have known that the Red Sox eat their young?
These are both true stories, and they’re both the same story, one in which innocent hopes are inextricably linked to the consuming stain of disillusionment. But it’s not just my story. Sit in the Fenway grandstand during any home game, and you’re as likely to hear para-intellectual rhapsodies about the park’s timelessness as you are to hear lug-headed tirades about who blew what and when. The Red Sox hold promises for everyone but satisfy no one. Every fan has a charmed-life Fenway story — why else the teary, righteous campaign to save a stadium in which the seats are like Ewok lawn furniture? By the same token, there isn’t a fan alive who can’t tell you what he spilled or what she threw at the television when the ball rolled between Bill Buckner’s legs.
What with all this agony and ecstasy, the Red Sox have made even the most hardened sportswriters lapse into bathos-drenched cliché. Trying to fathom the team’s fortunes is like being a half-wit in a hurricane, stuttering before the inexplicable. If you think it’s an exaggeration to say this borders on spiritual dread, find another city where Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is regularly invoked to describe a road trip. Or turn on talk radio after a bad Sox-Yankees game, and count the seconds until you hear a caller talk about growing up Catholic or Jewish. It’s less farfetched than it sounds, when you consider the amount of shame and guilt involved. This is why the stories of Sox fans always sound like addiction memoirs. You never really recover.
I wish I could say I walked away from everything that happened to me as a childhood Red Sox fan, but it’s not as simple as that. Like many, I had seen too much, too young. So much of my youth was spent hostage to the team that I couldn’t help identifying with my captors. The best example of my twisted dependency was the night in April when, as the drizzle turned to a freezing slush-fog, they blew their lead in the second game of a double-header, sending it into extra innings. How can I explain that at the time, this seemed like a bonus? I greeted the eighth consecutive hour of baseball from within the slush-fog of my own dazed, powerless serenity. If they were still playing now, I’d still be there.
It would take something drastic to jar me from this paralytic attachment. The day it all changed was a June matinee against Toronto. We sat a few rows back of the Pesky Pole in right field and watched contentedly as the Sox slugged their way to a 10-0 lead after five innings. Then, out of nowhere, someone turned on the tractor beam and the Sox were pulled toward their doom with the sickening, slo-mo inevitability of a bad dream. A few gopher balls later, the Jays were within eight, then six, then four. Someone behind us said, " You know what has to happen now. " A chorus answered, " Grand slam, " and within minutes the bases were loaded and, as if scripted, a long fly ball made its way towards the pole. As it closed in on us, I realized I had a shot at catching a home-run ball for the first time. But I couldn’t move. To this day, I don’t know if I froze in fear that a vengeful God was getting off at our expense, awed by my team’s matchless skill in finding new ways to blow it, or in revulsion by how profoundly retarded it was ever to have cared about this bunch of incompetent wankers.
I wish I could say I left right then, but I stayed as the Sox went on to tie, then lose, in extra innings. But while I couldn’t extricate myself, I could stop letting it go to my head. So instead I started watching baseball as theater of the absurd. There’s no better place for it. Whether it’s the history, the media, the fans, or the 80-year-old plumbing in the Red Sox clubhouse, there’s something about the team that routinely causes bizarre deformations of character.
Take, for example, Steve Lyons, who came to Boston a utility infielder and left a few years later as " Psycho, " a nickname he earned by snacking on dog biscuits in the dugout. He made the local sports pages a few years later when he lost his pants sliding into second base. Lyons’s tour with the Sox coincided with that of Oil Can Boyd, the first athlete I’d ever known to talk about himself in the third person. When the Can didn’t make the all-star team in 1986, he flipped out so severely that management suspended him and sent him to the hospital for supervision.
It could be that the cloud of fatality around the team attracts would-be heroes. How else do you account for Mike Greenwell, a redneck he-man whose off-season training regimen involved alligator wrestling in the Florida Everglades? That doesn’t account, though, for wack-jobs like Carl Everett, who last year dragged a Boston Globe reporter into a heated argument when the writer questioned Everett’s assertion that dinosaurs never existed.
Of course, baseball has a storied tradition of crackpots, going back to Rube Waddell, a pitcher who once missed a start because he’d gotten wrapped up in a game of marbles with local street urchins. The Rube was so simple that he would leave the mound to chase fire trucks; opposing fans would distract him by dangling shiny objects when he started his wind-up. During the Carl Yastrzemski era, the Sox bullpen featured the one player who’s come closer than anyone to Waddell’s legend –– Bill " Spaceman " Lee. In his autobiography The Wrong Stuff (Viking Press, 1984), Lee writes that the secret of his success was a mixture of " the blind-frog theory of sexual awareness " and the Zen belief that " you are the ball and the ball is you. " Lee claims that the ultimate reliever would be a Tibetan monk, before going on to describe how he once got so high on hash that he spent an hour letting the doors of an elevator open and close on him.
If the true unit of Red Sox team history is the psychiatric case study, the most illustrious patient is Wade Boggs. Most people know Boggs as the borderline autistic who spent five hours before game time following a meticulous schedule in which each of his warm-up rituals was scripted to the minute. It’s a lesser-known fact, however, that Boggs was the nation’s first celebrity sex addict. After his long-time mistress published a serialized exposé of their exploits (revealing, among other things, that his batting average was 10 points higher when she wasn’t wearing panties), Boggs tearfully admitted his condition during an interview with Barbara Walters. Boggs is guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame, but he’s already garnered a far more selective honor: a personalized nameplate on a barstool at Rumors, the lounge at the Howard Johnson’s near the old Sox spring-training camp in Florida.
While my policy of bemused nonintervention has helped me overcome my childhood trauma and lead a productive life, the time has come finally to take a stand. With the Sox under new ownership, the future of Fenway will undoubtedly be the subject of even heavier speculation. Some would like to see the ballpark kept as a shrine to innocence passed, while others think the only way to purge its cursed history is to demolish it. To many, these views might seem irreconcilable, but not to one with an intimate understanding of what it means to grow up a Red Sox fan. I hereby step forward to propose a bold compromise: let the fans tear the park down. The embittered will enjoy the catharsis of taking a sledge to the place, while the tenderhearted can keep parts of the Green Monster for souvenirs. As for the owners, they can use the insurance settlement to finance the construction of the new ballpark. We’d be doing them, and ourselves, a great service.
Andrew Weiner can be reached at andrewweiner@earthlink.net
