No, It's Not Time to Let Fenway Go

Yesterday, Boston Herald writer Steve Buckley wrote a column urging the Sox to replace Fenway. Today, someone from Sports Illustrated - although damned if I can find it again - echoed Buckley's statements, calling for the old park to bite the dust in favor something new, modern, and more comfortable. The topic is, of course, one that arouses great passions in partisans of both sides of the debate, but I have to wonder: what set off the hate to begin with? Buckley himself calls Fenway "a palace" when comparing it to the park's appearance a mere 10 years ago and while it's true that it's the team and more than the locale that keeps the ticket sales high, I wouldn't go so far as to say that going to watch a good team in a crappy stadium is fun. The late 80s/early 90s Athletics - for example - might have been excellent teams, but I'd hazard a guess that their fans would have enjoyed the games even more if the team wasn't housed in the Coliseum.

To my mind, there are two reasons why scrapping Fenway is a bad idea:

1. The Practical Reason. Have you seen the economy recently? Think ticket prices at Fenway are bad now? Imagine what they'd be like if the ownership pulled a Steinbrenner and turned most of the park into luxury seating to recoup the losses of construction. In fact, that's probably an optimistic view, because even the Red Sox don't have the resources the Yankees can generate.
   
   
2. The Emotional Reason. To defame Fenway is to forget one thing: Red Sox fans - and in some ways, Bostonians in general - are defined by the history of the team and their city. Do you remember in 2001 when Dan Shaughnessy said the Yankees deserved to win the World Series because the Pheonix newspapers were handing out guides to baseball and the Diamondbacks didn't have the proper sense of history? An asinine thing to say, to be sure, but the point is that his statement was emblematic of how closely Sox fans look at the history of the game. And while some of that historical obsession came from years of near-miss ineptitude, the feeling is still part of the culture of Red Sox Nation. We can't tear down Fenway, the shrine to the successes and failures of our team, our living link with the oh-so-important past: it would be tearing out a piece of ourselves; a piece that could never be replaced with wide-load injection molded seats with three feet of leg room and two cupholders, no matter how comfortable.
   

A-Rod Makes History, Still a Douche

I was watching the Yankees/Rays game on ESPN and... ugh... rooting for the Yankees (I just puked in my mouth a little) and I saw some history.

In the top of the 9th with the Yankees already up 6-3 (so it wasn't really clutch), A-Rod launches a fly ball over the left field pole. Called a homer... but WAIT... they will use INSTANT REPLAY!!! For the first time ever they reviewed a home run call with technology and not the eye ball method that has been in use since the 1700's when they threw an onion and hit it with an ivory cane.

The result? Well... I couldn't really tell. But the umps seemed to find enough evidence to keep it fair and the Yankees ended up winning 8-4 and got the Sox another game closer to the Rays.

So, thanks A-Rod! You douche.

Watching History Unawares

I was in the gym this morning, pounding away at one of the elliptical machines, when a TV broadcasting one of YES's classic games caught my eye: Boston versus New York, clearly at Fenway. A date flash across the 22-inch screen; from 15 feet away, I thought I saw June, 1972. The score read 5 to 3 in favor of New York. 'Odd choice for a classic game,' I thought, but settled in to watch as someone (Fisk, as it turns out) hit a single that sent Yaz to second. I knew the Red Sox would end up losing this game - it's YES, after all - but it seemed like a good piece of diversionary history: intellectually interesting, but ultimately unimportant.

Not long after, Fred Lynn knocked in Yaz with a single to left. Hobson flew out to right for the second out and with runners on first and second, George Scott came to the plate. I knew Scott was a big part of the '67 team (something I used to help write off my growing confusion about why I knew the names of so many of the players on a team that supposedly played a good 15 years before I started watching baseball); I'd learned more about him after digging up his card from a box of baseball cards I'd gotten from my grandfather. 'Boomer,' I thought. 'Right-handed power-hitter in the classic slugger mold. Let's see what he can do.'

Not much, as it turns out. Watching Boomer swing was a bit like watching someone built like David Ortiz swing like Dustin Pedroia: monster cuts with a backswing so fierce it spun him out of the batters box, with none of Pedroia's twitch to help him catch up to the ball. Gossage nailed him to the wall in three pitches and the game cut to commercial.

YES skipped the top of the ninth; the Yankees singled, but couldn't put anything together against Andy Hassler. Rubbing a little forshadowing salt in the wound, one of the commercials was for the replay of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS; the TV broadcast the Aaron Boone homerun and I suffered a chest spasm. Five years and two championships later and that game still rubs a little raw.

Dwight Evans started out the bottom of the ninth with a flyout to left; Rick Burleson walked. Jerry Remy came to the plate and all of the sudden, the thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind, the realization that - as those of you who followed the Sox in the 70s have no doubt figured out by now - this game didn't take place in 1972. I was pretty sure Jerry Remy wasn't playing in the majors in 1972 and even if he was, he was out in California, not in Boston. Remy singled, Jim Rice came to the plate with the tying run on second, and YES flashed the game date on the screen again. Straining my eyes, I finally saw what had eluded me for the past 15 minutes through the blindness of distance and - perhaps - a willfull decision not to see. The date on the screen was October 2, 1978.

You know the rest, of course: Rice sac-flied Burleson to third for the second out and Yastrzemski, in what must have seemed like a microcosm of the whole season, popped up to third, ending the game and stranding the Sox in second place. Bucky Dent would go on to become a byword for Red Sox futility by virtue of having homered the winning runs in the seventh; the Sox didn't see the top side of third place until 1986 and have yet to match their 99 win total in the thirty years since. As the Yankees celebrated around home plate, I climbed off the elliptical machine. The historical significance of this supposedly unimportant game had suddenly hit a little too close to home.

A Strange Coincidence

A couple of weeks ago, I was up at my parents' house in the Boston area, digging through their bookshelves for new reading material, when I came across the 1990 edition of The Red Sox Reader, a collection of writings on the Sox by a number of famous journalists and authors who are either Red Sox fans or fans of one particular player (mainly Williams or Yaz). Intrigued (it was the same day as the Fenway Tour, so I was in the perfect nostalgic mood), I dug in to immediate reward: pages of excellent writing on all of the noble heartbreaks of the past 100 years of Red Sox history, palatable without pain (I realized) only because of the fortunate combination of 2004 and the unbounded hope of spring. Not all of the selections are gems, but the inclusion of selections like John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams, Roger Angell's deconstruction of the 1978 season and David Halberstam's epitaph to the final fateful game of 1949 make this book a winner and well worth the read.

A couple of days ago, I reached Thomas Boswell's piece, "The Greatest Game Ever Played," a blow-by-blow coverage of every up-and-down moment of the one game playoff on October 1, 1978. All of the sudden, one page jumped off the page and hit me square between the eyes:

The Keep Your Sox On faithful sat silent in their fireman caps decorated with the names of their undependable deities: Boomer and Butch, Soup and Scooter, Rooster and Pudge, Eck and Louie, Big Foot and Spaceman, Dewey and Yaz.

Half an hour later, after an untold number of fevered Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia searches covering every combination of Keep Your Sox On, rooting group and fireman helmets I could think of, I was still puzzled. Who were these fans in their helmets, sporting the same moniker as my blog 26 years before the name popped into my head? Was this coincidence a case of Jungian collective unconsciousness, or had I encountered the phrase earlier in my life as a fan and buried it in my subconscious, where it waited for the right moment to bubble to the surface? More importantly, does anyone out there know anything about this group of fans? If so, put it in the comments section; I want to know the deal.