Play Ball

Sittin’ at work, sporting a Papelbon shirt. Something about the death stare/Riverdance combo really appeals to me.

A confession: until recently (the past five years or so), I never really followed baseball. Sure, if I was asked, I always said I supported the Red Sox, and to the extent that I was ever paying attention, I did. To be perfectly honest, I found baseball a little boring, even when I finally decided during my college years (thanks to cheap last-minute seats at spacious Camden Yards) that a game was a pleasant way to spend a sunny summer afternoon.

I think it was moving back to New England (and eventually back into Boston itself) after college that really did it. I know a few people who are planning on moving here in the near future, and I’ve made an effort to explain to them that baseball seeps through your pores here, but I don’t think that I’ve really captured it. It’s hard to convey that while you do need to know a few things about the Sox and how they’re doing to keep up at the water cooler, you don’t need to worry, since it’ll seep in through your pores, no matter your expressed level of disinterest. What’s more, someday you’ll get the warm feeling inside that comes from hearing the cheers from next door and knowing that everyone around you is doing the same thing at the same time.

Will Leitch in the New York Times thinks that the success of the Red Sox in recent years has made Boston fans more “normal”, and less into the martyr complex that people (often non-Bostonians) seem to feel that everyone here has. He may have a point, and he may not. Boston was, for a long time, and Irish town, and to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan (in a wildly inappropriate way, as he was speaking of the assasination of John F. Kennedy): “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.” Being a Boston sports fan used to be about suffering, but now it’s about fun. Is one nobler than the other? Is fun the point of sport? Is victory too simplistic an outcome for the psychosocial drama that we construct around sporting events? Hell, I don’t know. I’ll save a deeper meditation on sport for later in the series.

Go Sox!