It's April, it's the Red Sox, and I couldn't care less. Oh happy day.
I don’t care. Schilling may be OK in a month or so; defying gravity, age, and karma (stumping for Bush), or he may finally succumb to the aforementioned assailants; his Thomas Nast cartoon-like physique finally giving way to the weighty forces that helped bloody his infamous ankle. I don’t care.
Bronson Arroyo may turn into a solid 2-3 guy, or he may continue to resemble an extra in an after-school special about suburban gang-violence (in the credits he would be follower #2 or #3.) I don’t care.
David Wells? The man whose name comes up first as a point of retort any time I am called on to attempt to dispel the myth that ballplayers are fat and lazy and that baseball is the least athletically challenging of the major sports? I don’t care. Really, I don’t.
I don’t care because of what happened last October.
I am 34 years old. I became a Red Sox fan some 27 springs ago, when my family moved to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania. Luckily, I was at just the right age where I was only beginning to appreciate the necessity of regionalistic pride, so I really didn’t have any Pirates or Phillies to leave behind.
I love the Red Sox like I love my asshole uncle who can play the shit out of the piano and who is the closest thing to god I hope to ever know; this assessment based solely on a smile that can make a heart want to live a thousand years.
I love the Sox because they have an awful history of race relations; a flaw only endearing in light of it’s stature (huge) and that it adds to the great irony of the state’s strange duality of being far and away the country’s foremost area of higher education, as well as it’s most notoriously underhanded and backwards civil rights foot-dragger, and I want to be around as this ongoing tragedy is righted. I love the Sox for jerks like Ted Williams being eventually loved, and jerk-offs like Dan Shaughnessey and Bob Ryan being simultaneously hated and revered. I love the Sox for Fenway, where my 134 pound frame is squeezed tightly into my lousy, $72 seat. I love the Sox because they always, always try. I love them because they epitomize baseball and really all of organized sport.
Sport asks that no one individual be considered greater than the sport itself. Like selflessness in life requires that the self never be considered as important as the life it is living, baseball, above all other sports, will always loom larger than any one player, because of its history, its soul, and its very nature as a delicately perfect combination of violence, grace and strategy. Teddy was big, but never bigger than the Sox. Clemens was big, but never bigger than the Sox (even when he got super-fat). Yaz was a prince for a few years there, but the Sox were always the king. And as great as the Sox are, they were never, and are never, considered to be bigger than baseball.
With their seemingly perpetually grossly-imbalanced-but-working combinations of offense, speed, defense and pitching, the Red Sox epitomize baseball’s balance in a beautifully unpretty way. They are like a Zen fable about a drunk monk with a house on his head who is teetering on the head of a pin. He always falls hard, but he stays on that head for way longer than he should, by any reasonable explanation, be able to. Plus, he always comes back for more.
Each year I wade into the season with great denial. I forget about what happened last year, whether it was a 3rd place finish in the division that was actually 4th until the last week of the season only because the other, more reasonable teams rested their starters while the Sox used the ‘pen and the DH like it was the ALCS, or whether it was the champagne uncorked as a not-so-wild pitch got away from Gedman and Buckner somehow got blamed for the commencing tragicomedy. I forget it happened and act as if the Sox are an expansion franchise that just happens to have gotten the marketing just right to give them that glow of a 100 year old franchise.
Of course, I have trepidation. I’ve seen too many GM’s let go of too many good players and get Matt Youngs or even less (if that’s possible) in return. I’ve seen too many decent Aprils turn into pretty bad Mays and absolutely over-the-fucking-top horrific Junes.
Hate the Yankees? That’s victim bullshit. I love baseball too much to hate the Yankees. Sure I hate individual Yankees, their owner most notably (I would hate Miles Davis if he ever wore a white turtleneck with a blazer.) I have hated Jeter since the day I saw him, the fact that he dated Mariah Carey only compounded this. I have hated A-rod for some time as well, and his sissy-swipe at Arroyo only helped to magnify my feelings (though again, A-rod’s Hollywood appeal and Arroyo’s cornrows only made for even juicier after-school special plotlines.)
And the ‘Yankees Suck’ chants? Well just like Schilling must exhibit a flaw (but must it be so glaring?) in supporting Bush and a truly wacko Christian agenda, it is somehow appropriate that an otherwise loyal, intelligent fanbase collectively and repeatedly opines upon viewing the history of a franchise that has won has won more championships than the Celtics, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Red Sox combined, that said franchise quite plainly ‘sucks.’ Such flaws make for great writing and boy do they sell a story (just ask Shaughnessey. Do you think he would be sitting on such a sizeable pile of Sox-spawned earnings were he to be a scribe in, say, Montreal?)
But here we are, it is April (nearly) and the Sox enter the season as kings. I don’t care now, I won’t care next year, in fact I can’t imagine anything short of yet another republican presidency will be able to wipe this stupid smile off my face.
I get to watch this season of my favorite sport not as a Sox fan, but as a baseball fan; one in love with the game with a heart forever unbroken.
And so now, as the most conflicted, tortured organization that this big, weird sport has ever seen heads into the next 162 as champions, I don’t care. Not a lick.
Bronson Arroyo may turn into a solid 2-3 guy, or he may continue to resemble an extra in an after-school special about suburban gang-violence (in the credits he would be follower #2 or #3.) I don’t care.
David Wells? The man whose name comes up first as a point of retort any time I am called on to attempt to dispel the myth that ballplayers are fat and lazy and that baseball is the least athletically challenging of the major sports? I don’t care. Really, I don’t.
I don’t care because of what happened last October.
I am 34 years old. I became a Red Sox fan some 27 springs ago, when my family moved to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania. Luckily, I was at just the right age where I was only beginning to appreciate the necessity of regionalistic pride, so I really didn’t have any Pirates or Phillies to leave behind.
I love the Red Sox like I love my asshole uncle who can play the shit out of the piano and who is the closest thing to god I hope to ever know; this assessment based solely on a smile that can make a heart want to live a thousand years.
I love the Sox because they have an awful history of race relations; a flaw only endearing in light of it’s stature (huge) and that it adds to the great irony of the state’s strange duality of being far and away the country’s foremost area of higher education, as well as it’s most notoriously underhanded and backwards civil rights foot-dragger, and I want to be around as this ongoing tragedy is righted. I love the Sox for jerks like Ted Williams being eventually loved, and jerk-offs like Dan Shaughnessey and Bob Ryan being simultaneously hated and revered. I love the Sox for Fenway, where my 134 pound frame is squeezed tightly into my lousy, $72 seat. I love the Sox because they always, always try. I love them because they epitomize baseball and really all of organized sport.
Sport asks that no one individual be considered greater than the sport itself. Like selflessness in life requires that the self never be considered as important as the life it is living, baseball, above all other sports, will always loom larger than any one player, because of its history, its soul, and its very nature as a delicately perfect combination of violence, grace and strategy. Teddy was big, but never bigger than the Sox. Clemens was big, but never bigger than the Sox (even when he got super-fat). Yaz was a prince for a few years there, but the Sox were always the king. And as great as the Sox are, they were never, and are never, considered to be bigger than baseball.
With their seemingly perpetually grossly-imbalanced-but-working combinations of offense, speed, defense and pitching, the Red Sox epitomize baseball’s balance in a beautifully unpretty way. They are like a Zen fable about a drunk monk with a house on his head who is teetering on the head of a pin. He always falls hard, but he stays on that head for way longer than he should, by any reasonable explanation, be able to. Plus, he always comes back for more.
Each year I wade into the season with great denial. I forget about what happened last year, whether it was a 3rd place finish in the division that was actually 4th until the last week of the season only because the other, more reasonable teams rested their starters while the Sox used the ‘pen and the DH like it was the ALCS, or whether it was the champagne uncorked as a not-so-wild pitch got away from Gedman and Buckner somehow got blamed for the commencing tragicomedy. I forget it happened and act as if the Sox are an expansion franchise that just happens to have gotten the marketing just right to give them that glow of a 100 year old franchise.
Of course, I have trepidation. I’ve seen too many GM’s let go of too many good players and get Matt Youngs or even less (if that’s possible) in return. I’ve seen too many decent Aprils turn into pretty bad Mays and absolutely over-the-fucking-top horrific Junes.
Hate the Yankees? That’s victim bullshit. I love baseball too much to hate the Yankees. Sure I hate individual Yankees, their owner most notably (I would hate Miles Davis if he ever wore a white turtleneck with a blazer.) I have hated Jeter since the day I saw him, the fact that he dated Mariah Carey only compounded this. I have hated A-rod for some time as well, and his sissy-swipe at Arroyo only helped to magnify my feelings (though again, A-rod’s Hollywood appeal and Arroyo’s cornrows only made for even juicier after-school special plotlines.)
And the ‘Yankees Suck’ chants? Well just like Schilling must exhibit a flaw (but must it be so glaring?) in supporting Bush and a truly wacko Christian agenda, it is somehow appropriate that an otherwise loyal, intelligent fanbase collectively and repeatedly opines upon viewing the history of a franchise that has won has won more championships than the Celtics, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Red Sox combined, that said franchise quite plainly ‘sucks.’ Such flaws make for great writing and boy do they sell a story (just ask Shaughnessey. Do you think he would be sitting on such a sizeable pile of Sox-spawned earnings were he to be a scribe in, say, Montreal?)
But here we are, it is April (nearly) and the Sox enter the season as kings. I don’t care now, I won’t care next year, in fact I can’t imagine anything short of yet another republican presidency will be able to wipe this stupid smile off my face.
I get to watch this season of my favorite sport not as a Sox fan, but as a baseball fan; one in love with the game with a heart forever unbroken.
And so now, as the most conflicted, tortured organization that this big, weird sport has ever seen heads into the next 162 as champions, I don’t care. Not a lick.
posted by joe at 12:07 PM
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