I still can’t believe the Monday we just had. On Saturday night we set our clocks back here, a week ahead of the States, and when I realized that meant Game 4 of the Series would start at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 4 a.m., I decided it would be best to just stay up for awhile. So I moved the laptop to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and watched Goodfellas dubbed in Russian on NTV while reading everything I could find on the Interwebs about the Series. Game 4 began, and what can I say? Worth every sleep-deprived minute. My mom, who was visiting for the week, managed to get up for the last two innings. And once Papelbon nailed the final out, I opened a bottle of Guinness we’ve had lying around for awhile to celebrate. It was a great postseason with the perfect ending. I think I’m kind of going to miss these ridiculous middle of the night wake-up times, when I’m alone in the sleeping apartment with just my laptop and my sunflower seeds. And it is such a good time to be a Red Sox fan, which you realize when you think about fans of the other teams. In watching the games, I came to feel a little bad for Cleveland’s fans. They had a very good team, and since they haven’t won the pennant since 1948, they are approaching operatic degrees of sports fan suffering. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot to say about Rockies fans. The team only started in 1993. History counts, and a tough, heart-breaking, through, beating like this is the kind of thing that lets you build one. It is the circle of baseball life, and I have to think that somewhere in Colorado is a kid that will remember Tulowitzki-Holliday-Helton-Atkins the same way I remember Boggs-Barrett-Buckner-Rice. Once the game was over, and I’d watched most of the online postgame show, I collapsed into bed. The sun was already up (I think, it had been an impossibly dreary and grey October here), and it wasn’t long before my little girl woke up and started cooing – shaking her head mischievously at her mom and I when we asked her if she was indeed the birthday girl that day. Little scamp. Olga graciously let me sleep a few more hours before I woke and celebrated my little one’s first birthday, which included visits from friends and family and all the usual trappings. All day I kept thinking about what a freakishly good day it was. I had a lot of time to think about the world in which she was born, getting to see the Red Sox win a Series in her first year of life. I’m happy for her, and happy that I will have to explain to her how nerve-wracking it was in 1986, 1995, 1999, 2003, and how wonderful 2004 was. Much has been made about how allegedly Red Sox fans wallowed in their misery all those championship-less years, but every real fan I know was simply eager to see our team win at last – like any other fans of any other teams – with the sole added baggage of wanted to put an end to the “Curse of the Bambino” industry once and for all. We certainly didn’t build our identity on it, as much as sports columnists wanted to think we did. In 2004 we were happy to have won, after a very long wait, and to have put all that nonsense behind us. But 2007 is pretty darn fantastic itself. I keep asking whether 2004 or 2007 was better, and I just can’t figure it out – each is a thing unto itself. Of all the things I read about this team, what I liked the most was Charlie Pierce’s essay in Slate after the ALCS. It was about Manny Ramirez, and he took the contrarian stance of unabashedly praising the “Manny being Manny” phenomenon. When the Sox were down against the Indians, Manny famously said something to the effect that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and there was always next year. The sports media flipped out, but most Sox fans knew precisely what he was talking about.
“It was impossible to watch the Red Sox over these last three games and not see Ramirez’s words in vivid action. Boston did not play an inning of baseball in which the team was not cool, and loose, and utterly in command of the circumstances. [...] This was a team that realized that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and therefore, losing was nothing of which to be afraid. Manny saw that first and brought the rest of them along.”
Throughout his time in Boston, Manny has been subject to ritualized bouts of heavy criticism, which manages to take his impressive numbers for granted and ignores completely just what he brings to the team. I remember thinking about it back in 2004, when Manny went out of his way to be demonstrably nice and friendly with tightly-wound reliever Byung-Hyun Kim – he didn’t need to do it, it wasn’t popular to do, and it didn’t work out so well, but it was the simple, decent thing to do. This kind of easy-goingness is probably also a critical part of what makes him one of the best hitters in history too. So all the clichés, about taking it one game, one inning, one at bat, one pitch at a time, turn out to be true. So to rephrase Billy Bragg, “I don’t want to change the world/ I’m not looking for a new New England/ I’m just looking forward to another season.” Now, if we can just re-sign Mike Lowell and steer well clear of a certain Scott Boras client, it should be a magnificent offseason as well….
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