RED SOX ANTI-CHRIST
HOW ONE ASTONISHINGLY BITTER FAN BROKE THE CURSE OF THE BAMBINO
I spent the last hours of October 27, 2004, burrowed beneath the blankets of my bed, engaged in an activity plainly definable as cowering. It was the fourth and final game of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, and I was living in a dust-caked apartment in Somerville, just a few miles from Fenway Park.
The Sox were poised to sweep the Cards and thereby end the most ballyhooed dry spell in all of professional sports, dating back to the team’s shipment of Babe Ruth to New York in 1918. I had received multiple invitations to watch this historic contest, and declined all of them. I was a man in possession of an excruciating secret, and I wanted very much to sleep.
It was dark and stuffy under the blankets. At a certain point, it also got loud. From next door came a noise of jubilation so primal I hesitate to place it in the humanoid category. Then car horns, the fizz-bang of bottle rockets, air horns, small arms fire. The beady red digits of my clock radio read 11:40 P.M.
Soon the phone would start ringing. My friends, proud citizens of Red Sox Nation, the loudest-suffering fan contingent on earth, would want to share their joy with me. Floodie would confide how he envisioned the final out moments before it was recorded. The Big Ruskie would describe, in slurred and loving detail, the lunar eclipse that painted the moon above Busch Stadium a blushing red. Young Bull would tell me, in that half-ashamed guy manner, that he loved me. If they considered the date at all, it would be to note that the Sox had lost a crushing Game Seven to the Mets on October 27, 1986.
None of them would grasp the true significance: October 27 happened to be the very day I was born into this world and called to serve as the Red Sox Anti-Christ.
TO BE A FAN is to live in a condition of willed helplessness. We are (for the most part) men who sit around and watch other men run and leap and sweat and grapple each other. It is a deeply homoerotic pattern of conduct, often interracial in nature, and essentially humiliating. In response, fans have developed what is most accurately diagnosed as a religious psychosis. We honestly believe that our thoughts and actions affect the outcome of games. And that an accumulation of these thoughts and actions, carried out over, say, thirty years, can shape the larger contours of history. So when I tell you that I, Steve Almond, am the primary reason the Sox won the 2004 World Series, I don’t expect you to believe me. I’m just another Jesus freak when it comes to this stuff.
I can only humbly submit the facts for your consideration…
ON OCTOBER 22, 1972, the Oakland Athletics played the seventh game of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In the sixth inning, Sal Bando hit a long fly to center. Bobby Tolan looked to have the ball in his sights, but his left knee—weakened by the laser malevolence of my glare—buckled under him. The ball fell in for a double, and the A’s went up 3–1.
The Reds rallied in the eighth, putting two on with no outs. The A’s summoned to the mound one Rollie Fingers. Fingers appeared unfazed by the 56,000 screaming maniacs at Riverfront Stadium. He wore a handlebar mustache, the tips waxed to impeccable upturned points, which, between pitches, he twirled with great élan. This mustache itself seemed to do most of the damage. Fingers induced two strikeouts to stanch the threat, then mowed down three straight in the ninth.
Five days later I turned six years old. I asked my parents for nothing. There was nothing to ask them for; I had been given the A’s, the Series, a life.
LIKE MANY FANS, I grew up in a house full of men, the smallest of three brothers born to kind but overextended parents, and residing in a tiny Eichler home at the ass end of an affluent suburb. I attended school in a state of perpetual terror. Bullies could smell the fear on me. They did what bullies must. At home, I waited for my brothers to cast a healing glance upon me, and spent most afternoons alone.
That I turned to sport for solace should come as no surprise. It was one of the few areas in which I could engage the passion of my father, whose personal archive includes a yellowed box score of the first game he ever attended, a 1951 tilt between the Yankees and the St. Louis Browns.
Given our location—an hour south of San Francisco—I should have rooted for the Giants. But the Giants were dull. It was the Swinging A’s who kidnapped my heart. They were a dashing bunch, brawny, headstrong, with a tendency to beat one another silly. My favorite book during this era was an illustrated version of the Iliad, and I thought of the A’s lineup as a modern incarnation of the Greeks. They weren’t a team so much as a reluctant coalition of superstars. Bert “Campy” Campaneris,1 Billy North, Joe Rudi, the team’s gallant left fielder—he would smash a grand slam in the first game I ever attended—and, of course, Reggie Jackson, with his tinted shades and biceps of bunched cable.
The pitchers, equally imposing, bore names only a pro athlete could do justice: Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom, not to mention Rollie Fingers. I can still see Odom launching into the divine contortions of his windup, which, at its apex, tipped him over so far the knuckles of his throwing hand brushed the dirt beneath him. And those unis! Kelly green shirts with blingy gold sleeves. It will go without saying that my entire wardrobe was predicated on this unfortunate color scheme.2
For three autumns, I watched the A’s destroy all comers. In 1973, they handed the Mets a Game Seven thrashing, courtesy of homers by Campy and Reggie. In 1974, they tamed the Dodgers in five.
None of this struck me as exceptional. It was merely the annual dividend of my devotion. My father and I would seat ourselves in front of the old Zenith in our den and watch destiny unfold, occasionally adjusting the rabbit ear antennae so as to remove excess snow from the unfolding destiny. At a certain point, Fingers would appear and induce a harmless grounder and the A’s would converge on the mound and the two of us would leap up and briefly embrace. I was happy. My father was happy. The world was happy. It might have gone on like this. It should have gone on like this.
But then fate—or, as I prefer to think of fate, the Lord God of Sport—intervened. The instrument of His cruel intervention? None other than the Boston Red Sox.
IN THESE EARLY YEARS, I had nothing special against the Sox. My sense of the team was sketchy. They came from a place with snow. They wore old-fashioned uniforms. Their best player, Carl Yastrzemski, had a name I believed to be an exotic lunch meat. My interest was hardly piqued when, in 1975, Boston earned a spot in the AL Championship Series against the A’s. They were just another team my boys would flatten on the way to a fourth title.
But the Red Sox had a mysterious effect on Oakland, an effect best summarized as making them suck. This was clear from the very first inning of their matchup, during which our sure-handed infield committed three straight errors. Game Two began in more typical fashion: Bando doubled and Jackson sent a bomb over the wall in right. But the Sox struck back for three runs against Vida Blue, then knocked the stuffing out of the unknockable Rollie Fingers, pushing Oakland to the brink of elimination.
I understood, even as an eight-year-old, that the A’s sometimes lost. What the A’s did not do was lose in the clutch. And thus it was clear to me, as I settled in before Game Three, that the A’s were merely pretending to suck. This pattern of “pretend sucking” continued deep into the game, which I was watching (for reasons that escape me) at my grandparents’ house. From time to time, my grandpa would stick his head in the doorway and offer me a mournful glance. He was a forsaken fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and viewed the garish dominance of the A’s as the inevitable result of my generation’s moral degeneracy.
In the eighth, down two runs, Oakland finally woke from its slumber, putting men on first and third with Joe Rudi coming to the plate. The Sox went to the pen and extracted their closer, a right-hander with the absurd and villainous name Dick Drago. It was perfectly clear to me what would happen next: Rudi would pull a double down the line. I could see the ball’s sweet humming path through the night, the cloud of chalk kicked up along the left field line; I could hear the crowd’s grateful thunder. And then, quite abruptly, the ball was bounding to the shortstop and the Sox were turning a double play and Rudi was hurling his helmet to the ground and something inside me, some very early notion of faith, shattered.
AS AN ADULT, I have often found myself in the position of having to explain to women with whom I hope to sleep why I take such a maniacal interest in the Oakland A’s. For years, it was my habit to trot out the story of the A’s golden years, how they seduced me—poor depressed child that I was—with those three sensational campaigns. But the origins of my obsession reside in that first massacre at the hands of the Sox. What characterizes the true fan isn’t the easy pleasure of rooting for a winner, but the struggle imposed by loss.
There were, of course, plenty of rational reasons the team lost. Catfish Hunter had defected to the Yanks, the A’s bats had gone dead, and so forth. But the true fan is unmoved by rational analysis, and least of all the mercy implied by disappointment. We live in a kingdom of shame and recrimination. Those who defeat us are to be despised. And those who defeat us before defeat seems possible, who pop the cherry of our omnipotence, become sworn enemies for life.
Was this a healthy psychological posture to assume? I would say no. My father made some effort to explain, in the face of my banshee rage, that flying to Boston and murdering the Red Sox would not actually solve anything. But I had trouble focusing on his lecture, what with my still beating heart torn from my chest.
The next year, the team shipped Fingers and Rudi to Boston. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn (acting on orders transmitted from my still beating heart) voided the deals. But the damage had been done. The franchise went into a swoon that presaged and outlasted my tortuous passage into adolescence. The A’s were now losers, like me. And the Red Sox were to blame.
I MUST HAVE SPENT a thousand summer afternoons in my room, listening to Bill King narrate the drubbings subsequently endured by the A’s. My weapon of choice was an ancient silver Panasonic weighing at least twenty pounds, with speakers that popped like fat-back. The A’s fan base amounted to shut-ins, the criminally insane, and me. They drew fewer than thirty-eight hundred per game during the 1979 campaign (54–108), and I myself was perhaps the only person on the planet who tuned in to the broadcast of a July laugher that drew, if memory serves, 937 lost souls to the vast concrete bowl known as the Oakland Alameda Coliseum.
Against all reason, I found reasons to root. That season it was the rookie center fielder Dwayne Murphy, who set his cap at a rakish angle atop his Afro, from which perch it would inevitably tumble as he dashed toward the gap to flag down one of the many drives surrendered by the team’s pitching staff. Murphy was a lefty, like me, and a specialist at the drag bunt. I nearly wept the first time I saw him perform this elegant bit of legerdemain. He lowered his bat across the plate and drew it back just before contact. For a moment, he seemed to have caught the ball on the sweet spot, before gently pushing it between the mound and first base. Murphy himself was halfway down the line before anyone discerned the con. The drag bunt struck me as emblematic of those years: a way of improvising something from nothing, turning a gesture of weakness into strength, of locating redemption in the gaps.3
The next year, Rickey Henderson joined Murphy in the outfield. The adjective electrifying is shamefully abused in the sporting arena, but it does apply to the young Henderson. He looked like no other ballplayer alive: short and squat and endowed with a massive, rippled complex of muscles best described as the National Republic of Rickey Henderson’s Thighs. I spent hours studying his batting stance, an osteoporotic crouch in which his legs cocked inward at the knee, creating a strike zone the approximate size of a Chiclet. He walked about 75 percent of his at-bats, and once on base he took over a game.
Henderson’s steals were spectacular for their audacity—everyone knew he was going—and their improbable physics. The mechanics worked like so: About halfway between first and second, Henderson (now moving at the speed of sound) launched himself into a headfirst dive, covering the remaining yardage Superman style, crash-landing on his chest at the same moment his gloved hands hit the edge of the bag, bouncing in such a manner that his body slid across the top of the bag, decelerating by means of the resulting friction, then elegantly hooking the tongues of his cleats along that same front edge to keep from sliding into left field. As a thought experiment, I often speculated how far into left field Henderson would have traveled without this ingenious braking system. My general estimate placed him somewhere around the warning track.
AND WHAT OF my own derring-do on the diamond? For behind every fan there lives some private history of athletic ignominy. Mine began on the sun-baked ball field of Terman Middle School where, as a shrimpazoid eight-year-old, I showed up with my Reggie Jackson autographed Rawlings for a Saturday afternoon tryout. Along one side of the grass stood the coaches who would draft us, former jocks to a man, with round, scarred knees and beer guts cinched into golf shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A: the Little League Meat Market.
Inexplicably, I wound up drafted directly into “the majors,” a league composed of kids up to twelve years old. There should have been some rule forbidding this, a ban, for instance, on boys who still sucked their thumbs. But there wasn’t. Big Jeff Wilkins, coach of Round Table Pizza, decided I was going to be a star, once he could find a pair of pants small enough to fit me.
This dream died rather quickly, thanks to Kathy Schindler, the league’s only female player. Schindler was, to put it delicately, pubescent. She stood nearly six feet, wore two batting gloves, and, on occasion, spat. I was—just a reminder—an eight-year-old who still sucked his thumb. We had no business interacting. The only reason we were forced to interact is because I was playing second base at the precise moment Schindler (having been walked yet again by our terrified pitcher) broke for second.
I took the throw from home in plenty of time, but forgot I had to tag the runner. On came Schindler—blotting out the field of play, the sun, the sky above—and plowed into me, spikes up. The umpire threw his arms out and yelled Safe! “You gotta tag her, son,” he murmured to me.
Coach Wilkins came roaring out of the dugout. He was perpetually sunburned, with a neck that belonged in the Fat Neck Hall of Fame.
“Do you understand what just happened?” he said.
“I forgot the tag.”
“Is this a play we went over in practice?”
I nodded.
“And?”
I glanced down at my stirrup socks, puddled idiotically around my cleats. My spit had turned to paste. “I should have remembered.”
“And who was counting on you to remember?”
“You.”
The band of flesh that joined Coach Wilkins’s cheeks to his neck flushed. “No, Almond. Not me. Your team. Your team was counting on you.” He gestured grandly to my teammates, who were watching my humiliation with great satisfaction.
“Because what did we say, at the beginning of the season?”
For half a minute, I wandered the small corral of my mind for an answer. But it was all sheep shit up there.
Coach Wilkins glanced toward the stands and tried to shape his massive face into an expression of distress. He was experiencing something like ecstasy. This was one of the few pleasures granted the Little League coach: the right to publicly mock children under the guise of nurturing them. It stood as the sole reward for the hours spent lugging equipment bags, devising lineups, extending advice to children who, frankly, not only would fail as players, but would be lucky to escape major injury in the course of their woeful, stunted careers.
“There is no I in ‘team,’” Coach Wilkins said. “Didn’t we say that?”
“I guess,” I said.
“No guess about it!” Wilkins roared. His rage was by now operatic. “There is no I in ‘team.’ Spell it out.”
“T-E-A-M.”
“How many I’s in that word?”
“None,” I said cautiously.
“You sure? You want to count again?”
I shook my head.
“That’s right,” he said. “None.”
THUS BEGAN MY inexorable transition from failed jock to full-time jock sniffer, a transition ratified by my decision to apply for an internship as a sports reporter with my hometown newspaper following my sophomore year in college. Soon after, I received a letter on Peninsula Times Tribune stationery, informing me I had been hired for $60 per week.
“What do you want?” the editor said, when I showed up in June.
“I’m your intern.”
“Already got an intern,” he said.
This was a fair introduction to the world of sports journalism.
There are a good many bitter people on earth—I like to think of myself as one of them—but there are not many people quite so bitter as sports reporters. (Picture a locker room full of dorks. Now picture them tussling over a bag of Cheetos.) As the subintern, I had no desk. My first real assignment was an interview with Billie Jean King.4 By August the editor, tired of tripping over me, dispatched me to cover an A’s game. Why not? Everyone else was on vacation, and the team was awful.
I entered the press box woozy with the honor. A tray of free hot dogs had been set out for us credentialed reporters, but I was too frightened to eat even one. I sat in the back row scribbling notes furiously while the beat reporters discussed how many weeks it would be before the new manager, Tony LaRussa, took his own life.
After the game, I followed the veterans down to LaRussa’s office, where he sat behind his desk, a grown man in a rumpled uniform, muttering glum assessments.
Someone mentioned the bullpen.
LaRussa shrugged. He speculated that his newest relief pitcher—whose disastrous outing had just lost the game—might have arm trouble. (For reasons involving personal safety, specifically mine, I shall refer to this player simply as Pitcher X.)
When LaRussa was done, we were released to the main locker room, and here I found it difficult to concentrate. I was surrounded by naked A’s, many of them my boyhood heroes, all of them much larger than they appeared on TV, their great penises bouncing as they strutted from the showers. Here was Carney Lansford, all-star third baseman, looking oddly bookish in spectacles. The mountainous Dave Kingman, moisturizing all eight feet of himself. And José Canseco, not yet bloated by steroids, a vainglorious rookie attending with much product to his Tiger Beat coiffure. Autographs, I thought. I could get so many fucking autographs.
But I was a reporter (remember!) so I hovered with the other supplicants. An elaborate code of rules prevailed in the locker room, developed to inoculate all parties against the inherent homoperversity of the ritual. You didn’t interview a player while he was naked. You didn’t look at their bodies. You waited quietly for them to complete what the French might call their toilette. Above all, you did not ask any questions that might offend, which reduced discourse to a safe zone of cliché (tough loss, just keep battling, 110 percent, ibid.).
I was unaware of this last restriction, and so I marched up to Pitcher X—thinking it vaguely odd that no other reporters wanted to talk to him—and asked him about the health of his arm.
X’s face (a natively sweet-looking face) twisted. “What?”
“Your arm,” I said. “I just wondered—”
“You saying something’s wrong with my arm?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not saying that.”
X took a step toward me. “So who’s saying that?”
“The manager,” I stammered.
“Now you talking to the manager about me?”
X took another step toward me. I was obliged to take a step back ward. The other reporters had noticed what was developing and gone silent. A headline briefly flashed before me:
INTERN FATALLY WOUNDED BY ENRAGED RELIEF PITCHER
BASEBALL BAT, BLEEDING FROM MULTIPLE ORIFICES CITED AS CAUSE OF DEATH
I certainly didn’t blame old X for wanting to kill me. He was at the tail end of a middling career and fresh from a performance that would send him packing from the big leagues with an official ERA of infinity. And so I slowly backed away, toward the main scrum of reporters. The players were watching me, too, all except Canseco, who stood before a full-length mirror, transfixed by his deltoids. He turned away from his image with reluctance, plainly heartbroken that, in the real world, there was only one of him.5
PITCHER X DID not in fact assault me. I survived the summer and returned to college only to discover Red Sox fever in full bloom. I should have mentioned this earlier: I had chosen a school in New England, just a hundred miles or so from Boston. Back then I was only vaguely aware of the pivotal role I would come to play in the fate of the Red Sox. This was my Anti-Christ-in-embryo phase. Or, to provide a more accurate visual, my young-Judas-Iscariot-with-a-mullet phase.
In either case, the year was 1986, and so I suffered the noisy exhortation of my classmates all that fall, as the Sox beat the Yanks for the pennant, then clawed back from a 3–1 deficit to top the Angels in the AL Championship Series. Dave Henderson’s game-tying homer in the ninth inning of Game Five unleashed outside my dorm room a chant of All Hail Hendu that went on for 103 hours straight. I sat alone with only my ill wishes for company. I wanted the Sox to lose, as traumatically as possible.
That being said, I refuse to rehash the details of the ensuing World Series, and specifically the Agonies of Game Six, a fervent recitation of which—Roger’s blister, Stanley’s wild pitch, Buckner’s epic muff—has become the official Stations of the Cross in Red Sox Nation. All you need to know is that the Mets’ comeback win in Game Seven (and the subsequent suicide watch issued for all Sox fans) transpired on the occasion of my twentieth birthday.
TWO YEARS LATER, my very own A’s squared off against the Sox in the AL Championship Series and administered what I would respectfully characterize as an ass-raw whupping. I took this as further proof that whatever negative sway the team held over me in the past had been banished from this earth, or perhaps compacted into some kind of giant spiky lozenge, then stuffed up the ass of Red Sox Nation.
Yes, thanks to my unflagging devotion—those years of loyalty in the face of hundred-loss seasons—Oakland had been resurrected. Campy and Catfish and Reggie were gone. But now we had Canseco and Mark McGwire, the team’s anabolic glimmer twins, and a ferocious pitching staff led by Dave Stewart, whose very plateward stare was registered with the FBI as a lethal weapon. The team was filthy with talent, and I looked ahead joyfully to the World Series against the meager Dodgers.
In the very first inning of Game One, Canseco bopped a grand salami. The only question in my mind was whether the A’s would reach a hundred runs. But the team’s bats fell silent, and they found themselves clinging to a 4–3 lead in the bottom of the ninth.
I was still not especially worried, because our closer, Dennis Eckersley, was the best in the league, the second coming of Rollie Fingers, right down to the mustache. He quickly retired two batters, then surrendered an uncharacteristic walk. Kirk Gibson strode to the plate as a pinch-hitter, though strode is the wrong verb. Gimped makes more sense. Gibson had a strained hammy on his left leg and a twisted right knee. Incapable of planting his legs, he flailed at two fastballs in the manner of a soused ballerina.
By all rights, Eckersley should have punched him out with high heat. Instead, as so often happens when you are pitching against someone who appears to need crutches, Eckersley got cute. He nibbled at the edges. Then, at 3–2, he delivered the lazy backdoor slider for which Gibson had been waiting. The pitch dipped toward the bottom of the strike zone and Gibson lunged batfirst, catching just enough on the barrel to send the ball sailing over the wall in right.
I was watching the game on a tiny black-and-white TV at the pottery studio my brother Dave managed in Berkeley, and my cry of anguish brought him running from the kiln he’d been loading.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Is the kiln going?” I said.
“What?” he said. “Why?”
“I might want to stick my head in there for a minute or two.”
“It’s just one game,” Dave said. “Calm the fuck down.”
As wise and compassionate as this counsel was, I could not calm the fuck down. Instead, I stared at the screen, where CBS was broadcasting the first of 137 replays of Gibson’s shot, all of which I would inexplicably watch.6
The truth is, I had never entirely trusted Eckersley, and it now occurred to me, in the same way a knife wound to the back might have occurred to me, why: because Eckersley was a castoff…from the Red Sox. He carried in his veins the doomed blood of that franchise, and he had now come and visited that doom on me. Or, no, perhaps Eckersley was a double agent dispatched directly by the Lord God of Sport. How else does the game’s best reliever give up a homer to a man who was essentially crippled?
I wanted to explain this situation to Dave, to ask for his help in the performance of some kind of ritual sacrifice, perhaps. (We had the purifying flames of the kiln at our disposal!) But Dave is not a fan. He would have insisted I was being “irrational.”
The A’s never recovered from the Gibson homer and fell obediently in five.
IN A GRAND history of my team, 1989 should have been an exalted year. Oakland stormed through the regular season, managed to avoid Boston in the playoffs, and made short work of their crosstown rivals, the Giants, to claim the title for which I had been waiting fifteen years. But that Series (if it is remembered at all) is remembered for the giant earthquake that struck the Bay Area minutes before Game Three, and sent the media into the sort of instantaneous frenzy triggered by natural disasters, which helpfully mimic action films. For the next week the entire world sat transfixed, watching the same stretch of I-80 collapse over and over, while baseball officials tried to explain exactly why playing the rest of the Series would restore hope to a stunned nation. Most of my family lived in the Bay Area, and though none of them had been harmed in the least, I was obligated to consider just how tragically the tragic events of such a tragedy might trage. It was not a lot of fun.
Like most people, I initially viewed the Loma Prieta earthquake as a freak occurrence. It would occur to me only later that the Occult Forces of the Sox were delivering one of their nasty Occultograms:
TO: RED SOX ANTI-CHRIST
This is what we can do to you and your team STOP
Any time we fucking want STOP Enjoy!
IN 1990, THE A’s once again faced the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series. This time they outscored Boston 20–4. Any decent person with even a hint of clemency about him might have used this occasion to forgive Red Sox Nation for past transgressions.
I, on the other hand, gloried in the carnage, which I watched alone, on a borrowed TV, in my dank apartment in El Paso, Texas, where I was passing myself off as a newspaper reporter. Did I mind watching these games alone? Absolutely not. The true fan is always in a state of spiritual solitude when watching games of import. This arrangement also allowed me to devise and perform what might be loosely defined as a fight song, set (and I can now see how unfortunate this choice will seem to those not in the spirit of the thing) to the MC Hammer hit “U Can’t Touch This.” Please feel free to sing along:
A’s beat the Sux!
(Dooo-do-do)
’89 redux!
(Dooo-do-do)
Beantown reflux!
(Dooo-do-do)
Swept again, ya fucks!
The Series pitted us against the Reds, a rematch of the 1972 tilt that spawned my affliction. The A’s had now swept three playoff series in a row, and everyone on earth assumed they would make it four against the Reds.
I don’t have to tell you how this turns out. What unsettled me was how meekly my A’s went down. Stewart got pounded in the opener. Eckersley gave up the lead game-winning hit the next night. In the fourth and final game, the fat and utterly average José Rijo reduced our mighty lineup to corned beef hash. It was as if the A’s had been replaced by a squad of zombies.
My friend Holden—a well-meaning if deluded loyalist of the Texas Rangers—was the first to suggest what should have been obvious to me from the beginning: My anti–Red Sox mojo had boomeranged.
I MORE OR less took a pass on the A’s for the rest of the nineties. I was in Miami for much of the decade, where the Lord God of Sport had decided to place not one, not two, but three shiny new franchises, in the hopes of seducing me. Instead, I turned for comfort to another of my Oakland teams, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.7 The LGS also sent me a new best friend, a six-foot-five-inch Sox addict named Pat Flood, who spent many useless hours trying to explain to me why it was a mortal sin to refer to Carl Yastrzemski as “dumbshit Pastrami.”
These were my years of alleged artistic growth. The Miami sun baked all sorts of delusions into my skull and I shipped off to grad school in the suburbs of the South, happy to pack my brutish fandom into a steamer trunk and ignore the occasional thudding. No, I was going to become the other sort of guy, who concerned himself with more refined matters, who wrote poetry and recycled.
I was pretending, of course, and poorly. I still read the sports section of any newspaper I could get my mitts on, still rifled the box scores for some sign of divine approval, still snuck off to a hidden dorm lounge every weekend to get my lonely fix. And then grad school ended and I needed to decide where in the wide world I might live.
Over the years, I’ve provided many semiplausible reasons for moving to Boston. I wanted to teach college. Sure. I wanted to stay far away from the kryptonitic effects of my family. Understandable. I wanted to be in a city with lots of single women who might not see through my fraudulent sensitivo routine. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
In fact, I moved to Boston in the autumn of 1997 not of my own volition, but as a matter of prophetic necessity. I had a score to settle with Boston and its baseball fans. This is how it works with us Anti-Christs: We blow into town confident of our own righteous mission. It never quite occurs to us that our presence might serve as a prerequisite to the salvation of our enemies.
ON MY SECOND day as an official Bostonian, I scalped a ticket to Fenway Park and watched from behind a large green girder—the scalper had promised a seat along the third-base line, he just hadn’t mentioned the girder—as the Royals thumped the Sox, 9–2.
Fenway was gorgeous. So gorgeous that I raced home and wrote a barfy poem. I still hated the Sox, but I was also trying to fit in to my new hometown. Both our teams sucked and I saw no reason to allow old ghosts to curdle my goodwill. Besides, Boston seemed to have enough problems. Half the streets were being torn up on behalf of an absurd automotive boondoggle called the Big Dig. Some goon squad of developers had punched the Boston Garden in the mouth so as to put up a parking lot (another barfy poem). Revelations began to emerge that some of the local clergy subscribed to the Mark Foley School of Teen Mentorship. Overall, the city trudged along in its unofficial capacity as New York’s Bitch.
Thus, I tolerated Sox fans as a minor irritant, something like the college students who seize the local street corners every September, spewing smoke and nonsense. Many of these fans were my friends, and therefore difficult to escape. But it’s also true that I became quietly and horribly fascinated with the sports talk radio stations of Boston, and specifically WEEI, which broadcasts an array of noisy blowhards genetically incapable of pronouncing the letter r. I listened to these gentlemen mostly in the car, and found their indignation oddly soothing while I was mired in traffic.
Then something bad happened. In 1999, the Sox made it all the way to the AL Championship, where the Yankees summarily thrashed them. The ensuing uproar was not soothing. It was more like the inconsolable wailing of many children betrayed. I could hear, in each rant and squall, the echoes of my own doomed loyalty. It might be said that I had met the enemy and they was me.
This was not how I saw things, of course. Sox fans did things I would never do. They booed their own players. They hassled fans from out of town. They waddled about righteously in shirts bearing logos such as “Yankees Suck.” Most annoying of all, they regarded themselves as underdogs, forever pitted against George Steinbrenner’s “Evil Empire” (their term, not mine). To those of us who root for poor teams from small markets, the notion that the Red Sox would lay claim to the holy mantle of underdogdom is beyond loathsome. A friendly reminder: the team has the second-highest payroll in baseball.
No, it was my team who represented the little guy. What I couldn’t figure out is why the LGS kept smiting them. For three years running (2000–2002) the A’s reached the playoffs only to collapse in the first round. They blew six straight clinching games, three against the Yankees. It was as if the LGS wanted to see Goliath stomp David, as if he were gazing down at me through his cruel oculus and cackling, Having damned the citizens of Red Sox Nation, I shall make you feel the sting of their lamentation!
AS THE 2003 season opened, I was in no shape to listen to more moaning, particularly because the Sox had just nabbed our gutsy center fielder Johnny Damon by offering him a perverse salary of the sort the A’s cannot afford to pay.
My foul mood was exacerbated that spring by another event, which I cannot fairly neglect: The United States was in the midst of invading Iraq. This was a discretionary war, launched under false pretenses by foolish cowards and covered with reflexive obedience by all available media, which confused the war—an event in which the resources of our vast and powerful nation were mustered to murder the people of a much smaller nation—with a sporting event. Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sandswept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.
As an opponent of the war, I felt an oddly familiar sensation watching all this. It was like being a disgruntled fan, helpless before the slaughter. Although it was worse than that, because I had played a distant but undeniable role in the proceedings. As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.
The man we (almost) elected president in 2000 bears much of the blame,8 but I’m going to tread lightly here, as I’ve got my own crucifixion to attend. The point is that another season in hell was upon me and I was in my car, enduring war propaganda, then Sox propaganda, then more war propaganda, and this, compounded by my own choker-identification-misery, caused me to snap. On April 10, 2003, I published the following, uh, editorial in Boston’s alternative weekly:
A couple of weeks ago, at my weekly poker game, the host, a guy we call The Big Ruskie (though he is, in fact, a mid-sized man of German/Irish extraction) looked at me during a lull and said: “You know, Stevie, I’ve never believed in ESP or any of that kind of crap. But I really do have a feeling, a deep feeling, a feeling in my soul, that this is the year the Red Sox will win the World Series.”
I love the Ruskie. But looking at him across that poker table I felt I was gazing into the bloated, half-cracked heart of every single Red Sox fan on earth. Because every single Red Sox fan on earth (whether or not they say this out loud, though most of them do) truly believes that this is the year the Sox are going to vanquish the Yankees, break the curse, win it all. So let me be the first, on the eve of yet another opening day, in this blessed year of 85 A.S. (After Series), to deliver to the entire Red Sox Nation the same simple but timeless message: Shut up.
Shut up about Pedro and how he’s the greatest pitcher on earth if his shoulder holds up. Shut up about Manny Ramirez not running out ground balls. And for God’s sake, shut up about how we got nothing in return for Roger Clemens seven years ago.
Shut up.
Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up.
Now look: I’ve been a sports fan my whole life and rooted for the Oakland A’s during the darkest days of that franchise. I am on intimate terms with the agonies of fandom. What’s more, I’ve traveled this fine country of ours and witnessed the behaviors of numerous sports habitats. It’s true that most fans are prone to complaint. But I hope you’ll believe me when I observe (with no intention to offend) that I have never encountered a group of fans as whiny, sanctimonious, and unforgiving as Red Sox Nation.
I have, of course, asked Red Sox fans to shut up on an individual basis. I have frequently asked my friend Zach to shut up. This is especially important because Zach is that saddest species of Red Sox fan: the rabid optimist. Last year, when the team leapt out to a 27–9 record, he was ready to set the rotation for the playoffs. Then, of course, the team did its usual late-summah swoon.
This is generally how it goes with the Sox. They start strong and finish weak. Part of the reason for this—according to me—is that the players simply get tired of listening to the fans, who are always one strike out, one bonehead error, one gopherball away from crying bloody murder. In short: The players would like the fans to shut up.
They can’t say this, though. Because if they did, the fans would go into that self-righteous how-dare-you-I-pay-good-money-to-watch-you-spoiled-brats mode that is even more tiresome than their usual tirades.
And here I think of my pal Artie, who actually does pay good money to see the Sox and occasionally (senselessly) invites me along to games. Oh, Artie! How sad it is to watch his transformation, from the guarded optimism of May to the disconsolate rage of August. This is a man, after all, who tapes every single Red Sox game he can’t watch live and gets furious if you tell him the score before he has a chance to watch.
Artie is the more common kind of Red Sox fan, the fatalist, and he knows he’s locked in a terrible cycle of self-punishment, but he’s helpless. He’s given a significant portion of his heart to the Sox and they have inflicted the standard crack down the middle, and there’s nothing he can do but yell at his television in blind aggravation.
The thing is, to a true Red Sox fan, the idea of shutting up is simply impossible. It’s become the entire raison d’etre of their allegiance. To allow the team’s flagrant and repeated misdeeds to go uncriticized would be, by their own twisted logic, to let the team down.
And the sort-of-beautiful-but-really-more-pathetic thing about being Red Sox fans is that they’ll never run out of things to bitch about. Because baseball is a game of endless mistakes, miscalculations, misfortunes; so sure, Varitek may go three for five on Tuesday with a nifty basket catch in front of the backstop. But on Wednesday, he’ll muff the throw down to second and the ball will go bounding into centerfield and Red Sox Nation will rise as one to denounce him.
It’s such a dysfunctional relationship.
In closing, I’d like the Red Sox Nation to consider a simple exercise in logic:
a) The Red Sox do not seem to improve when bitched about.
b) You bitch about them incessantly.
If you agree that a and b are true, then:
c) Shut up.
WAS THIS A WISE THING to write as a resident of the Greater Boston metropolitan area? I would say no. But I felt at the time it was a necessary (and long overdue) declaration of war. Fate had drawn me into the chilly bosom of Red Sox Nation. It was time to go public as the team’s Anti-Christ once and for all. We’d been on a collision course since 1975. The Lord God of Sport was in full agreement.
Which is why, as autumn came to New England, as the maples rid themselves of leaves, turning the sidewalks as bright as Van Goghs, I found myself in the dank interior of Casey’s Bar and Grill watching the A’s take the field against the Sox. (I was not watching with one of my Soxchotic friends, because we had all agreed—without exactly discussing the matter—that I had best seek other venues.)
Game One was a humdinger, pitting our ace Tim Hudson against his counterpart Pedro Martinez (known to Bostonians as Saint Pedro of the Contract Holdout), a wily flamethrower with a Jheri curl that dripped duende. The A’s scrapped out a run in the ninth9 to send the contest into extra frames where, in the twelfth, with two outs and the bags full, catcher Ramon Hernandez did something no A’s player had done since the heyday of Dwayne Murphy: He laid down a bunt of transcendent beauty. The ball drib-bled down the third-base line. The entire bar let out a howl. Eric Chavez scampered home for the winning run, a walk-off bunt.
The clientele at Casey’s was by this time quite drunk and ex tremely belligerent, though I’m not sure that’s ever not the case, and I was careful to hold off on any celebration until I hit the sidewalk, at which point I ran down the street windmilling my arms and pounded the hood of my car repeatedly.
I switched bars for Game Two. The A’s pitched Barry Zito, whom I refer to as Baked Zito, based on my wishful theory that he smokes a lot of dope. Zito throws the most beautiful pitch in all of baseball, a curveball that loops toward the batter’s frontal cortex before diving into the strike zone. It’s a great deal of fun to watch a Zito curve, because hitters often buckle as they fight the impulse to bail out of the box. The Sox spent most of the afternoon in this mortifying posture. Zito struck out nine, and the A’s breezed.
I had enjoyed the first two games about as much as a human being can enjoy two sporting events, a pleasure prolonged by listening to the meatheads on WEEI, who, taken as a single sound track, produced the ferocious whingeing of a large machine with broken gears. It took a great deal of willpower for me not to call the station.
I watched Game Three in the lobby of a hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont. I was in Brattleboro for a literary festival, and this meant I was eating dinner with a large group of writers, some of them cute lady writers. It seemed to suggest some sad, uncultured things about me that I would choose to watch a baseball game rather than flirt with cute lady writers. And so, as is often the case in my life, I watched on the sly, sprinting back and forth from the table to the TV at the bar, offering as an excuse an unspecified family crisis, which, pathetically, for my dad and me, an A’s playoff game does constitute.
Of the many strange plays in this game, the strangest of them occurred in the sixth. Eric Byrnes, who had replaced Damon in center for the A’s, wound up on third with one out. The Fenway masses absolutely reviled Byrnes. This had something to do with his ostentatious high-kneed gait (the verb “flounce” seems to apply) and even more to do with his flowing blond locks, which I will admit lent him the aspect of a slightly effeminate wrestling villain. Nonetheless, he stood ninety feet away from knotting the game at one, and when shortstop Miguel Tejada hit a high bouncer, he bolted toward the plate, where Jason Varitek awaited him.10
Byrnes came screaming down the line. He had the throw beat by several feet. But Varitek, who was standing in front of home plate, did something, well, evil: At the last second—and I must emphasize this temporal aspect, at the last second—he stuck his left leg out so that his foot, in clear violation of the rules of baseball, as well as common sportsmanship, was blocking the base path. Unable to change course, Byrnes slid directly into the side of Varitek’s foot, which, anchored by his Brobdingnagian thigh, did not budge. Instead, Byrnes’s knee crumpled, and he went tumbling headfirst over home plate. The ball now arrived and bounded past Varitek (understandably distracted by his effort to cripple Byrnes) and skittered toward the backstop. Byrnes hobbled to his feet and initiated a spastic jig behind home plate. He did not pause to consider whether he had touched home plate, or whether he might wish to, for he was in the thrall of a primal playground drama: That motherfucker just tripped me. For ten long seconds, Byrnes hopped around behind the plate, shaking his blond locks in anguish and reaching down gingerly to confirm that his lower leg was still attached to the rest of his body. Nobody could quite figure out what was supposed to happen next. And then suddenly the cameras picked up Varitek, who had run to retrieve the ball and now bustled toward Byrnes and tagged him. In any sane universe, the ruling here would be obvious: Byrnes should have been awarded home plate and been granted the right to administer a lethal charley horse to Varitek. This being Fenway Park, and the opponent being my own A’s, the umpire called Byrnes out.
“Tough luck,” the bartender said.
Luck had nothing to do with it, but I nodded and returned to the table, where the writers were busily flinging bons mots and sniffing each other for coital ambitions.
The game ended in the bottom of the eleventh, when Boston’s Trot Nixon deposited a fastball into the right-field bleachers. Nixon had missed three weeks with a strained calf muscle, and thus the announcers were quick to compare this blow to the Gibson homer of 1986. Nixon himself, interviewed after the game, awarded the RBIs to God. It was Jesus up there swinging that bat, he told America, in the timeworn tradition of athletes who view the Kingdom of Heaven as an upscale suburb of Las Vegas.11
I LEFT VERMONT with my back in spasm (in retrospect, it may have been my soul) and drove directly to an establishment called the Good Times Emporium, which looks something like paradise as conceived by a juvenile delinquent. It is the size of an airplane hangar and contains 50,000 video games, most involving Uzis. Also: pool tables, paintball, batting cages, air hockey, bumper cars, a wide array of fried foods, and a service staff legally required to wear blouses that make visible the tattoos on their boobs. The TVs are the size of billboards.
I was aware of the looming psychological danger. The Lord God of Sport had announced His presence to me the night before in that exquisite tableau of injustice. My hope was that He had gotten it out of His system.
In the second, the A’s loaded the bases with no outs. Byrnes himself stepped to the plate and hit a towering fly ball down the right-field line. The fellow next to me produced a noise like a horse being punched in the stomach. But the ball tailed off at the last instant, and he missed his grand slam by half a foot. Byrnes went quietly, as did the next two batters.
This was a squander of the first magnitude, a very bad sign. But we still had Tim Hudson on the mound. As the A’s took the field for their half of the second, in fact, Hudson had gathered a small retinue around him. And then suddenly, Hudson was trudging toward the dugout while various Boston fans loudly speculated as to testicular endowment. The announcers eventually identified his injury as a strained oblique muscle. This struck me as appropriately oblique.12
On came Steve Sparks, a journeyman knuckleballer who had been released by the Detroit Tigers earlier in the year, not before helping that team set a major league record for losses. He promptly served up a gopher ball to Johnny Damon. It was now clear what was happening, no crystal ball necessary, and I began rooting—rather hysterically—for the Sox to break the game open.
Instead, the A’s fought back and found themselves up 4–3 with six outs to go. At this point, I turned to the least felonious-looking guy at the next table and said, “Don’t worry—the Sox will come back.” I was attempting a move patented by Floodie down in Miami: the rare double-reverse judo jinxball. Keith Foulke, the A’s closer, came on for the save. He retired his first two batters, then allowed the next two to reach base.
Up came David Ortiz. Because of his girth and jovial on-field demeanor, the Boston DH is often compared to the animated character Shrek.13 Because he is also Dominican, the lily white Fenway rabble have taken to calling him “Big Papi,” one of those charming nicknames that no doubt make them feel very ethnic. Hitless in the series thus far, Papi whiffed at Foulke’s first two offerings. Foulke now drew a deep summoning breath and prepared to slam the door.
But that is not what happened. Instead, Ortiz began fouling off pitches, settling into his swing, timing Foulke. I could see this with agonizing clarity. Foulke, meanwhile, was descending into that invisible panic that afflicts A’s closers on the brink of a win that will deliver me unreasonable happiness. In the end, Ortiz worked the count full, then turned on an inside fastball that went screaming from the shaded infield into the blinding sun of right. Jermaine Dye, stationed ten yards too shallow, sprinted back toward the track. All around me, Sox fans rose to their feet. I could hear them cursing softly, making choked sounds of prayer. Dye turned first one way, then the other. He raked the air with his gloved hand, like a man frantically searching for the ripcord to his parachute. It was a very long line drive. At last, Dye leaped, a valiant and hopeless gesture. Ball met earth at the base of the wall and thudded and jittered. Both men aboard scored and Shrek the Rapist pulled into third, panting.
The entire population of the Good Times Emporium began chanting Paaaapi! Paaaapi! Young toughs of various ethnic flavors, boys who, on any other occasion, might have been happily knifing one another in the parking lot, were instead exchanging high fives and sloppy hugs, while I sat in a putrid cloud, breathing in the fried cheese sticks and chicken wings left to sit and the thousand happy beer burps offered up into the smoky air.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Game Five, I had a dream, and in this dream my father called to say the A’s had lost 7–2, but that it was all right, they would be allowed to go to the Series anyway, an assurance that suffused me with irrational serenity. The amateur psychoanalysts among you will recall that ’72 was the first of the A’s three consecutive championships, and the year my condition was born. Thus, the dream marks the wished-for return to a prelapsarian state in which father and son are reunited and the A’s always win, even when they lose.
I woke with a swollen tongue and October in my heart. This was a Monday in Somerville and my apartment smelled of bachelor. The novel upon which I had diddled away the past two years of my life lay rotting inside my computer. I was supposed to visit a class of college students that night, to speak to them about how to survive as a writer without actually selling your plasma, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to cancel, despite the fact that half the class (the Sox fans) ditched anyway.
At precisely nine, I sprinted back to my car, intending to lunge for the radio. My cell phone rang. This would be one of my friends calling to inform me that the A’s were down by nine runs and that Eric Byrnes had been placed on dialysis. But no, it was a woman. A very jiggly woman, as it should happen, who, I suspected, would let me smell her neck. She wanted to see a movie.
I thought: Yes, this is fate. This is fate instructing me to go see a movie and smell this woman’s neck. Fuck the A’s. Fuck my whole messianic fan complex. The game was going to happen, no matter what I did. The Lord God of Sport would carry out His merciless will. There was no reason for me to suffer a third straight loss. So it was settled. I was off to the movies.
But I couldn’t bring myself to call this woman back. Instead, I sat gazing at the shitty little radio in my shitty little car and imagining I could hear the dull roar of the crowd, as I had on those many afternoons of my youth. And then (somehow) that roar was filling my ears and it was a sweeter sound—more human and comforting—than any I had ever known. Zito and Pedro were locked in a scoreless tie through three.
I knew then that I would listen to the game, all the way to the bitter end, because rooting simply doesn’t work in retrospect. It requires an instantaneous response, the building of hope, strike by strike, hit by hit, the gradual release of anxiety as your pitcher works his way out of a jam, the adrenal surge at the sight of a drive to deep left, the delicious horrible whiplash of a screamer snagged at the hot corner. The true fan, in other words, does not merely sit back and receive the game. He or she is working every moment, crafting fantasies, second-guessing, storing up regrets, tempering the unwanted equity of pain. This is the essential experience, the reward and punishment rolled into one, the sad duty of our sad disease.
So yes (of course) I blew off the tootsie and joined my friend Tim, who was at yet another bar with our pal Young Bull, a good-natured Texan stoner whose unseen darker regions had drawn him to the Sox long ago. In the sixth, Zito began to tire. His curve bit into the dirt while his heater, as if to compensate, rose slowly into the fatal latitudes. He gave up a dinger to The Brute Varitek, walked Damon the Apostate, then plunked Todd Walker. Zito was unraveling (as my students might put it) like a tortured ball of yarn. With the game tied and two on, Manny Ramirez stepped to the plate.
Since his arrival in 2001, the citizens of Red Sox Nation have enjoyed no greater pleasure than treating their dreamy left fielder as a communal chewtoy. His performance against the A’s was not helping matters. He had gone 3-for-18 without an RBI. His last confrontation with Zito, in the fourth, had ended with Manny waving nostalgically at a fastball on the outside corner.
This was cause for hope, of course, which, if you have been paying any sort of attention so far, is cause for dread. Zito delivered a strike, then a ball, then a strike, then another ball. His fifth pitch was a fastball dispatched, unwisely, to the same spot he had tried last time. Manny was waiting.14 A gruesome and unmistakable crack rang out. The ball soared high into the air, did a couple of loops around the moon, and landed twenty rows into the bleachers. Young Bull jumped from his barstool and performed a tribal dance involving anointing his shirtfront with beer.
Here, down 4–1, I should have tipped my cap to the LGS and gone off to find a cat I might quietly torture. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I hung around just long enough to witness Sox second baseman Damien Jackson and Johnny Damon engage in a vicious collision that knocked The Apostate cold for several minutes. What secret pleasure I took at the sight of his unmoving body! It was probably time to leave the bar.
Back at Tim’s, I started smoking pot. I don’t know why I thought this would make things better. (Drugs almost never make things better.) Young Bull ran inside and turned on the radio. But I was feigning indifference. I stood on Tim’s porch and smoked and feigned and occasionally glanced through the window, where Young Bull was perched before the radio, clutching his head. He came outside a few minutes later to announce that the A’s had knocked Pedro out of the game and put the tying run on first with no outs in the eighth. In I went, fuckheadedly, and listened to the heart of the lineup squelch the rally. Durazo: pop out. Chavez: lazy fly ball. Tejada: grounder.
I returned to the porch, pipe in hand, intending to scrub my short-term memory clean. Soon Young Bull would burst outside, wearing the grin of a miracle winner. It would be terrible for a few seconds. Then it would be over and I could return to the proper miseries of my life—the losing struggle with words, the quest for a woman stronger than my self-hatred.
As it happened, Young Bull did appear before me. But he looked stricken.
“What?” I said.
“You should come,” he said.
“A homer? What. What?”
Young Bull went back inside.
A homer, of course, would have been far too definitive. You can’t blow a homer. No, the A’s had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth. A base hit of any sort would win the game. They didn’t even need a base hit to tie the game. A bunt would do it. Or a sac fly. Or a feeble little bleeder to the right side. These did not seem like unreasonable hopes.
The Sox manager, Grady Little, brought in his volatile sinker-baller, Derek Lowe. Due up was Dye, the A’s best fly-ball hitter. But the A’s manager, Ken Macha, called Dye back from the on-deck circle and pinch-hit Adam Melhuse, the backup catcher, who had collected three hits in Game Four. It was one of those moves guaranteed to make Macha seem like a genius, by which I mean it made absolutely no sense. Melhuse struck out.
Lowe now did the obvious thing—given that his true intent wasn’t just to win the game, but to do so in a manner that would inflict maximum pain on me. He walked the bases full. Ellis, the second baseman, was due up. But he’d been pulled from the game in favor of Billy McMillon, who’d been pulled in favor of Frank Menenchino, who had exactly zero at-bats in the series. Eric Byrnes was the logical choice to pinch-hit, as he was batting nearly .500. But Macha had just inserted him as a pinch runner. So Macha stared down his bench—I like to think he did so with a funereal air—and came up with Terrence Long.
A reserve outfielder, Long had perhaps the most graceful swing of all the A’s. The problem was that his bat never actually hit the ball. At least, I had not seen it hit the ball. He was being asked to rescue the A’s and, by extension, to rescue me. To say that I smelled trouble would be like saying that Custer, upon reaching the Little Big Horn, smelled Indians.
Nonetheless.
Nonetheless, the Series had funneled down to a single batter. He reaches base safely, we win. He makes an out, we lose. The crowd out in Oakland was agape, athrum, ahowl, as was every member of Red Sox Nation. I myself spent the endless interludes between pitches pacing around the room, yelling out a series of increasingly demented bets—twenty bucks says Long knocks himself unconscious with his own bat!—none of which Young Bull would accept. No, he was busy hyperventilating, bent in the posture of a man waiting to be examined by prison guards.
To call this at-bat “a dramatic showdown” somewhat overstates actual events. Lowe made short work of Long, finishing him—if memory serves—in four pitches, the last a nasty sinker that dropped onto the inside corner.
In the moment that followed, Young Bull rose up and bounded over to shake my hand. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I was working furiously to minimize the impact, telling myself this was just so much silliness, a juvenile attachment, setting over my burred raiment the flimsy and unconvincing robes of a New Testament fan. “Nice comeback,” I said.
Young Bull’s phone rang and he gazed into the tiny blue screen. “It’s my dad!” He flipped open the phone and began speaking as if he were five years old. “Wasn’t it beautiful, Dad? I know! Gosh! I’m so happy!” Down the porch steps he wandered, out onto the sidewalk to receive his dose of fatherlove. I followed him, merely to eavesdrop on his joy. The sky was a chalky purple and horns were blaring everywhere.
TIM HAD SHUT off the radio, in the interest of sparing me the postgame interviews. I would only read about what happened next, how Derek Lowe strutted off the mound and made an obscene gesture toward the A’s. And how, in the A’s locker room, Miguel Tejada raged against Lowe and vowed revenge to the assembled reporters. At a certain point, he was led away from the jackals to a private alcove where he broke down altogether, for this was the ninth straight playoff clincher he had lost, and the weight of futility had finally crushed his athlete’s pride. Tejada wept.
As for me, I was stoned and depressed, mired in a classic sports hangover, the period after a harsh loss during which you revisit all the ways your team chunked it while simultaneously feeling like a fool for revisiting all the ways your team chunked it. Psychologically speaking, the A’s hadn’t lost. They had refused to allow themselves to win. And this struck me as my own crisis, the white-hot shame at the center of my fandom. I kept holding myself back in matters of love and literature, swinging through the fat pitches, forgetting to touch home plate, choking. How is it, I wondered, that I might rid myself of this hex? Was there some sort of operation? Or maybe a blood transfusion. I even called my father, hoping to swear off the A’s out loud, like they teach addicts to do. But he wasn’t around.
I had reached the stretch of the Mass Pike that runs beneath the Monster, and as I passed into the shadow of that great green wall a terrible shame seized me. The Lord God of Sport had led me into exile, led me into battle against my sworn enemies, led me to the brink of victory a dozen times—and each time forsaken me. Or, more accurately, He had allowed me to forsake myself. What if there was no lesson here, merely an exercise in pain?
THOSE HOPING FOR a recitation of the ensuing Sox/Yankees series can pretty much fuck off. I did everything I could to ignore the affair, by which I mean I caught only five of the seven games. I am trying to think of the most appropriate metaphor for what it was like to watch. The best I can do is to say that it was like having to choose between Bush and Cheney.15 The rivals bashed each other around for six games, taking three apiece, to set up the expected showdown: Pedro versus Roger Clemens.
I watched the game in a bar called Rocco’s, on the shores of Lake Erie, the western extremis of New York State. The crowd was split down the middle, the Sox fans loud with pilsner and anguish, while the Yankee partisans remained quiet, churning inwardly. Clemens lacked his fastball, and exited after four. Pedro pitched superbly. He entered the seventh with a three-run lead, at which point Fox flashed a graphic onscreen, noting that he was 84–3 in such situations. The balloon of hope within Red Sox Nation swelled almost painfully.
Everyone assumed Grady Little would yank Pedro before the eighth inning, and allow his bulletproof bullpen to finish the matter. But this he did not do. No, Pedro remained in the game for another five batters, suffering what probably ranks as the most notorious meltdown in the history of baseball.
I should have considered this pleasure enough. But I was (and am), after all, the Red Sox Antichrist, and thus in this, my shining moment, I made what would turn out to be a momentous decision: I wrote a seven-thousand-word letter to my friends in which I broke down Grady’s refusal to pull Pedro, and the ensuing disaster, in excruciating (and psychologically tawdry) detail. It was a florid glop of prose, bristling with the sort of false empathy that Iagos like me conjure at the drop of a ballcap. I knew my friends would read every word and that they would suffer deeply in doing so, while I, an alleged friend, an alleged sympathizer, derived some demonstrably sick pleasure at the thought of their deep suffering.
SO MY FRIENDS were in a shambles. The callers to WEEI had descended into sociopathic ideation. It was, in this sense, a return to the known world of glorious victimhood—for Sox fans are never happier than when they are pursuing despair.
As the 2004 season opened, my own expectations were humble: I wanted a final confrontation between the A’s and Red Sox, with a culminating contest at Fenway Park, during which my Oak-town heroes would decimate the Old Towne Team, and, if necessary, I would be torn limb from limb on the infield grass by a raging mob. The key to happiness resides in such compromises.
But the A’s missed the playoffs by one game. And the Sox, after losing three straight against the Yanks in the AL Championship, came roaring back to take four straight, then four more against the lethargic Cards. Damon the Apostate smashed the winning run in the Series finale and their new closer, Keith Foulke, recorded the final out, while I cowered beneath my blanket, waiting for my birthday to be over.
THE SOX FANS among you will find this summary cruel in its brevity. The rest of you need not shed too many tears. For the Red Sox, upon finally winning the Series, have launched their own cottage industry of Soxporn, a torrent of books and videos documenting the fortnight in question. My friends have watched and read and rewatched and reread all of this crap. They have wrung from the experience every precious drop of vindication, and turned ahead to disappointments yet unborn.
I think now of the recent conversation I had with a cabbie named John, on the way to the airport. The radio was tuned to WEEI, so I had to shout to be heard.
“You a Sox fan?”
“Since Yaz was in short pants,” he said.
I asked him where he’d been when the team won the Series.
“Didn’t watch the game,” he said. “Didn’t watch any of them.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Not even the comeback against the Yankees?”
John the Cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “Would’ve jinxed them,” he said calmly. His cheeks were a deep scarlet, his white pompadour stained by a lifetime of smokes and cheap pomade. “Anyway, they won’t win again, not in my lifetime.”
He spoke the line with proper vehemence, but there was something hollow in his delivery. Without the curse, after all, he had lost the exaltation of martyrdom. In winning the Series—a triumph he hadn’t even allowed himself to enjoy—he had suffered the ultimate loss. The secret wish nestled within his stated fear was obvious: He wanted to return to the way it had been before the Sox won, to recapture the ecstatic grievance that had defined him (and his fellow Soxchotics) as special.
It was at this precise moment, as I stared into the bloodshot eyes of John the Cabbie, as together we were swallowed by the blackness of the Callahan Tunnel and the babbling menchildren of WEEI fell abruptly silent, that I hung up my cleats as the Red Sox Antichrist. My work, I guess you could say, was done.
AND WHAT OF me and my Athletics? I keep meaning to quit them. Really I do. I have personal matters to attend to, and a growing list of moral qualms. I can’t help feeling that sport has become a fueling station on the road to war.
It is also, in my view, a form of slavery. However we might seek to obscure this truth, the modern sports complex has reduced the most abject precincts of this planet to ad hoc plantations, harvested each year for specimens. The strongest and fleetest may win a few years of lucrative idolatry, but they are discarded soon enough, when their bodies break down. The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete—rewarded all his life for a capacity to defeat and harm others—should serve as a moral exemplar. (The common parlance is role model).
Having said all this, I am left to explain why I can’t quite quit the A’s. My fancy excuse runs something like this: In a world in which our politics, our entertainment, our very waking lives have come to feel preordained by corporate masters, sport offers a last vestige of unscripted experience. True pressure, true grace.
The simple excuse is that I feel alive when I watch the A’s. This vitality often takes the form of misery. But the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures—a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men. Maybe it makes more sense to think of sport as the dominant religion of our age, the discovery of faith within ourselves by an allegiance to gods we can see, all those lovely bodies making miracles of air.16
I’m not suggesting that a stadium is a church. A stadium is just a place for people to gather close together, one of the last, ripe with longing, exposed to the risks of hope and its duties. I’m not naïve. Only I am. Sometimes I need to pretend. Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights.