Originally published August 10, 1995, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
Let’s face it: With picture perfect days, clear, mellow nights and 24 overachievers pushing us toward the conclusion of August, you can’t help but drop the weight of the world by the side of the road in order to devote your energy, attention and imagination to the Olde Towne Team because they have already given us the gift of a great summer.
The Red Sox prove we live in the baseball capital of the world, New England, where front porches, back decks and beach umbrellas everywhere bear witness to the wonderful things that occur whenever we get our money’s worth in dreams and deeds. You can’t give tickets away in Detroit, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia or New York while, here, you have to beat people off with a stick if they figure you have a pair in your pocket.
All this the attendance, the standings, the fever present since June prove that it is embarrassing to compare the Patriots to what goes down inside the Basilica in Back Bay. No doubt about it: The Patriots, Parcells and Bledsoe are terrific.
But that’s merely infatuation; baseball is our one true love.
And like anything having to do with the heart, deep feelings occasionally cause people to jump ugly with their loved ones. As a result, the Sox have often been victims of a bizarre form of familial abuse that infects fans from Montpelier to Mashpee.
They get beaten up regularly in the public prints, over the lunch counter, on radio talk shows, from the pulpit, at the gas bay, nearly everywhere by nearly everyone. And like other aspects of our incredibly provincial history as well as perspective, local fans are prisoners of the past.
Can’t blame them. From Enos Slaughter beating a perfectly good throw in St. Louis to Denny Galehouse starting in place of Parnell, from taking the pipe against Joe DiMaggio and the real Bronx Bombers in ’49 all the way through Aparicio tripping as he rounded third and Rich Gedman’s passed ball 14 years later, the Red Sox have always managed to turn September and October into kind of a weird, nightmarish, annual Throat Lozenge Festival.
Of course, the worst part of this brutal biography isn’t the loss of a pennant. It’s the winter of abusive phone calls you get from Manhattan and Chicago.
Crank calls from disgruntled dopes like my friend Michael Breen of Queens, semiprominent radio reader, who has a neck like a drainpipe and a mind right out of Creedmor. As any psychiatrist would tell you, Breen enjoys predicting the demise of the Red Sox only because he is filled with selfloathing.
Breen, along with Anthony Kornheiser of Washington, D.C., behave in this pathetic pessimistic manner because they have no team to make them crazy. The club they most admire, the New York Yankees, is a troubled franchise run by a greedcrazed, loudmouthed bully who tries to put fannies in the seats by holding attractions like “Unauthorized Weapon Day.”
Thankfully, things are a lot different around here. For starters, Red Sox fans are called ticketholders and Yankee fans are called parole violators.
Our guys have coaches; their guys have probation officers. We call our owner John; they call theirs a felon.
We have pitchers who make the Sign of the Cross before they throw; they have pitchers who flip the crowd the finger after they lose.
At Fenway Park, Joe Mooney, world’s greatest groundskeeper, marks both foul lines with white chalk; at Yankee Stadium, they have a relief pitcher and a degenerate rightfielder who have put the equivalent of the first and third base lines up their noses.
The Red Sox have real AllAmerica role models like Mo Vaughn and Timmy Naehring; the Yankees have Wade Boggs, whose eyes obviously gave out long ago, and you can prove it by taking a peek at the woman who once fed his sex addiction.
So, let’s stop trembling about what tomorrow might bring. The Olde Towne Team has already given us a summer that will disappoint only cynics and pessimists.
It’s August and it’s exciting. And the best part is that, no matter what happens, it’s only baseball.
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