My Baseball Valentine
2007-02-18 @ 1:54 p.m.

Like any true New Englander, my baseball partisanship was genetically hardwired and not the product of free will. We know this to be true because Red Sox fans enter the world with certain primordial myths branded into our memories: Ted Williams and his .400 season; Yaz's Triple-Crown year. Then there's the indelible image of Carlton Fisk willing the ball fair in Game 6 of the '75 World Series which is, in my family, as sacred an event as an obscure thirty-three year old carpenter rising from the dead three days after his execution. Indeed, in 1975, the idea of anyone rising from the dead seemed far more plausible than a victorious October in Boston.

To be a Red Sox fan, pre-2004, was to be gloriously exiled from the nation of baseball. We were joined in our wanderings by the forsaken Cubs (the petite bears from the windy place) and those other Sox. They had been exiled through incompetence and poor luck. The door remained open to them if they could pull it together long enough to step through. Our exile was different.

I was five months from entering this world when Fisk willed his home run against the daunting Big Red Machine. It brought false hope. What the Sixth Game giveth, the Seventh taketh away. Of course, it had to be that way. Red Sox heroism must occur not in the final, but in the penultimate, scene. Achilles might slay Hector, but Achilles must also fall.

In 1978, I was two. Perhaps even I, amid my dolls and miniature tea set, shuddered when the apostate shortstop went deep. Not that Bucky Dent was responsible for our fall. Dent was no more responsible for that victory than Judas was for Christ's death. They were mere vessels, pawns in a cosmic, Manichean struggle. Red Sox fans know that such events are pre-ordained, written long ago.

My first decade comes to a close. I sit and actually watch my first World Series. There was a collective sigh of relief that this New York foe was from the most feminine sounding of boroughs. We watched our team climb to the very top of the mountain, only to be cast down by a weak dribbler and a poor bounce. It is little consolation that Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner now cohabit Dante's sub-basement.

My Sox were Midas, to whom all good things came and then just as suddenly....disappear. That a man would sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees to finance a Broadway show might tell you all you need to know about any sports franchise. But it was more than that. Somewhere, in the corroded depths of Fenway, there exists a contract, penned in elegant sulfur, reeking of brimstone. Of this, I am sure.

There is also my alternate theory that Fenway was built upon an Massachuset tribe burial ground.

I cherished being a Sox fan before 2004. There was an outlaw quality to it all. The Bronx Bombers were corporate, down to the "no long hair, no facial hair" clauses in their contracts. We, of course, had Johnny Damon, a man Lewis Leakey would almost certainly have misidentified on the evolutionary chart. The Sox were Boston, but not of Beacon Hill. The Yankees resided in The Bronx, but were really Manhattan. We were Carthage to their Rome, Troy to their Mycenae, Vercingetorix to their Caesar, Butch and Sundance to their Bolivian Army (Jan to their Marcia?).

Fans invent themselves, their team and their own doom. We invented Carl Michael Yastrzemski and then fed him to Bob Gibson. We invented Lynn and Fisk and fed them to Reggie and Thurman. The Red Sox were a concept, not a reality. Our souls could soar with their achievements and wallow in their defeats. And we could relate. If I didn't pop the champagne and flash a big beautiful ring, well neither did Carl, or Jim or Carlton. Nor did Roger or Wade until they went to the other place. To come close and then lose was their gift.

It was pre-ordained that this team would find the New England soil fertile for their struggles. They were bound to this hard earth, their seasons mirroring the earth's cycles: warm springs, dazzling summers, cruel winters. Disappointment and defeat were printed on their schedules, if one's eyes were sharp enough to read .

In 2004 everything changed. Carthage defeated Rome. A city's, a region's, longings were a fulfilled. The team was victorious: All supposed curses lifted.

And I'm not sure I like it. I think something was lost when Boston finally won. Perhaps the only cause worth fighting for is a lost cause.

Added Enchanted Palms, over on the right. It's a good, fun read. Visit and say hi. Lenora's a Dom. She likes baseball too.