The New Landscape
Picking up from yesterday in our indefinite series.
I left off yesterday by saying Red Sox fans no longer have a common stake. I’ll expand on that.
Before 2004, all Red Sox fans wanted the Sox to win the World Series for one reason: just to see it happen. It wasn’t to co-opt any sense of superiority from the Yankees, even if that’s exactly what happened. How on Earth could any Red Sox fan reasonably say that the team is better than the Yankees because it’s won two World Series in five years? Anyhow, I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is, Sox fans wanted to see the Sox win because they didn’t think it was even possible. You can call it quirky, neurotic, or egregiously egotistical (that God, or whomever, would choose us to suffer), and you’d be right on all these things, but there’s no doubt that it was compelling on the outside and all-consuming on the inside.
When I say that I thought about what it would be like when the Red Sox won the World Series every day, I meant every day. My fondest memories came in my first sustained job after college, when I worked at a newspaper office in the middle of Queens accessible from my apartment by a four-train commute that took upward of an hour. The last leg was a 15-minute walk up a hill under the Long Island Expressway, then into a residential neighborhood. It was here, walking past a CVS with the cars whizzing past me both on the side and above, that I did the real daydreaming. Would it be at home? On the road? Would it be a walk-off or a slaughter? Naturally, I always imagined myself there, in the stands, even if I’ve been to Fenway only a handful of times. But how would it happen? I wouldn’t so much construct scenarios in my mind as much as I would reset my brain each day and see what came up next. The kicker was that I would create all these wild scenarios in which they won, and they’d go out and lose in even more creative ways that I could have imagined.
Yes, the Sox formerly made something of an art of losing — as bad as a loss was, you could just add it to the collection. Now, there’s no upside to a loss, because we’re in the business of dominance. I think of Plato’s words — favorites of my friends, the Cleveland Frizzies — “never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how small.” I took all the losses as signs of progress; we were going to explore every tough way to lose before we figured out how to win. That’s what separated the Sox (and their fans) from the Cubs, and theirs. I would say that after the horrifically slow Enos Slaughter scored from first on a single to win the 1946 World Series, Sox fans probably groaned. Then there was 1967, and 1975, and Bucky Dent, and Bill Buckner, and Aaron Boone. Each one of these upped the ante, and by 2004 the whole thing reached a breaking point. The Sox really had found every way to lose.
That’s why the 2004 win inspired such confidence; I’m just surprised that it hasn’t abated. It seems to me like most Red Sox fans think that the suffering they and the team underwent entitles them to a dominant team, and that the Yankees-Sox dynamic is forever changed. It hasn’t. The Yankees will always be the Yankees, and the Sox will always be the Sox, and the Yankees will always be better. That’s a fact. If you’re a Sox fan who thinks differently, I want you to write this down somewhere where you read it every day. You are not the Yankees. Remember that. Because to the world at large, Sox fans and Yankees fans are now indistinguishable. Remember all those bad things you said about Yankees fans before 2004? And you probably still say now? That’s you.
Why would you want to be like that?
Because you suffered?
Whether you like to admit it or not, the suffering was what made being a Red Sox fan fun. And believe me, not all fans feel this way. Ask any Indians fan whether they like what’s happened to their team over the last two decades. Ask any Mets fan what it’s like to be, well, them. I have. You know what they say? “Let us just win one, then we’ll be happy.”
That’s how I feel about the Sox. I’m happy with the one they have. The second was just gravy. But if being a Sox fan is all about dominance now, I think most fans are missing the point. And worse, if they really think that, I think there are dark clouds on the horizon, which I’ll pick up tomorrow.
