I used to proudly bemoan the fact that the last time the Red Sox won a World Series, my grandfather, who was born in the 19th Century, was not yet twenty. Then, in 2004, my daughter’s birth and the glorious death of the Bambino’s Curse were as parentheses enclosing the most cathartic week of my life.
The night the Sox finished the Cardinals, I went down to Shanghai Kelly’s to join my fellow long-sufferers in their revelry. San Francisco was thick with expatriated New Englanders in those days, and the Bosox bandwagon was a natural attraction in the cool gray city of Superbowls. So, Kelly’s was in a state of glorious pandemonium. Airhorns and cowbells drowned out the jukebox, and misty-eyes lined the bar, soaking it all in, thinking of Carlton Fisk and Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner, and assorted other ghosts from back in the day—both on and off the field.
Brian, a registered “Mass-hole” from Boston was working the bar like a medic in a field hospital. I gave him a wave and snapped him a salute. He pointed back and smiled. I held two fingers above the din and, in due time, he brought me my Bushmills and my Guinness, and we shook hands like comrades reunited years after a great war.
“These are on me,” he said. “The beer’s for the Sox, and the shot’s for your little girl.”
The thought of that moment still makes me faklempt.
She was born during the sixth game of the American League’s Championship Series which, was nominally the precursor to the World Series, but as any devotee will tell you, (with all due respect to the National League champs that year,) it was the cardinal event of that fateful season.
The sweeping of St; Louis in the Series was like the US Hockey team beating Finland for the Gold Medal in Lake Placid—the real “miracle on ice” already happened when the US beat the Russians. Similarly, after the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the dreaded Yankees in the ALCS, the Series felt like a formality with an inevitable outcome.
The sixth game was the “Bloody Sock” game, from which everybody remembers Curt Schilling, the way many people remember the ski-jumper from the Wide-World of Sports. My image from that game is a less iconic, but infinitely more dramatic.
Bronson Arroyo relieved Schilling in the 7th inning, inheriting a 4-2 lead, with Derek Jeter on first and Alex Rodriguez at the plate. A-Rod, promptly and weakly, grounded to Arroyo, who fielded the ball neatly and moved to the first-base line to intercept A-Rod and apply a routine tag. Shockingly, Rodriguez swatted the ball from Arroyo’s glove and proceeded to second while Jeter scored from first.
It was the cosmic, predestinate, post-season disaster that seasoned Red Sox fans had come to dread, like hapless in a brutal demonstration of Einstein’s definition of insanity. It was a marvel to behold over the years, the sheer variety of novel ways that the Sox contrived to consistently evade the ultimate victory.
Terry Francona came out of the Boston dugout like a banshee. Joe Torre emerged like a man anticipating injustice. Neck veins bulged. Spittle flew in the night sky. The umpires convened and, at length, Rodriguez was called out for interference, and Jeter was returned to first, nullifying the run and eliciting more veins and spittle.
I was the only person in the room who seemed to appreciate the profound implications of the moment: The planets were coming into alignment. The Earth was experiencing a magnetic polar shift. The Coriolis Effect was about to be reversed. The Curse of the Bambino was cleaving. Apollo 13 was emerging from the far side of the moon.
And yet, the obstetrician seemed deliberately obtuse toward my enthusiasm; the nurse verged on insolence. Frankly, even my wife’s behavior was marked by a sense of willful obliviousness.
In any event, Yankee Stadium went positively batshit. It was slipping away, and the smell of fear wafted all the way from the Bronx to our little delivery room in San Francisco. All sorts of crap—baseballs, bottles, whatever—cascaded down on the field like shit from a monkey cage. NYPD took to the field on horses and in riot gear. It looked like the ’68 Chicago convention and had the feel of the Beer Hall Putsch.
My little girl was born in the midst of this craziness. By the time she was cleaned up and handed to me, some Yankee struck out in the bottom of the 9th, sending the series to a decisive seventh game. And the rest, as they say…
Heady stuff.
Anyway, this time around, the World Championship was won in much less distracting circumstances. My six year-old boy and I sat up past midnight and watched the Red Sox handle their business with little ado. I was struck by how an event that seemed downright miraculous three years ago seemed almost banal in reprise. But then I considered that the boy was not a part of the catharsis of ’04. This was his entrée into Red Sox nation—an amazingly different experience that diverges wildly from family tradition.
The thought of family tradition, of fathers and sons and baseball and the panoply of wisdom and emotion it can bring, reminded me of another, fond baseball memory…
For years, I’ve credited Gates Brown with a home run that seemed, at the time, to threaten the Citgo sign beyond the Green Monster at Fenway Park. As it turns out, it was not Gates Brown, but Willie Horton, who hit that shot. I looked it up on the Internet after I put the boy to bed.
Fortunately, in much the same way that I’ll never forget Bronson Arroyo, I’ll always remember Bob Montgomery from that game. He hit a twelfth-inning grand slam off Ron Perranoski to win the game, 12-11. It was a Monday, August 9th, 1971, to be precise. It was the first game I ever saw in person. I went with my little brother and my Dad.
As it happens, Montgomery hit only 23 home runs in his entire career, and only one grand slam—at Fenway, that day. His only other noteworthy accomplishment is as the answer to the trivia question: Who preceded Carlton Fisk as the catcher for the Red Sox? Mediocrity on this scale tends to streamline research.
Yaz and Reggie Smith and Boomer Scott played that day, that much I remembered without looking it up. But I had no idea about the other luminaries in that game—like Jim Lonborg, who started, and Sparky Lyle, who got the win. Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan and Jim Northrup played for Detroit that day. Dean Chance came out of the bullpen. Luis Aparicio, Rico Petrocelli, Billy Conigliaro and Bill Lee played for the Sox.
Sport is a childish pastime that fixates on artifice and inanity—just try to explain what a “balk” is to a six year-old. But it serves the same purpose as religion in many respects—usually without the noxious side effects. It signifies honor and tradition, history and possibility, discipline and whimsy, faith, hope and charity, strength of mind, body and character, competition and accomplishment.
I believe it is incumbent upon parents to acquaint their children with disappointment, to teach the children to manage their fears, and to cultivate their dreams. The Red Sox nation is like a laboratory for this science.
It has been said that the irrational glorification of the athlete presaged the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, and that contemporary sport, with its proclivity toward boorishness, ignorance, corruptitude and greed, sends a clear signal to contemporary culture that the Greeks and Romans clearly ignored. So, perhaps my superstitious and sentimental Red Sox avocation, and my desire to impart such foolishness unto my children, does not represent the height of rationality.
But, my grandfather told me stories about seeing Babe Ruth and Cy Young; my father told me stories about Ted Williams; I’ve told my boy about Yaz and Fisk and Buckner, and I can only hope that, one day, he’ll tell his kids and grandkids about Manny and Big Papi and Mike Lowell and the great Red Sox of the mid-21st Century, and my daughter will tell the tale of A-Rod and Arroyo on the night she was born. And, these stories will impart tales of their generations, and be repeated like innocuous Bible verses.
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