Why I Hate the Red Sox
The title of this post is misleading. I don’t really hate the Red Sox. At least, not in the same way that I hate that other AL East team. With the Yankees, it’s easy to hate just about everything: the players are old, pricy, underachieving prima donnas; ownership is outspoken, nepotistic, and incompetent; management destroyed a farm system through reckless free agent signings; and a significant chunk of the fans act like entitled jackasses. Not to mention the annoying non-stop coverage by the national and local media, and the pretentious sense of history and accomplishment that the Yankees organization shoves down people’s throats (as evidenced during this year’s All-Star Game and at the closing ceremony of Yankee Stadium). All of these things make hating the Yankees easy; it’s something every non-Yankees fan does, and it’s the natural order.
Good riddance (even though Pedroia's awesome).
The Red Sox, at least for me, are more complicated. I like most of the players and coaches on the Red Sox, especially now that Manny’s gone. Curt Schilling has his own video game company, and listens to many of the video game podcasts that I listen to. Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis are good, young, home-grown players that are fun to watch. Same with Jon Lester, except with the incredible side-story of beating cancer and coming back to throw a no-hitter. David Ortiz is probably the funniest and most gregarious player in baseball, and all of the stories about him indicate that he’s a genuinely good person. Terry Francona is a smart, eloquent, and level-headed man, and perhaps the best manager in baseball.
I have a great deal of respect for the ownership of the Red Sox, a group that managed to revitalize Fenway Park and install a top-notch baseball operations staff headed by Theo Epstein. The principal owner, John Henry, is a long-time diehard baseball fan and a student of sabermetrics (it’s little wonder then that he tried to lure Billy Beane from the A’s after taking over the Red Sox). Unlike the Yankees, the ownership and management of the Red Sox understood that establishing a stellar farm system was the key to the team’s prolonged success, and their work has paid incredible dividends during the past couple of years.
Even long-time Red Sox fans are generally likable people. Sure, the large amount of obnoxious townies provide a pretty good reason to hate the Red Sox. But every city has its particular group of dumb, annoying fans. The baseball-savvy Red Sox fans are just like hardcore baseball fans in any other city. People who understand the simple elegance of the game. People who understand the cruel paradox of following a team through the ups and downs of a grueling, six-month, 162-game season only to see one’s championship hopes evaporate in the blink of an eye in the postseason. People that remember the life-long, generation-spanning torture of the 86-year championship drought. And these are the people that I felt genuinely ecstatic for after the 2004 championship, because they deserved it.
With all of these feel-good things about the Red Sox, you’d think it would be easy for me to root for them, or at least be indifferent about their success. This might have been true when I moved to Boston for college in 2002. Now, I constantly root for the Red Sox to fail. I was so ecstatic after their loss to the Rays in the ALCS this year that I almost felt like the A’s, my own team, were going to the World Series. This feeling felt right, but I couldn’t justify it to myself in coherent terms. However, after thinking about it for a couple of days, I feel like I now have a decent answer.
The dreaded pink hat.
The root of the answer can be found by starting with a group of fans that I didn’t mention two paragraphs ago: the “bandwagon” Red Sox fans that have jumped on during this decade (including the pink hats). Their origins are numerous. Maybe they’re college students from out of town who didn’t care about baseball until they got swept up in the general fever that grips Boston whenever the Red Sox are contenders. Perhaps they’re the significant other of a longtime fan, and adopted the team in order to feel closer to this person. Or maybe they’re a lifelong resident of the Boston area that can only care about the Red Sox when they’re winning. Regardless of origin, they enjoy following the Red Sox, and usually don’t give a damn about the rest of baseball. And as a diehard baseball fan, they annoyed me to no end when I lived in Boston (and still do).
You could say that this makes me an elitist. The bandwagon fans do genuinely enjoy following the team. Who am I to condemn them just because it’s a newfound experience? These people, after all, can only serve to broaden baseball’s reach, which must be a good thing for baseball as a whole. Maybe they’ll evolve into hardcore fans of their own, and discover a love of baseball that they’ll pass down to future generations.
I still can’t help but feel that these bandwagon fans cheapen my own experience as a baseball fan. Perhaps I’m being hopelessly idealistic, but I feel like there was a time when being a fan of the Red Sox meant being a passionate fan of baseball itself (who else could love a loser?). A fan of another team would talk to a Red Sox fan and have a two-way discussion about their teams, the game of baseball, and its history, and perhaps commiserate about the plight of both teams. Even though these fans cheered for different teams, there was still a strong common bond. With the rapid proliferation of bandwagon Red Sox fans, this bond seems to get more tenuous. Running into someone in an airport who’s wearing a Red Sox cap doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to forge some sort of connection through baseball. Sure, they might be able to tell you how awesome it was in 2004 or 2007 to watch the Red Sox win the title and how they got to celebrate with everyone in the streets of Boston. But they won’t be able to share a single thing about the experience of following a major league season; the ups and downs that accompany every pitch, at-bat, game, and series for each team. Or anything about a lifetime spent waiting, through numerous gut-wrenching moments, for a shot at a championship. And forget trying to mention anything about baseball history. On some basic level, the bandwagon fan seems disrepectful to the game of baseball; they just don’t “get it”.
To some extent, these bandwagon fans are not unique to the Red Sox. Bandwagon fans pop up whenever any team has success; just look at the legion of celebrity fans the Yankees created over the years. But with the Red Sox, the sheer number of fans that have sprouted up during the past few years represent a seemingly dramatic shift in the “values” of the organization and its fanbase. The proliferation of bandwagon fans is just one aspect of this. Red Sox Nation used to be a lighthearted term of endearment for the collection of diehard Red Sox fans spread around the world; now, it’s an official, team-sponsored club with membership fees and a leadership structure with a “governor” in each state and an elected “president”. NESN (New England Sports Network), the cable network owned by the Red Sox, now carries a reality dating show for Red Sox fans called “Sox Appeal”. Hell, one of the first things television viewers saw after the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series in St. Louis was Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore running onto the field to “celebrate” with the team. After all, what better way to mark the end of an 86-year championship drought than with the on-field filming of a Farrelly brothers comedy?
The end result of this transformation is that, on a high level, the Red Sox aren’t a baseball team anymore; they’re an entertainment conglomerate with hip marketing. “Red Sox” is a New England brand that just happens to have a baseball team as its core component. Through careful cultivation, the bandwagon fan is now a core consumer of this brand. While other teams may have bandwagon fans that hop on for the late-season run during good years, bandwagon Red Sox fandom is now a quasi-permanent institution. And it is vital to the team’s growth plans. I don’t know how long-term Red Sox fans feel about this, but it is alienating to other baseball fans who used to think that Red Sox Nation was part of the “good guys”.
I readily admit that I follow baseball with a passion that is highly unadvisable. And perhaps I was overexposed to many of the more annoying elements of Red Sox fandom in a college environment. There might not be such a hard dividing line between the “diehard” and the “bandwagon” fans. Or perhaps the diehard, long-term “true” baseball fans vastly outnumber the others, but Red Sox marketing efforts have been disproportionately driven to “converting” the bandwagon fans that they’ve attracted. Regardless, the past few years of Red Sox success, and the subsequent fallout, have been antagonizing to other baseball fans. And this is why I, and many others, now “hate” the Red Sox.
I don’t begrudge anyone, “bandwagon” fan or not, their right to enjoy themselves by cheering for the Red Sox. By all means, go have fun when you can. But I am incredibly excited that the Rays and Phillies are playing in a World Series that really only means something to hardcore baseball fans and people from the Tampa Bay Area and Philadelphia. I can enjoy a World Series without feeling like I’m sharing it with every last unappreciative person on the planet. Yes, I’m a grinch; but at least I’m not the only one.
Anyways, this post got long pretty quickly. This is the first time I’ve posted in a year and a half, and I really need to put up an update about what I’ve been up to. The short version: I’m now in Austin, and life is pretty good.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
By your definition I’m a bandwagon fan. So now I’ll waste some tubewidth defending it.
I just wasn’t much of a baseball fan at all between 6th grade and late college. Why? Well, for one, you have to admit, baseball had some pretty awful years in there (the MLB strike in my middle school years, for example). When I was little (grade school) I rooted for the White Sox because they were not much further away than the Twins and I just liked Chicago far more than Minneapolis. (I also thought Frank Thomas was the shit.)
Unfortunately, my parents aren’t really sports fans at all, so for the most part we watched a little bit of college basketball, the NFL playoffs, and a very occasional baseball game. I honestly didn’t have a favorite NFL team at all until college (though I did root for the Patriots in their superbowl against the Packers, mostly because they were the underdogs and I found the Brett Favre media love-in repellant).
When I got to Boston, it took several years before I really got back into any sport, and it was football first: I listened to the Patriots games on WBCN every Sunday because (1) I listened to WBCN all the time, (2) Sunday was tooling day, and (3) Gino Cappelletti is cool. And YES, I was listening to them and nursing my growing hatred for those damn Jets fans before 2001, thank you very much.
Baseball… just took longer to get back into. I think football is fundamentally a better sport—there’s more strategy, more preparation, MUCH more going on (and BTW I’m convinced that most people watching a football game—including me, at least some of the time—have NO idea what’s really happening on the line of scrimmage; they’re just watching for the long passes with circus catches or a linebacker decleating the runningback). By comparison, the relatively low energy of most baseball games just isn’t all that attractive. So why do I like baseball at all? Really, two words: baseball prospectus. The reason baseball is great, I’ve come to realize, is because there’s a numbers game behind it all, and THAT is the part I actually like. The strategies are longer term, and in a sense even harder to discern than in football, but they’re there. (Also I have a perverse love of data mining and statistics.) I’ll readily admit that I don’t know nearly as much about baseball as I (think I) know about football. But I do know enough to have a reasonable if somewhat superficial conversation with dudes in airports.
All this fails to address the fundamental charge, though: that I’m a bandwagon fan because I only started caring about the Sox when they were winning. My first response to that is this: it should hardly be surprising that, at a time when my interest in baseball was returning after a decade hiatus, I was swept up in the excitement of postseason. Moreover, I can hardly be blamed for rooting for the “home team”—it’s not as if I’ve ever identified with Minneapolis or Chicago, and either would be a more arbitrary pick than Boston given that I’ve never lived closer than 200 miles from either. And while it’s the case that I don’t watch many regular season games, that’s in no small part attributable to the fact that it’s hard to shake the feeling that most of them just “don’t matter” until late in the season, and for me that’s enough to really nuke my attention span.
So yeah, I’m not old enough to have really suffered in the 86-year drought. I didn’t manage to move to a place with anything larger than a community college team until 1998, and the Pats are really my favorite team, Tom Brady or no. But I got a pretty goddamn concise summary of the championship drought in a single ALCS game watching Grady Little piss away our World Series chances by giving Pedro an ego stroke. And goddamnit I drove your ass to Yankee Stadium and got beer thrown on me in Fenway when you cheered Jermaine Dye’s home run in the A’s-Sox ALDS. So don’t call me a bandwagon fan or I’ll fackin’ cut yah.
…or maybe next year I’ll earn my baseball cred by joining a fantasy baseball league.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
By the way, your comments are broken. Somehow your comment submission CGI is redirecting to the https:// version, but in the process the post data is being lost. You need to change the HTML of the comment form to #<form action=”https://www.garum.net/blog/wp-comments-post.php” method=”post” id=”commentform”#>
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Yeah, your comment reinforces a feeling I had that there’s probably not so clear-cut a distinction between “diehard” and “bandwagon” fans as I assume. There’s a spectrum between “superficially caring about one team” and “obsessed with major league baseball”, and most fans fall somewhere in the middle. And the fact that you have an appreciation for the statistical side definitely distinguishes you from the pink hats.
I also think it’s relevant that you bring up the relatively low energy of baseball when compared to football. Football is a mainstream sport: it’s flashy and features lots of action in short, frequent bursts along with a compact 16-game, four-month season. Baseball is a purist’s sport: a relatively slow pace of play with infrequent, unpredictable, and long periods of high tension combined with a grueling 162-game, six-month season. In some paradoxical sense, this actually contributes to its appeal among diehard fans. You have to respect baseball in order to be a “real” fan; nobody has such pretensions about football. And this need for “respect” is part of what annoys many other baseball fans about Red Sox fans. You can’t just follow the season for the last two months and act like you were with the team all along. Yeah, it’s petty and not really rational, but little about following sports is rational.
Another effect that contributes to the particular annoyance I have with Red Sox fans dawned on me after I wrote the post. The Boston media form an incredible echo chamber; you hear more in Boston media about local sports teams than in almost any other city (just look at how many people write about the Red Sox on any given day in the Boston Globe). But this also means that comparatively little gets discussed when it comes to other teams and the interesting stories that occur elsewhere (except if it involves the Yankees). And this makes me feel that a lot of Red Sox fans are just generally less educated about the rest of baseball than fans of other teams. This is annoying when you’re trying to talk, for example, to that dude in the airport or your Boston cabbie (who seems like a huge Red Sox fan) about your favorite team. You both know a decent amount about the Red Sox, but he probably has no clue who even your star player is.
And, in the end, I probably shouldn’t care anymore about bandwagon fans, especially now that they don’t annoy me on a daily basis. I’m more alienated by the fact that the Red Sox marketing machine has gone out of control. This includes the Red Sox Nation club and “Sox Appeal” show that I mentioned in the post, as well as numerous other tacky things. I probably shouldn’t care, but I’m still confused by the entire process. There was a time when the Red Sox embodied “pure” baseball (as opposed to the flashy Yankees). I guess things change when you’re successful.
Also, the comments are fixed. Blame my method of forcing SSL for administration.
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 am
(Rambling, disorganized thoughts, since I’m falling asleep as I write this)
I think Sam and I are the Sox fans you’re talking about when you’re talking about the “die hards” that you like. I doubt I need to go over my history with anyone who reads this blog, so I won’t. But I have spent a fair bit of time analyzing my own attachment to the Red Sox, and how it fits into the overall change in the fan base and attitudes over the last few years, and I have a few thoughts.
First, professional sports are now, and always have been, a business. And businesses a) change with time and b) exist to make money for the owners. Sports are a special case of business because some owners prioritize winning over profits (essentially using their investment in the team as a form of entertainment), but they’re still a business. So let’s not delude ourselves by talking about “purity of the game” or whatever. Ty Cobb bitched about players playing for money over love of the game, and the president of Harvard in the late 1800’s didn’t want his pitchers throwing curveballs because they were intended to deceive the hitter in an unsportsmanlike way. The A’s play in Oakland because the owners felt like they could make more money there and didn’t care about screwing the fans in Philly or Kansas City.
Second, I use terms like “we” to describe the Red Sox. Some people have criticized fans’ use of the first person plural to describe their favorite teams, but I think it’s appropriate. The Red Sox are a group of 10 guys on the field, supported by 15 more guys in the dugout and bullpen and another 15 filling out the 40-man roster, coached by half dozen coaches on the field, managed and assembled by a couple dozen guys in the front office, backed up by a few hundred guys filling out minor league rosters, funded by a business operation that includes a few hundred stadium staff, and ultimately funded by a couple million fans. The Red Sox exist in order to part me with my money; they take my money to go hire highly entertaining baseball players, and I’m satisfied by this transaction. But since a key part of the Red Sox’ success is that they “own” their fans, and rely on the fans for revenue, it seems reasonable for fans to use the first person when talking about the team.
Third, I have mixed feelings about the bandwagoners, who run the gamut from the “pink hats” (a term I disagree with, since pink-hatted people seem roughly as knowledgeable as anyone, except the “home jersey with the name on the back” guys, who tend to be idiots) to guys like Riad who didn’t care too much about baseball or the Sox before, but have made themselves into fairly knowledgeable fans. On the one hand, they make it hard for guys like me to get tickets to the games, and earn all of us a bad name when they do dumb stuff like leave game 5 of the ALCS in the 7th inning. On the other hand, I know the Sox couldn’t afford a $150m payroll without their support, and though $150m can’t buy a championship, and it’s possible to put together a good team for $50m, the $150m payroll, intellegently deployed and combined with a solid farm system, means that the Sox should continue to be a playoff contender for the forseeable future.
Finally, I have very little sympathy for other teams who don’t spend as much as the Sox. The Sox have the smallest ballpark in the majors (like it or not, there are empty seats under those tarps in Oakland), play in the #7 media market in the country (behind 10 other MLB teams), but are in the top 3 in revenue and spending because the fans drop more money on the team. Maybe it’s because Boston is rich, but maybe it’s because people here care more. I’ve been called a rich hypocrite when I’ve worn my Sox jersey in other parks (most notably Cleveland and Denver last year in the playoffs) but we both saw all those empty $5 seats at the Jake when we went last spring. And really, if you’re not willing to drop $500 on a season ticket, but you happily shell out $75/game for the playoffs, who’s the hypocrite? It shouldn’t be that hard to fill 2 million seats per year if anyone, at all, in your city cares about the team. And if no one cares, then you don’t get to bitch about it when your team can’t afford good players.
People caring about the Sox isn’t a new phenomenon. Boston Baseball/Baseball Underground has been around 15 years now, based entirely off fans’ demand for a better scorecard/program than the team put out. Sox fans have organized around internet sites since before “internet community” was a buzzword. (There’s a reason SOSH is a “message board” rather than a “blog community”). And if people are insecure about the size of their Sox Cock and want to donate $5 to the team to join a mailing list and get a Citizenship card, that’s fine by me. The new phenomenon is that ownership isn’t afraid to take a couple of risks, spend some money, charge some money, and put a highly competitive product on the field.
On some level, baseball is like democracy, with an element of luck thrown in. The team with the best chance of winning is the team with the most fans, who the most fans want to win. But there’s a lot of luck in baseball, and throw in guys in their first 3 or 6 years, and a lot of teams can make a run at a title. It’s a myth that any particular MLB hat could ever indicate a true baseball fan. Over the course of my life, I’ve worn Red Sox, Cubs, Mets, Braves, Angels, Reds, and White Sox hats on a regular basis (I played on the Yankees for a couple of years in little league, but only wore the hat for games), as well as wrong-color Red Sox hats. And I’ve never thought twice about it. Hats are just hats, not a flag that says, “I can speak intelligently about baseball”
P.S. I really want a “GINO” shirt with a picture of Gino Cappelletti on it. That would make my day.
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:05 am
Yeah, everything you say makes sense, James (and yes, you and Sam were primarily the ones I was referring to when I referenced the diehards, but there were some other random people I’d met before 2004 that I was thinking of too). The “purity” of the sport is a ludicrous concept, but it’s one that I’d like to be pretentious/short-sighted enough to hold onto while I can (probably until the A’s move into their new stadium). I understand the business aspects completely, and part of the reason why I respect John Henry, Larry Lucchino, Tom Werner, et al. is that they’ve exploited the success of the Red Sox in such a shrewd and sensible fashion (at least from a pure business perspective). I’m just confused about why so many long-time Red Sox fans don’t find some of the marketing and business tactics more repulsive when they used to criticize the Yankees and their fans for the exact same thing. Have they rationalized it in the same way you have? Are people willing to trade some previously held “ideals” in return for success? (I guess the answer to that is an obvious “yes”.)
A large part of the alienation from the Red Sox that many people feel is just a natural backlash to success, which is unavoidable. But, especially for someone who’s lived in the Boston area and isn’t a fan of any of the teams there (like Ariel, Yoder, and myself), I think a large part of the backlash is also related to unique characteristics of the Boston sports scene. Everything gets amplified in Boston in a weird way. For someone who’s used to a more level-headed scene where people don’t feel the massive highs and lows about their sports teams that Boston does, people that get really excited about the success of the Red Sox (and the Patriots, and the Celtics) come off as jackasses, especially since they seem to only pop out of the woodwork and talk about their team when the team’s doing well. There’s no real rational criticism here; just a feeling that it’s not really my scene, and that I’d rather see dejected Boston fans on my TV than excited ones.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I think part of the problem is you see a strange version of the “boston sports scene.” FIrst, there’s the people you interact with personally on a regular basis in boston: for you, mostly students, and mostly students from out of town. And mostly people who just aren’t that into sports in general.
Then there’s “the boston sports media.” By which people generally mean Shaughnessy, Remy, and WEEI. But no one in New England (outside of Bristol, CT) under the age of 50 takes Shank seriously any more. He’s got four columns: “what happened last night is a metaphor for the whole history of the red sox,” “fate dictates that (whatever) will happen,” “random thoughts/hey kids get off my damn lawn,” and “I’ve got an axe to grind with (name).” He had one semi-decent column idea 20 years ago (curse of the bambino) and turned it into a franchise. And the thing is, he could have started in the same place (a history of the Red Sox since the Ruth trade) and arrived at a spot-on diagnosis of the sox’ ills (a pattern of incompetence on the part of ownership keeping the Sox losers.) Remy can be tough to deal with, but after seeing some other teams’ announcers, I’ve come to accept that we could do a lot worse. I can’t defend WEEI, though they do fill the demand for rapidly disseminating sports information.
And then there’s the national media’s version of Red Sox fans. The yahoos who call WEEI, the “new haircut” crowd that packs Kenmore Square bars for the games, the slightly deranged fans who need to wear the jersey of whoever is pitching at that exact moment as they watch the game at home, and some LA guy who claims to be the world’s foremost authority on boston sports, and writes 50,000 words a week to prove it.
But that’s not what it feels like in small-n Red Sox nation. Red Sox fandom is having mothers’ day dinner with the extended family, my aunt going into the kitchen to get more food, and saying, “hey, the sox have the bases loaded in the 9th!” and everyone at the table getting real quiet so they can hear the game on the radio from the next room. It’s knowing that “Pu Pu Hot Pot Ten Minutes” really means, “don’t expect your food until the end of the inning.” And it means that during a pennant race, it’s not too hard to find a bar with the Extra Innings package that plays the other relevant games. (When I was in SF a couple of months ago, I tried finding a place to see the Sox game, so I went to the baseball-themed bar across the street from AT&T park. Even though the Giants day game had just let out, the place was empty. And even they didn’t have the extra innings package.)
Yeah, the mood of the city does change with sox wins and losses, just like it changes with the weather and the beginning/end of daylight saving. Maybe you think that’s going too far, but I think it’s normal, and other cities just don’t take their baseball teams seriously enough. You were never really in boston before the sox were good, but even when they weren’t selling out, sox wins and losses were still palpable in the mood of the city. I’ll be the first to admit that the other teams only matter when they’re good (though when Jeremy Jacobs sells the ruins, a lot of people will give them another shot.) But the sox matter even when they’re bad.
As far as trading ideals for success, I think there’s probably some element of that, but you have to remember that the Sox fans ideals WERE success, and we were just dumb enough to believe the owners when they said that they couldn’t keep players because they were greedy and asking for too much money and we needed a new stadium and it wasn’t physically possible to add any new seats to Fenway. When the new owners bought the team, a lot of people in Boston were pissed. The Herald’s front page was a big fenway scoreboard that said, “VISITORS 1, BOSTON 0.” But when people saw that they were committed to winning, their attitudes changed. They got rid of the GM and managers who would snipe at each other in the media. They ran the sox as a business whose purpose was to produce wins, rather than as the toy of a few old guys. And when we saw that their way worked, the fans bought in. We realized it wasn’t the end of the world to have ads plastered all over the park. We decided it was OK to have all the games on cable (I’m still pissed about that). So yeah, we traded some “ideals” for success. But most of those ideals were pretty dumb.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Yeah, all of this makes me sad I didn’t go to college in Boston earlier than I did. One of the things I was really excited about when I decided on MIT was that I was finally going to a “real” baseball city. The Bay Area is a pretty football-centric place, and the Giants and A’s get second billing to the 49ers and even the Raiders. It’s the reason why I think the Bay Area has two NFL teams while L.A. has zero (other than a conspiracy by every NFL owner to use L.A. as a permanent bargaining chip in stadium negotiations). The same highs and lows that Boston experiences with the Red Sox are similar to the highs and lows in the Bay Area for its NFL teams (but not with the amplified insanity that you’ll find on WEEI). You’ll find passionate debate about both teams (and especially their coaches) even though both teams suck this year. I was in the Bay Area this past weekend, and the leading news story on respectable news radio (KCBS 740) on my way to the airport was this breathless rumor that Condoleeza Rice was going to be the new president of the 49ers. People just don’t get excited in the same way about the baseball teams, though.
You’re right when it comes to my skewed view of the Boston sports scene (at least relative to someone who has roots in New England). Even now, if I watched a Red Sox game with you and your family, I think I would have a hard time rooting against the Red Sox. But the rapid ascendance of the Red Sox combined with an exposure to out-of-town college students who weren’t all that into sports was pretty toxic. Add in the national media (including Bill Simmons), and it was intolerable, especially for someone who considered himself a “real” baseball fan, and felt like he was getting gypped out of the Boston baseball experience he had been promised. Obviously, this experience exists, but among people like your family, and not out-of-town college students in Cambridge/downtown Boston.
I think in ten or twenty years when I look back on my time in Boston, I’ll be more positive about the fact that I got to see what happened when the curse ended in 2004 and what that experience was like for Red Sox fandom. In the immediate aftermath, though, it just came at me in all the wrong ways (MIT frat boys going insane over some team they barely had a connection to). Here’s the end of a historic championship drought/”curse” that was steeped in baseball lore, and people that don’t know a single thing about Babe Ruth, Bucky Dent, and Bill Buckner are going crazy over it.
Also, your story about the bar outside AT&T Park is pretty amusing. My own disdain for the people that frequent that park has been repeated multiple times on this blog. Suffice it to say that I hope that’s not what going to an A’s game will be like in five years, but I’m worried that it might turn that way. In which case I’m joining these guys and ghost-riding my whip all the way to Fremont.
Also, I think part of the purpose of this post was to bait you into responding so that I could actually figure out what long-time Red Sox fans think of the current situation. Thanks for taking the bait.