The Good Old Days

I miss the good old days.  I miss the Octobers past where a lead against the Red Sox was as good as a win.  I miss the fall series where Bostonians refused to celebrate success, because they knew that failure was a heartbeat away.  In those good old days, dread was the permanent October forecast of Fenway Park.  Any negative turn of events caused conversations to shift from balls and strikes to Babe Ruth, Bucky Dent, and Bill Buckner.  For members of the Nation, losing was a rite of passage.  You weren’t a true Sox fanatic until they broke your heart.

As a result, the players would respond to the general feeling of “Oh no, here we go again.”  In the late ‘90s, when the Yankees and Red Sox began to meet up regularly in the postseason, we Yankees fans could always count on the Fenway Faithful to cause the Sox to tighten up in big moments.  As Nomar Garciaparra circled a routine grounder and prepared to fire to first, you could hear 40,000 people hold their breath.  Would this be the moment that the ghosts reared their fickle heads?  As Nomar gathered himself and loaded up, muscles tensed and pulses raced across the Red Sox Nation.  Then, as the throw sailed just wide of first, the prophecy would once again fulfill itself.  Karma would once again make the citizens of Boston pay for the transgressions of Harry Frazee.  The game, followed closely by the series, would spiral out of control.  The Red Sox would fade into the night.

Then Dave Roberts stole second base off of Mariano Rivera.  Taking the words of Dylan Thomas to heart, Bill Mueller, Trot Nixon, and Kevin Millar raged against the dying of the light.  In 2004, karma finally said enough.  Had you walked around Boston that fall, you would have seen Pedro Martinez wandering around Massachusetts with a handwritten list of his past misdeeds, which he would cross of in the style of My Name is Earl.  That postseason, players that had only experienced and became synonymous with Red Sox heartbreak (Garciaparra) were replaced by those that didn’t ascribe to any belief in curses or karma (Orlando Cabrera).

Everything bounced the way of the Sox.  Nobody bunted against Curt Schilling throughout the entirety of October.  I mean, why would you want to force a near forty-year old overweight pitcher, who was bleeding through his sock, to move around?  Over the course of those three weeks, Keith Foulke threw somewhere between 65 and 3,000 pitches, but never broke down.  With October 2004, those killer B’s of Boston (Babe, Bucky, Buckner, Boone) were removed from the back of the franchise.  Players stood taller when they weren’t weighed down by 80 years of futility and misery.

Now, the Red Sox simply will not die.  They used to quietly lie down in the graves dug by their opponents and offer little resistance as the dirt began to pile on.  These days, the Sox play the role of some horror movie character, on which you can never turn your back.  No matter how closely the Yankees, Indians, or Rays push them to the edge of oblivion, they still rally back.

On Thursday, seven outs from destruction, the Sox completed the biggest comeback in a postseason elimination game ever.  On Saturday, Josh Beckett, suffering from some kind of oblique muscle injury, gamely led his team through five innings, giving them a chance to remain in the series.  As their pitching held, emotional captains David Ortiz and Jason Varitek (who hit .223 after the All-Star break) came through with huge hits.  Finially, an admittedly sore Jonathan Papelbon closed the game out with a 1-2-3 ninth.  By the end, the Sox looked loose, energized, ready to play another nine innings right then and there.  In stark contrast, the typically electric Rays seemed tight, nervous, and on the precipice of collapse.  The weight of history rested squarely upon their shoulders.

On Sunday night, Boston’s John Lester matches up against Tampa’s Matt Garza.  The winner moves on to the World Series.  There is nothing more exciting than a game seven in the baseball postseason, but I feel nothing but dread.  This is a brave new world where the Red Sox don’t give in and fight to their last breath; where simply blaring Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” over the Fenway loudspeakers causes fans to beat their hands bloody against the walls lining the field; where a groundball trickling beyond the glove of Bill Buckner and down the first base line no longer signifies the franchise.  This team is the Jason Voorhees of Major League Baseball.  This world worries me.  I know as I watch Sunday’s game, I will long for the good old days.