Some thoughts on being Red Sox fan

It seems that the Red Sox have once again won the World Series.  And again, against the Cardinals. Third victory in less than a decade, and all the players should be very proud of themselves.  They are some fantastic ball players, and justly deserve the parade that the city gave them.

While we were watching the coverage of the parade as it was happening (because the TV happened to be on), my daughter looked up just as some reporter was interviewing a little girl about her age, all decked out in Red Sox gear, clutching a little stuffed Wally the Green Monster.  And my daughter looked at me and said, "Why can't I be the little girl on TV?"

And I chuckled good-naturedly.  I may have even tossled her hair.  And I said, "Maybe next year."

And to her, that meant just what it sound like.  I'd agreed, tacitly, that next year, after the Red Sox win the World Series again, I would take her to the victory parade so she could be interviewed by a TV reporter.

But to me, it was like a secret code, a quiet acknowledgement that while we in what is repeatedly referred to now as "Red Sox Nation" have gained a World Champion team, we have perhaps lost something in our nature, something that defined us for many decades.

Now, I'm probably not the biggest fan of baseball, in general.  I don't really follow it, don't watch it on TV, didn't watch a complete World Series game this year. 

My daughter probably likes baseball more than I do.

But I was born a Red Sox fan.

There really was nothing I could do about it, and choice never entered into it.  My father was a Red Sox fan, thus I was taught to be a Red Sox fan, and there was very little else to say on the subject.  He told me about Ted Williams, about the Impossibe Dream, about Carlton Fisk and the the homerun that almost wasn't.

I collected the baseball cards. Had an official Red Sox batting glove.  A souvenir baseball.  I remember my first game at Fenway (I'm pretty sure it was Clemens on the mound, though at the time, that meant nothing to me, and I had no idea why people kept holding up signs saying "K.")

But the year I really became a Red Sox fan, as I have always understood the term, was 1986.

That year, while I was busy being a kid, the Red Sox made it to the World Series for the first time in my lifetime.  Suddenly, I was interested!  The Red Sox were going to be World Champions!  All they had to do was beat the Mets, and really, how hard could that be?

You must know the story: They just about had it sewn up, when a ground ball down the first base line went right past the glove and between the legs of Bill Buckner, and the Mets went on to win, and win the following game as well, leaving us Red Sox fans heartbroken and disappointed.

Which, of course, was exactly the point!

We, the true Red Sox fans, have always lived in a state of perpetual heartbreak.

And that is not to say that we were never proud of our team, or that the team, prior to 2004, was somehow inferior.  I'd submit that Ted Williams, Dom Dimaggio, Carl Yastremzci, or the '86 team that included Clemens, Wade Boggs, and Dwight Evans are easily the equal of any recent Red Sox lineup.  No, it wasn't for a lack of talent; it was... something else.

Every year, or so it seemed, they'd start off the season strong, then they'd lag behind, and come September, they'd surge ahead, sometimes barreling into the playoffs like an out-of-control locomotive, sometimes coming up just short (in '49, the entire season came down to one winner-take-all playoff game against the Yankees.  Hey, that reminds me of another season...)

And then, as though the universe realized what it was about to let happen...they lost.  No, they didn't lose: they blew it!  Year after year, they blew it!

And did eighty-plus years of constant disappointment turn Boston into a city of fatalists, without any shred of hope for the future?

Never been to Boston, have ya?

Red Sox fans have always been veritable fountains of unyielding optimism.  Every year, after every defeat, we would simply look at each other and say, "There's always next year."

This was famously immortalized on a bottlecap from the Nantucket Nectars juice company, which got into the habit of putting interesting facts or short jokes on the underside of their caps.  One cap said, "The Red Sox will win the World Series next year."  I guarantee, non-Sox fans didn't understand that cap.

And that taught me everything I needed to know about life.  That no matter what happened, no matter how hard you worked, how far you came, sometimes you'd still lose out, right at the moment it matters most.  And you what?  That's ok, because there's always next time.

They taught me good-sportsmanship.  They taught me persistence.  They taught me resilience.

And I'm a little worried that my daughter will never not know a world where the Red Sox are not known as World Champions.

Sure, I'm happy for them.  I was happy, truly happy, for all the fans in 2004, who had waited so long.  But now, I'm worried about the fans.

I'm worried that the fans will begin to expect to win.  They'll forget what it means to say, "Maybe next year."  They'll feel like they are entitled to win. They'll be obnoxious, unruly, intolerable.

In other words, I'm afraid they'll become that which they most abhor:

Yankees fans.