Bambino's Curse

On the Via Dolorosa, Sure Footed

It hurts, right? I know it does. I know it does.

I forgot how weighty it is. How it has presence, a very pressing down upon me everywhere this hurting.

And you are bitterly reminded how the getting close, so close, only 5 outs away from beating the only team you really want to beat in a way you'd been dreaming of as long as you can remember, only serves to intensify the hurt and the longing for what could have been.

It hurts. I know it does.

For some of you Red Sox fans, those of you too young to remember '86 or those of you who, for whatever reason, are only recently anointed, this may be your first experience with the essence of the grieving that has become all too familiar through the years. But the hurt is no less, no weaker, no easier to shrug off be it your first or only your most recent in a calamitous succession of games that end just out of reach.

It still hurts just the same. I know it does.

But this is the nature of the game in general. In baseball most efforts fail. Failure is omnipresent. And, so it seems, if there can be such a thing, failure is somehow beyond omnipresent for those of us who bind our noblest hopes, our most fervent desire for transcendence through victory on the Boston Red Sox baseball club.

And what choice do you have?

As Faulkner writes in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem,

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

And so will I. And so should you.

Today many Red Sox fans are thinking of quitting. The hurt is too much. The pain is not worth it. Why bear this grief?

And some will quit.

But the rest of us will shoulder on, as we've done before. And while our hearts our heavy with this most recent letdown, we can still imagine what it will feel like to win, to become transcendent and sacred in that moment.

So let the grief in. Don't fight this grief, this twin but opposite brother to joy. Take grief to breakfast with you and to lunch and to cocktails this evening even. Same for tomorrow and the next day and as long as grief chooses to keep pace with you as you walk along.

And remember we are all of us in this together, all feeling the same heartache and frustration. So say "please" and "thank you" and "you're welcome" as you go about your day bearing your piece of our collective burden.

Faith and hope shall sustain as it has before and as it always will to anyone who dares to attempt the journey from home, to first, to second, to third, and to home again, bearing fame and the spoils of success.

The Whole World Is Watching

Cancel the "Amber Alert."

The offense gone missing and feared kidnapped has been found safe and sound in the Bronx:

Nomar Garciaparra, David Ortiz, Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller were a combined 10-for-71 with five RBI. Not surprisingly, the Sox were one game away from their season's end. … Garciaparra went 4-for-5 and scored two runs. Ortiz and Millar each had two hits and drove in a combined four runs. Mueller, in the deepest slump of the group, went 3-for-5.

Combined, the quartet was 11-for-20 with five runs scored and five RBI. As a direct result, Boston beat the Yankees, 9-6, to tie the series at three games each. (Gee, Herald).

You knew, you just had to know, the offense was eventually going to come around and they did, just like the cavalry coming over the hill in a western. "Cowboy Up" indeed.

And so for once you can honestly say that no matter how much tonight's game is hyped it just cannot be over hyped. Every cliche, every breathless news report, every drop of ink, every pixel pointing to Game 7 tonight in NY is deserved.

As Theo Epstein says, "We've been on a collision course for a hundred years" (Hohler, Globe).

But this is my favorite quote of all: "We're going to have a couple of cocktails, get some rest and be ready to take on the Babe and the rest of the Yankees," Johnny Damon said (Hohler).

I didn't know anyone still said "cocktails." It's a lovely word. And Johnny and the crew deserve to swizzle their sticks a wee bit for having the wherewithal to comeback and force this seventh game.

As Scott Williamson says, "This is what the baseball gods demanded.'' And the gods sent this fireball as confirmation, no doubt.

Tonight the whole world will be watching, and I like to think the majority will be rooting for the Red Sox.

I'm so excited I can barely think, let alone write.

Tick Tock Tick

Well, what can you say? The offense has vanished as everyone is quick to point out this morning:

An ill-timed dropoff in production over the last week, however, has now left the Sox vulnerable to comparisons to the offensively inept 1962 New York Mets. It has also left them on the verge of being eliminated from the American League Championship Series … (Horrigan, Herald).

And there is no better face on the milk carton (as the DirtDogs show us: "Have you seen me?") to begin the search for the missing offense than Nomar Garciaparra.

While so many of the stories about Red Sox fans seem to focus on us always waiting for the proverbial "other shoe to drop," I tell you it's been quite the opposite for me (and I'm sure many of you as well) this playoff run: Every single time Nomar came to the plate yesterday, I assumed it would be the moment when he'd break out of his slump with a bantam blast, or barring that, a bloop single to keep the inning alive.

But nothing doing.

Yet I remain resolute. This offensive slump, be it Nomar's or the rest, just has to end eventually …

Though here we are, Red Sox fans, looking like Marshall Will Kane watching the clock tick ominously closer to high noon when Frank Miller will step off the train in Hadleyville.

And while the attitude of the townspeople of Hadleyville can be summed up in these lines by Martin Howe:

"And in the end you wind up dyin' all alone on some dusty street. For what? For a tin star. It's all for nothin', Will. It's all for nothin'."

The hero, Will Kane, in the face of almost certain destruction won't back down.

Marshall Kane : I've got to, that's the whole thing.

That's the whole thing. I've got to and you've got to believe the Yankees gang of gunslingers can be overcome at the hands of a marshall who hasn't even got any guns.

John Burkett is our Will Kane today. And the noon train is on time.

Pause, Listen, Count

So maybe the indignity that went down on Saturday was a catharsis, a purging of the collective Red Sox system, a discorrupting of them, and a charging them full with the charge of the soul?

And along those lines, isn't it perfectly fitting that last night's Fenway heroics came at the hands of the guys who are the antithesis of prima donaism, the group of laborers — Wakefield (of whom we've frequently sung the body electric), Walker, Nixon, and Varitek ?

Varitek (the veracious one) is particularly noteworthy:

After taking a first-pitch ball, he hit a hard grounder to Derek Jeter at short. Jeter flipped to Alfonso Soriano, who made the pivot and fired to first. The 230-pound catcher beat the relay, allowing a run - the eventual winning run - to score. It might not have seemed like a big deal at the time, but Varitek's hustle was the difference in the Sox' 3-2 win over the Yankees in Game 4. It's the reason the series is now deadlocked at 2-2 (Guregian, Herald).

Don't you love the sound of the phrase "the series is now deadlocked at 2-2"?

And what Edes reveals will have you wanting to swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with
the firemen …

A bit of history that suggests the series could swing in Boston's favor: The Yankees had won five straight one-run decisions in LCS play, their last loss coming in Game 2 of the 1980 ALCS against Kansas City. Since the start of the '98 postseason, they are 17-4 in one-run games. Their previous three one-run defeats came in series they would go on to lose, the last being the 2001 World Series against Arizona (Globe).

Can you imagine?

In the words of Whitman: "The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them."

"Thank God for the Rain to Wash the Trash Off the Sidewalk."

Has a postponement due to rain ever seemed so good?

I walked around in a funk all day yesterday, depressed, out of sorts, empty, and had there been no rain I wouldn't have watched a pitch of the game nor peeked in to check the score. And I don't say this because I was trying to prove a point or otherwise boycott Red Sox baseball. I say it because yesterday I honestly had no interest.

But what about today, after a cleansing rain, after some time to heal, after the apologies and the tears and the fines and the gag order?

I don't know. I really don't. All day yesterday I was telling people that something "broke" inside me after Saturday's disaster at Fenway, but now I realize that is the wrong metaphor. It isn't that something inside me broke but rather that I was awakened to or otherwise forced to acknowledge how I, as a fan, as a Red Sox fan in particular, need to better scrutinize my own relationship with the game of the baseball.

And under the light of scrutiny I realize I need to drop baseball down a few notches on my priority list. It is just a game. And I don't want to fall down the slippery slope of believing "I live for this," when it's the other way around: "It lives for me." The game of baseball is supposed to be about "betterment," about, as I wrote yesterday, transcending the quotidian existence of birth, school, work, death.

But baseball isn't the only game in town (pardon the pun) that can be a "way of talking about betterment, about making oneself more noble because of a temporary engagement of a higher human plane of existence" (Giamatti). I can also get to that same higher plane by way of de Chirico, for instance, or Callas singing Carmen, or, as I did yesterday morning, by walking the dog along a creek bed sans leash and with the just right magic light of fall glowing through bright leaves and the dog looking back at me as we lock eyes and say to each other in dog/man harmony, "Can you believe how good this feels?"

Tonight I will watch baseball and I will root for the Red Sox; however, if they win or if they lose will not mean the same to me as it did before Saturday's game. That has all changed. Perhaps it's temporary, perhaps not.

In more lighthearted news, the fellas over at Elephants in Oakland have honored our friendly ALDS wager by writing a poetic homage to Jason Varitek, the player whom I named (with reader input) as the MVP of the ALDS. It's very well done, so please do check it out.

And in the shameless self-promo department, Bambino's Curse was named "Website of the Week" by the Denver Post.

"Red in Tooth and Claw"

I went to bed last night feeling embarrassed to be a Red Sox fan. I awoke this morning and felt no different.

It's a pretty sad day when trying to find a bright spot in the darkness that was yesterday's so-called "game," the only glimmer I can find is that, as Michael Gee concludes,

The bench-clearing brouhahas in the top and bottom of the fourth innings of the Red Sox' 4-3 loss to the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS were created by one man - Martinez (Gee, Herald).

And the one man appears to be an anomaly and not a sign that the whole team is slouching toward Gomorrah. As the Herald's Massarotti observes, "Interestingly, following the game, not a single Red Sox player defended Martinez' pitch to Garcia. Not one."

As sick as it sounds, the Yankees came out of it all appearing the more righteous and noble, but their hands are dirty as well. 

Everybody suffers from what went down yesterday, especially the game of baseball.

The late baseball sage (and the baseball writer I most adore) A. Bartlett Giamatti had this to say about rules in sport:

Rules — complete and completely arbitrary — are what set [sports] off from work, and make them doorways to leisure… entirely created by human will and imagination, social agreements for organizing energy… (Take Time for Paradise).

It's the rules themselves, according to Giamatti, that set sports apart:

All these rules are conventions meant to separate the sports world from the quotidian world, meant to organize energy in to a contest … By imposing identical conditions and norms upon play, the essential assumption of all the rules is that skill or merit, not chance, will win out.

So yesterday, Pedro Martinez didn't have the skill or the merit to beat the Yankees hitters so he threatens to beat their brains in with a fastball?

Like Michael Holley, I don't understand why no one was ejected.

Watching the entire scene, you had to ask yourself how, time after time, a sport manages to continually smack itself in the face. Either Ramirez or Martinez should have been ejected. Neither was. Zimmer certainly should have been ejected. He wasn't (Holley, Globe).

And the rules have to be enforced else

… the whole enterprise has no meaning. After all, if one is not going to accept that basic convention, none of the others makes sense…One might as well live in Nature, red in tooth and claw (Giamatti).

As a Red Sox fan, I'm used to having my heart broken by loss. However, in all my years of watching Red Sox baseball, nothing prepared me for the deep hurt inflicted yesterday. While other games may have wounded my heart, this one blackened my soul.