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The Birth of a Nation

Hank Steinbrenner’s attempted smackdown of Red Sox Nation continues provoking comment (including, perhaps especially, in this space of all places) ranging from the thoughtful to the thunderous and all the way back to the thudding. To say nothing of the amusing, considering the friendly needling since between himself and Red Sox owner John Henry. But now and again you find even defenders of Red Sox Nation (in concept, if not necessarily in fact) catching things almost as wrongly as the younger Steinbrenner does.

Consider Jim Rome, whose commentary began sagaciously enough once he’d finished quoting Yammering Hank’s original ejaculation.

Hey, George Jr . . . I love the swagger. No one likes a ‘smack running’ owner more than yours truly . . . but let me once again remind you, the entire universe is not centered in New York City. Things that matter really do happen outside ‘the Apple’. As hard as that may be for you to believe . . . and as far as the nation being an ESPN creation . . . they must have skipped over that during my company orientation. I didn’t get that memo. The Budweiser Hot-Seat is an ESPN creation, the Red Sox Nation isn’t.

So far, so good. (For those who weren’t privy, Rome once worked on ESPN radio and television.) And then, the trip around the third base line.

That was born out of their winning it all twice in the last four years…and I’m here to tell you . . . ’chowd’ fans are everywhere. Go to an Angels game out here, and it’s Fenway West…and you know why, George Jr.? It’s because they’re winning and you’re not. They’re better than you. The Chowd Nation is not a figment of your imagination. How do you like them apples, George Jr?

Mr. Rome has it right about the scene at Angel Stadium, almost. I wouldn’t necessarily call it Fenway West, but I did take the boy formerly under my jurisdiction to numerous enough Angel games and saw numerous enough Red Sox fans, in regalia enough, in the crowds and even on days or nights when the Angels weren’t playing the Red Sox. He is also right about the Red Sox winning and the Yankees not—on Steinbrennerian terms, the terms that say if you don’t win the World Series you’re nothing. That’s what the Yankees have won, on those terms, in the 21st Century, so far.

But so far as Red Sox Nation being born out of winning the World Series twice in the last four years, Mr. Rome—and others, in this space and elsewhere—is wrong enough. I refer you first to a 1996 book, At Fenway: Dispatches from Red Sox Nation, by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy. You know, the fellow who picked up the ball from the New York Times‘ George Vecsey (who first bespoke it in October 1986) and ran it all the way to The Curse of the Bambino a few years prior.

I refer you next to yours truly, writing in 2003, a year before Mr. Rome, Yammering Hank, and a contingency of the parvenu deem the Nation’s founding. (What, I wonder, might these folk deem the Nation’s declaration of independence?) I wrote thus after the almost equally snake-bitten Chicago Cubs lost a pennant in a way once thought possible by none but the Red Sox, who had turned losing a pennant or a World Series into something between a dark art and a Stephen King scenario long before Steve Bartman taking the foul as Moises Alou scaled the left field line wall didn’t cost the Cubs the pennant. (The double play ball bouncing off Alex Gonzalez’s chest, and Mark Prior’s unexpected ball four wild pitch, started the real loss.)

Brace up, Cub Country. Heads high, Chicago Cubs. You gave the best you had to give, you got caught short in a human enough moment of absolute unbelief, and you proved to be human beings, not android supermen, when the Marlins did what tenacious teams tend to do and take advantage of the transdimensional.

Red Sox Nation salutes you. We want nothing more than for the Cubs and the Red Sox to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, start all over again, and nudge aside the flying Fish and the Evil Empire, making for ourselves a World Series for which there can be no words possible, though millions will be composed. We beseech you to ask a certain fan down the left field foul line to come forth, cheer once again, and accept the forgiveness of one and all, side by side with Alex Gonzalez, because there is really nothing to forgive.

—From Mudville: The Voice of Baseball, 15 October 2003.

Of course, in the same season I was also the fellow who figured there was extraterrestrial maneuvering enough in the offing, born of lifetimes of frustration, that the World Series simply had to come down to Nomar Garciaparra hitting against Kerry Wood in the bottom of the ninth, the bases loaded, two out, and a full count, when at the precise moment the pitch left Wood’s hand there’d come a clap of thunder, about fifty bolts of lightning, and a corpulent ho-ho-ho bathing Fenway Park: OK, that’s it. Game over. Tie score. I can’t decide between you two, and neither of you deserves to lose. Let’s do it again—in another eighty-six years.

Shows you what I knew. Nomar Garciaparra would leave the Red Sox midway through 2004, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior would spend the next several seasons dividing their time between the mound and the disabled list, and hell would freeze over twice in four subsequent years. But I did know this much, and not merely by way of John Cheever, speaking in the aftermath of B.F. Dent in 1978: “All literary men are Red Sox fans. To be a Yankee fan in literary society is to endanger your life.”

Indeed, as Shaughnessy went on to observe from there, the Boston Globe threw together a special section in 1986 that consisted purely of baseball writings by (I note them alphabetically) A. Bartlett Giamatti, Doris Kearns Goodwin (well, many literary ladies are Red Sox fans, too), David Halberstam, George V. Higgens, Ward Just, Stephen King (did it figure that King, the master of the macabre, would prove a from-the-cradle Red Sox fan?), Martin F. Nolan (then the Globe’s editor), Robert Parker, John Updike (whose “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” just might have started the whole thing in the first place, though it wasn’t obvious at the time), George F. Will, and Geoffrey Wolff. Herewith a few extracts from those pieces, most of which were included in Dan Riley’s imperative 1991 anthology, The Red Sox Reader.

Shake a tree in Orange County and a half-dozen Dorchester emigres fall out. In Baltimore, Earl Weaver used to complain that Oriole partisans at Memorial Stadium were outnumbered by Red Sox fans who had motored north from nearby Washington.

—Nolan, in “From Frazee to Fisk.”

[T]he seasons of my childhood passed until that miserable summer when the [Brooklyn] Dodgers were taken away to Los Angeles . . . leaving all our rash hopes and dreams of glory behind. And then came a summer of still deeper sadness when my father died. Suddenly my feelings for baseball seemed an aspect of my departing youth, along with my childhood freckles and my favourite childhood haunts, to be left behind when I went away to college and never came back.

Then one September day, having settled into teaching at Harvard, I agreed, half reluctantly, to go to Fenway Park. There it was again: the cozy ballfield scaled to human dimensions so that every word of encouragement and every scornful yell could be heard on the field; the fervent crowd that could, with equal passion, curse a player for today’s failures after cheering his heroics the day before; the team that always seemed to break your heart in the last week of the season. It took only a matter of minutes before I found myself directing all my old intensities toward my new team—the Boston Red Sox.

—Goodwin, in “From Father, With Love.”

If only Mr. Riley had thought to include what the Globe editors could not, because it was a fortnight or so yet to be written: Nathan Cobb’s analysis of divided loyalties in Connecticut, in 1986, between fans of the New York Mets and fans of the Red Sox. It was therein that the phrase “Red Sox Nation” appeared first. Mr. Shaughnessy’s 1996 volume merely sent the phrase into the popular vernacular.

And I know a little more than something of divided loyalty. I suffered the affliction in 1986 myself. I was (and remain) a New York Mets fan since the day they were born; I’m old enough to have seen the Mets play something resembling baseball (you really did have to be there to believe it) for two seasons in what remained of the Polo Grounds, the rambling old wreck of a former home to the New York Giants. But I became (and remain) a Boston Red Sox fan since the 1967 pennant race. The thriller that ended when Rico Petrocelli bagged Rich Rollins’s popup for the final out of the final regular season game. Sending the Red Sox to the World Series that ended when circumstances forced Dick Williams to send his Cy Young winner in waiting, Jim Lonborg, to face Bob Gibson in Game Seven on two days’ rest and nothing left of his best repertoire against the great St. Louis samurai.

In those days of UHF television, if you turned your set and jiggled your antenna just so while turning the UHF dial, you could pick up the occasional Red Sox game from the south shores of Long Island, where I lived in those years. And if you did, you knew something extraterrestrial was happening with and to the Red Sox that hadn’t been happening in just over two decades since Leon Culberson threw high to Johnny Pesky while Enos Slaughter was running the bases as if to leave Wile E. Coyote in the dust and caught in his own traps.

Ask not my bill for sedatives in October 1986. Ask not how I endured a World Series that was played by two teams that had passed through the sublimely ridiculous to get there as it was. A Series that was mostly mis- or mal-managed in the first five games before Game Six turned a dark masterwork of tactical clumsiness (quick! name the double switch that should have happened two innings prior) into the theater of the absurd. With my two favourite teams of all acting out something that could have been written in a backstreet collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Fred Allen.

On the other hand, I’ve survived my own divided loyalties, right down to the Mets and not the Red Sox landing Johan Santana, and for a short medley as opposed to the songs the Olde Towne Team and the Empire Emeritus alike seemed to be offering for the former Minnesota Twins bellwether. So did the late Mr. Halberstam, which makes for the only thing I could claim in common with him.

[M]y childhood concluded with two conflicting loyalties. The first was one to the Yankees, and most of all to DiMaggio. When I think of DiMaggio, I see him, not so much at bat, though the stance was classic, but of him going back on a fly ball, or of running the bases, particularly going around second on his way to third; I have never seen a tall man run with more grace. He was the first of my heroes; my true (and pure) loyalty to the Yankees ends with his retirement. Never in the age of Mantle was I able to summon the commitment and obligation innocence that I had brought to the age of DiMaggio. I was growing older. By the time DiMaggio retired in 1951, I was 17, and it was time to go on to other things.

But even as a young man, the vision and the loyalty were clouded. For there was the other vision, that of the Red Sox, and most of all, of Williams. As DiMaggio seemed so natural in the field, Williams seemed equally natural at the plate, first seemingly loose, and gangly, and then suddenly bound tightly and perfectly together, the swing at once so smooth and yet so powerful, all of it completely focused—as if he was destined to do this one thing, hit a baseball and nothing else. Of his talents, there was no lack of admiration among Yankee fans: When I was a boy, there was a constant schoolboy debate not just about the respective merits of DiMaggio or Williams, but of what would happen if each had played in the other’s park, DiMaggio with the Green Monster, Williams with the short Stadium right field porch. It was the ultimate tribute to Williams that had the trade been made, it would have been accepted without complaint by most Yankee fans.

—From “The Fan Divided,” Boston Globe, 6 October 1986.

Even a fan divided knows a nation when he sees one. Especially a nation that has been a nation since about two decades before an heir apparent Yankee owner pronounced it a mere and obnoxious creation of a team and a television network that never claimed to have invented the idea in the first place.

But I understand the confusion. When Keith Foulke fielded Edgar Renteria’s comebacker and threw to Doug Mientkiewicz for the out heard ’round the world (Red Sox fans have longed to hear it! hollered Fox Sports’ Joe Buck as the ball arrived at first base) , it put a seeming end to the literature that had grown under generations of Red Sox surreality. “Would that I could remember who said that tragedy breeds literature while triumph by comparison breeds mere scribbling,” I wrote the following spring, launching a review of three volumes written for once, for shock, of Red Sox triumph. “The lyrical balladry and epic prose poetry of the tragic generations must now give way to . . . well, we don’t know what it will give way to, just yet. The early products are not volume enough to call accurately, and there remains a sense that merely receiving a Red Sox bibliography of triumph, never mind accepting it, will require at least half as long to acclimate as it took the Red Sox to return to the Promised Land in the first place.”

That’s the thing. It’s still taking an awful lot of getting used to, if you’ll pardon the expression, that the Red Sox are no longer the team who found new ways to slip from the mountaintop after they got that close to the Promised Land. In two staggering World Series sweeps over a mere four years, the Red Sox are no longer the team most likely to lose the prize at the eleventh hour after an arduous battle (was there any more arduous than the 2004 American League Championship Series?) to get to the dance in the first place.

So perhaps we should be kind even to Yammering Hank. The change in Red Sox Nation began, after all, at the direct expense of his father’s former empire. And the Yankees and their minions haven’t many clues as to what it means when a team reaches Valhalla at last following ages of eleventh-hour failures that would have broken lesser men on the wheels of their regrets. (Comedian Ray Goulding, whose partnership with Bob Elliott began in Boston, and who died in 1990: On my tombstone, it will read: Cause of death: Boston Red Sox.)

Until 2004, no Yankee team ever blundered a pennant or a World Series away with that kind of transdimensional calamity (and no team anywhere—sorry, Yankee fans—had before or since blown a League Championship Series after being a mere three outs from sweeping it); no Red Sox team ever spoiled themselves into believing the Promised Land was their birthright; and, anyway, even the most patriotic citizen of Red Sox Nation might entertain a thought that it’s time for the Cubs—who’ve got quite a country of their own that Yammering Hank hasn’t noticed, either—to break whatever it is that’s been breaking them for the past hundred years.

Just so long as it isn’t at our expense, under our skies, thundering or otherwise.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Red Sox Nation, Hank Steinbrenner, Catbird, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.