Saturday, July 07, 2001
Dyed-in-the-wool
Check out this Aussie's devotion to the Red Sox taken from the weekly Gordon Edes Mailbag feature from the @Bat Insider:
I wish to allay the fears that many BoSox fans have had over the prospect of never seeing a Red Sox team win the World Series again. I have the ability to break the curse. I am a rabid fan now residing in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. The only thing south of us is Tasmania and the South Pole!
Born and bred in Queensland, where the only thing north of US was the equator, our state cricket team had never won the Interstate Championship. In my lifetime, 32 years, I have seen them win it now 3 times.
When I started following rugby league, the football where they don't pad themselves up beyond recognition and actually move around enough to need Gatorade and oxygen, I chose the Parramatta Eels, a team that had been in the competition since 1947 and never won it. From 1981-86 they won it four times.
As a young lad leafing through the world book encyclopedia, under baseball I saw a picture of Ted Williams swinging a bat and I was sold! A long distance affair has since ensued where all the heartaches have continued, but I know I've been through all this before and I know how good it feels to come out the other side.
Keep the faith fellow BoSox faithful, I promise I can deliver the same for the Sox, victory will be ours!
-- Gavin Butcher, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Now that is just the tonic I needed this morning!
Grinding it out
Last night's game really has me feeling spent this morning. The game was on TBS so I was able to watch it all from start to finish and I like to think that is what messed with me. Living in Virginia, I only get to see the Sox on TV every so often, nationally televised games, games on TBS or games against the local market Orioles. Seeing the Red Sox come back to tie the game with two outs in the 9th on homers from Nixon and Ramirez only to end up losing to the Braves in the 10th is tough to swallow.
And the Yankees won, so now we are 1.5 back.
I wonder if I'm just losing my ability to grind it out and deal with these tough losses?
Friday, July 06, 2001
Back home
When I last wrote, before I left on my oblication1 to visit my family in New England, the Red Sox were in first place in the AL East by 3 games over the Yankees.
Upon returning, the Red Sox are now in second place and trail the Yankees by half a game. Still there is no need to panic. Coming off the road with a winning record against two tough clubs is very good. And another come from behind win last night shows there is a lot of fight left in these Red Sox. It's a great time to be a fan.
A couple of times during the trip when things were not going well for me or the Sox, I admit that I did slip into woeful self-pity and thought the inevitable train wreck had finally arrived. (A fitting metaphor as well since we took Amtrak to Boston and, due to weather, the 7 hr Acela trip up there ended up taking 10. Not a good way to start a trip.)
It was good, too, to see that the city of Boston is still overwhelmingly populated with die-hard fans. Case in point: While taking a taxi from South Station to our hotel on Tuesday, every time we stopped for a red light in traffic, the cabby would whip out his copy of the Boston Herald and read a few lines of the story on Bryce Florie getting hit by the liner in Monday night's game. Now that is cool. Not only did it support my thesis that the Herald is more the paper of the blue-collar, working class folk, but it showed how devoted Boston fans are to the Red Sox.
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1Oblication, (n), Obligation + vacation = oblication. In this case my obligation was a long overdue trip to visit my immediate family and I used my first vacation of the year to meet it.
