Totally Unrelated: Getting Used to It

papelbon.jpgThe morning after the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series (following two miserable seasons of championship drought), two people approached me in McDonald’s. I was wearing a Red Sox shirt. We were in northern Arkansas, beginning an 11-hour drive north after a weekend of wedding festivities. Incidentally, I eat at McDonald’s about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series.

Year of the Snob?

My two sports loves are the Red Sox (since 1986) and the men’s basketball team at the University of Illinois (my alma mater), and together they pretty much occupy me year-round. When baseball season ends in October, it’s time for college basketball, and when the Final Four is done, opening day of baseball season is upon us.

The Stuff of Legend

You could not write this story any better, and if you tried to pass it off as fiction, you’d get buried in rejection slips. The tale of the 2004 Boston Red Sox – who won the World Series (and the team’s first championship since 1918) on October 27 – is among many other things a beautifully constructed narrative.

Why Did It Have to End?

Because I haven’t even posted what I wrote about the World Champion Boston Red Sox – yes, a thank-you card is appropriate for that withholding – I offer you this, which effectively captures my emotional state as it relates to baseball. I’m not quite this bad, but … I do seem reticent to move on.

Baseball by the Numbers

One of the fun elements of baseball (more than probably any other sport) is that it has a statistical richness through which one can completely divorce oneself from subjectivity. Take, for example, my beloved Boston Red Sox, who through May, June, and July were accused regularly of being playoff pretenders, to the point of being more than 10½ games behind the God-Damned, Mother-Fucking New York Yankees on August 16.