The Post-Baseball Mindset

This is part one of a series that will continue until I’m out of thoughts, a stream-of conscious ramble on what being a baseball fan means to me nowadays.

I’m in a state that I’d like to call post-Baseball. I still love the sport, love the stats, love watching it, and playing it. But the fire is gone. No more long nights thinking about whether or not the Red Sox would win the World Series in my lifetime, and no more thinking about how it would happen, play by play. I used to think about that every day of my life. Now it’s an apparition, a ghost of the past. It’s not the only one. Whenever David Ortiz strolls to bat, it’s like I’m in a time machine, or my brain hit rewind. To me, he belongs to a different era: the era in which I cared.

To me, David Ortiz is the last baseball star. In almost single-handedly resurrecting the 2004 Red Sox from their shallow grave, he put Boston baseball at the center of the sports world. That’s never where it was supposed to be. Like New England, Boston sports were supposed to exist at the periphery. The entire appeal of being a Red Sox fan was that it was a club that was easy to join and impossible to leave. The rewards looked great at first until you realized they weren’t rewards at all. For instance, if you were a Red Sox fan you knew that many others suffered along with you. This seems great until you realize no one likes to suffer.

Now that the Red Sox have exorcised their demons, and their futile ways are a relic of the past, the club is far too easy to leave to mean anything anymore. You have what are called casual Red Sox fans, which used to be a contradiction in terms. Now, it’s the norm. Much is made by the old school fans about the pink hat-wearing crowd, which is both the new legion of female fans attracted to the team (and its players) and the men that encourage it. These people are scapegoats, but the crime is real, at least against the bedrock Red Sox fanbase that now makes up about 50% of the whole quote unquote Nation. When the Yankees swept four games from the team two weeks ago, I was not nonplussed — I was actually happy to see something with which I was familiar. There is a long, storied history of the Red Sox dominating the Yankees in the spring only to be crushed by the New Yorkers in the summer and fall; it used to be a reliable as the seasons themselves. This year was a return to normalcy, so to speak, and for that I was actually happy. The Red Sox may never engage in a stretch of futility to match their last one (and despite what I’m writing, let’s hope not), but it’s that futility which made them compelling. Without it, they’re—or more accurately, their fans—a bunch of loudmouths.

It’s sad but true that winning has exposed Boston fans as some of the most ungracious people on Earth, but I can’t say I am totally surprised—I don’t live there for a reason, despite growing up in the area, and dreaming of nothing more than of owning Fenway season tickets since I was seven. The provincialism is dense and unyielding, at least if you’re paying attention. I’m always paying attention. It might have something to do with moving to the area when I was 12 and feeling out of place. It also might have something to do with the fact that a lot of the people there are raging assholes. At least before the Red Sox won, we were all in something together. There was a common stake.