wild violet | ^hot sand^ | first place

The Red Sox are in first place.

I'm 37 years old. I was born and grew up in Marlborough, Massachusetts. For the past twelve years I've lived in Milan, Italy, ten of those years with my Italian wife. I haven't truly resided in the New England area since 1986. Where I am, baseball is something you see either in a Kevin Costner film or occasionally played on a converted football field by Italians pretending to be Americans.

At the time of writing, they've got the best winning percentage in baseball.

I tune into games via the Internet. I pay the $14.99 MLB.Com subscription price and download Jerry Trupiano into our Milan loft via WEEI radio, where he provides the play by play from a time zone six hours away from my own. When it's 7 p.m. in Boston it's 1 a.m. in Milan. During the week, this makes it tough to catch the action, but Teresa has by now grown accustomed to the "another punchado for Pedro" shouts and inane Miller beer ads vying for dominance over the news and Columbo repeats of Sunday evening. "My God," I say to myself, "they found me even here."

The Yankees [1] don't seem so tough this year.

Even if the Sox do manage to get to the Series, I'll be one of the very few here listening. Isolation. Most of my English-speaking friends are British and maybe follow soccer or cricket. George Plimpton [2] is English, I tell myself, maybe there's hope. As another World Cup gets underway in Japan, I realize there isn't. My friend Ed, an ex-pat New Yorker, is the only baseball follower I know. He is a Yankees and Mets [3] fan.

With the pitching staff and hitting they've got...

When I was twelve, lying under the covers listening to the games on my portable radio, getting an inning or two from another city (usually New York) was like making contact with a distant galaxy. Now, not only can I choose any game I want, I can also choose between hearing it in English and Spanish. "Hey," I say to my wife, "I could put the game on in Espanol, it's close enough to Italian that you might be able to follow!" She stares at me and says that bottle of Chianti was for the guests. Lowe strikes out the side and she has no idea. Isolation I say.

...this really could be the year.

What am I saying? As I mentioned, I don't even live in America, let alone Massachusetts. The truth is that a Red Sox championship would have a limited impact on my own life. Listening to the games these days is more a slice of old Bostoniana than hardcore fandom. Through the miracles of computer technology I can download the Boston Globe sports section whenever I want. I seldom do. It has little relevance to where I now live. Truth be told, soon I'll have to choose between listening to the Sox in my private world and watching Italy play in the World Cup with my wife and our friends. I'll watch the soccer game. All those things you're supposed to have started doing when pushing 40: paying dues, taking the blows, doing your fair share of losing, all while looking for the TV flicker and paying the mortgage, have cut the Sox down to size. Today, on the rare occasions when I can actually watch a ballgame, I see talented young men who earn more money in a fiscal quarter than I'm likely to see in a lifetime rather than deities. With a handful of exceptions (thank you Ricky Henderson [4]!), they are all younger than I am now. I'll be happy if they win the Series, but I won't get too upset about it if they don't. As you may have already guessed, that wasn't always the case.

I began following the Boston Red Sox in mid-summer 1975. I was 11. If you're too young to remember, it wasn't a bad time to start. I don't recall the exact the moment I jumped aboard definitively, but I do remember that by the time my sister and I were splashing around the pool of the Pilgrim Sands Motel in Plymouth (together with a cute girl from Andover I had taken a pre-adolescent shine to) I was hooked. Running up past the exotic ice and soft drink machines to the shady confines of our hotel room, it was a do or die appointment with TV 38. Ken Harrelson would exude his southern charm doing colour while Dick Stockton made every foul nubber [5] sound as if it might suddenly bound over the green monster [6]. The Sox always seemed to win. The names and numbers were becoming familiar; Wise, Rico, Lynn, Tiant, Pudge Fisk ... ironically, the moment which stands out most in my memory from that holiday wasn't a Sox game but rather the mid-summer's classic. As number 8's pinch-hit All Star Game homer sailed over the fence in Milwaukee I knew; Yaz [7] would always be my man (even if with the Sox he seemed to do little else but ground out to second base [8] that summer).

Of course, Yastremski had simply gone into Clark Kent mode and left more space for the gold dust twins Lynn and Rice [9] during the regular season (okay, actually he was hurt); in the post-season it was his turn to shine. As his game two playoff homer against Oakland settled into the leftfield screen that Sunday afternoon, our family cheers and my rapture were interrupted by the phone and the news that my uncle had died suddenly. For me, it was the first time anyone "real" had ever passed on. I'd never before been so brusquely torn from one emotion to another. Such is life, such are the Sox; the good times seldom last very long.

And so the Reds [10] came, so the Sox came back and so Cincinnati came away with the championship. In the meantime, baseball, thanks to the greatest Series ever and a little body English from a young New Hampshire native [11], had emerged from its doldrums as the national pasttime once more. And like a first year maths student asked to discuss physics with Einstein, I had seen too much way too soon.

For the next couple of years, I was slightly past fanatical about the game. I read every book I could, memorized facts and stats, hit tennis balls around the neighbourhood, envisioning ballgames only I could see and hear, and made more than a few people think I'd gone completely mad. I was glued to every game. At school they called me "the baseball encyclopaedia," but it was seldom said kindly, apart from by my mother. At Marlborough Junior High in 1976, baseball was "square." Soccer, Kiss, the Fonz and Farrah were what was happening. I couldn't have cared less and kept swinging my bat at imaginary fastballs. I lived in my own world.

Actually though, playing organized ball did a lot to make me one of the boys (even if several of the best Little Leaguers were, in reality, girls). I'd always been shy and withdrawn, preferring things like science fiction and afternoon cartoons to roughhousing with the lads. Now suddenly, I was playing ball against some of the best young athletes in town, and usually I held my own. Sometimes my name even got in the local paper. On the field, whatever hang-ups I had at school or home were neutralized. It was you against the pitcher, no one else. You ran hard and caught the ball or maybe you didn't. It was all up to you. I liked that. In my own neighbourhood, my friends Craig, Mick and I formed our own whiffleball [12] leagues, did commando raids into neighbours' yards to retrieve homeruns and were generally inseparable. When I look back at those sunny, carefree summers of '76, '77 and '78, I realize that baseball was the one thing that got me out of the house once and for all and into that thing called life. For this I'll always be grateful.

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