to be made of glass.
Two stories:
1. Prior to Jon Lester’s last start of the 2009 regular season, NESN aired a short interview between Jon Lester and Heidi Watney. Toward the end, Heidi said, “What’s been the most memorable moment for you this season?” Lester — who is not the most articulate interview ever anyway, and where did he pick up that southern drawl, he was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest for Christ’s sake — sort of stared off into space for a minute and eventually mumbled something about the David Ortiz walk-off. I thought right then, “Yeah, this team isn’t going anywhere in the post season.”
Had Jon Lester come out and dominated in Game 1 of the ALDS, had Papelbon been able to put away the Angels with two freakin’ outs in Game 3, I’m sure I would have happily done a 180 and jumped right back on the Believe in Boston crosstown bus. But that’s not what happened.
I bet I could name 10 memorable moments from the 2007 regular season in thirty seconds or less: 1) The back-to-back-to-back-to-back homers against the Yankees, 2) the Mother’s Day Miracle 3) The Curt Schilling 8 and 2/3 inning no-hitter against Oakland, 4) the game against the Giants when Okajima struck out Barry Bonds, 5) that game in Texas where Pedroia had a, like, 25 pitch at-bat against Gagne that finally ended in a home run, 6a) Buchholz’s debut against the Angels, 6b) Buchholz’s no-hitter, 7) Jacoby Ellsbury scoring from second on a passed ball, 8) the game against Tampa when they came back from 8-1 to win 16-10, 9) Jon Lester’s return in Cleveland 10) Josh Beckett wins 20 games.
Can you name ten amazing things about the 2009 team that you will remember two years from now? Can you name five? (And no, Julio Lugo being traded doesn’t count.) I loved this team, I rooted for this team, if they had caught fire in the play-offs I would have stayed up past midnight and drank too much beer on a Tuesday and suffered through Chip Caray and Joe Buck and a thousand commercials for a Fox mid-season replacement I don’t know I hate yet. I would have happily done it all. But this team just didn’t have it, and deep down I knew it.
This was a weird season. Sure, there are more rational explanations for its abrupt ending than the lack of material for a compelling highlight reel: nobody really had a career year offensively, the catching and DH positions took turns being black holes where dreams go to die, the starting pitching was deep the same way that quicksand is deep (it sucked), the closer was irratic. Still, it was all there on paper. Somehow the 2009 Red Sox were never able to become more than the sum of their parts. But they were still my team.
2. Today, ahead of me on the escalator on the Orange Line at Chinatown, I saw a guy wearing a windbreaker with five emblems embroidered on the back. Each emblem had the logo of a sports team in the center, the name of the team above and the name of their current home field below. These were the only five things on the back of this jacket. The five teams were: The Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees, the New York Mets, the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. I tripped over myself trying to get a look at the front of the jacket, expecting it to say “Dissociative Identity Disorder Patients Anonymous” but there was nothing, no explanation of why a jacket like that exists.
The lesson? When it comes to sports, everyone’s crazy and you don’t know nothin’.
