Idiot Nation

December 21, the winter solstice. It’s reputedly the darkest day of the year. So it was appropriate to awaken that dark day and read that Johnny Damon had signed to play with the Yankees. My first thought, of course, was that now he really is an idiot! After all, he had told everyone as his contract was expiring, that although he intended to shop around, no way he’d ever play for the Yankees. Would he really shed his entire image, and look, just for a few million bucks? Well, if you think about it, why not get a haircut for a measly twelve million over four years? Of course, one of the things that made Damon distinctive, and marketable, was his look. So even though the Yankees are paying an extra twelve million (chump change) over four years, perhaps his endorsement value will be diminished once he gets a haircut and puts on those awful pinstripes. (Johnny Damon on Wall Street.) Actually, not much risk here, because endorsement opportunities for New York athletes are almost limitless

Having concluded that Damon was no idiot, the next question was whether we, the nation, were collectively the real idiots? Sure, we agonized year after year as the Sox turned up second best in the east, or a game short in the postseason, but after 2004, couldn’t we let go just a bit? Couldn’t we manage just to enjoy the baseball without needing a team so stocked with characters, that it distinguished itself from everyone else in the league? And having swept the Yankees on the way to our 2004 title, and having rallied from 3-0, as no team had ever done before, why are we still haunted by them? After 2004, is a loss to the Yankees any worse than to, say, the Blue jays? So Damon is gone, along with Pedro, and Manny is unhappy, but in the long run, what difference does it make?

Then it occurred to me, aren’t we missing the bigger picture? All this agonizing over Damon was distracting us. If we’re looking for idiots, why look any farther than the front office? After all, in the fourteen months since the Sox reversed the curse, and won it all, we have let go our GM, the boy genius who supposedly put everyone in place; we have disassembled the entire infield; we have given up our shortstop and center fielder, leaving us totally vulnerable up the middle; and we’ve traded away our best young prospect. We’ve been unable to sign a single marquee player; we have no clue whether we have a pitching staff, either starting rotation or bullpen (Timlin alone, even at his best, isn’t a bullpen.); and we don’t have a leadoff hitter to get on base in front of Manny and Ortiz. In fact, we don’t even know if we have Manny. And if we don’t, how many fewer at bats will Papi have?

I’ve read the pundits who say we’re better off letting these veterans go, and building a club around young talent. That would be a fine philosophy and would be a reason not to be discouraged, if we actually thought someone was intending to do that. Of course, there is truth to the old adage, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It wasn’t broke. And in fact, we weren’t trying to fix it. We’re just bumbling around aimlessly. And if it looks like we’re trying to build a club around young talent, that’s only because the young talent can’t go anywhere just yet. Give them time. They’ll flee also. Happy new year, to all the idiots.

It All ComesTogether

Game Four was played under a full moon, until the lunar eclipse began. I refused to go outside that night, to look up into the night sky either to watch the moon recede behind the earth’s shadow, or to gaze upon the faint red image left behind. A full moon is reputed to bring bad luck, something about the red caste of the eclipsed disk of the moon, and after a lifetime of close calls, who needed to tempt luck with the Cardinals down 3-0? As it turned out, luck didn’t play much of a role that night; if anything it wasn’t the Red Sox, but the Red Birds, who seemed to be suffering from bad fortune.

In truth, the series had already ended the night before. The Cards last gasp came in the third inning of Game Three; after Suppan got picked off trying to return to third, they barely drew a breath. In the remaining fifteen innings of the series, they managed only five base hits, and a single run. In fact, Game Four stayed close only because of the play of Pujols, who threw out two Sox at the plate. Three innings ended with various Sox stranded at third.

The only tension that night was created by Fox, who began speculating openly about a Sox victory in around the seventh inning. The first reference came when their graphic listed 31 thousand something or other days since the Sox last won the series. What is that? We need Fox to jinx us, when we’re this close? Get that shit off the screen! Everyone knows the Sox were a strike away in 1986, two runs ahead. Here we were only three runs ahead, and eight or nine outs away. Fortunately, none of this mattered. In rewatching the game, courtesy of these DVDs, I can for the first time enjoy all of Joe Buck’s foreshadowing. All these references to kids In New England staying up late, to Sox fans everywhere thinking about loved ones who never lived to see this happen. And when the game ended, after the Sox mobbed Tek and Foulke near the mound, and Jimmy Fallon finished kissing Drew Barrymore in some crazy blend of fact, fiction and entertainment, Fox cut away and the Nike commercial ran, the one depicting the four fans sitting at Fenway through the generations. It sat on Nike’s website for about a week, but I never saw it play on air except that one time.

One last observation, and then we’re done. Then we can turn our attention, if not to Montaigne, to the weighty questions of the day – Was Theo really a boy genius, or was he just lucky? And who’s going to play short next year? Anyway, watching the fans at Game Four, every Sox fan is on the cell phone from the fourth inning on. “Can you believe this?” Montaigne returns again and again to the relationship between fathers and sons. And so this endless dwelling on the Sox, this seemingly pointless recapitulation of the 2004 post-season, was actually not so pointless after all. We’ll undoubtedly learn more by reading the master, but we won’t connect any better than we do by talking baseball.