September slump leaves shoo-in Sox undone

SIDELINE CUT:The Sox couldn't simply fail to make the play-offs: they had to set themselves up in a seemingly unassailable position in August, only to set a bonfire under it . . . and that they did, writes KEITH DUGGAN

“IT BREAKS your heart. It is designed to break your heart,” Angelo Giamatti wrote of baseball. Giamatti who was, amongst other things, president of Yale, commissioner of the baseball league, father to actor Paul (Sideways, Cinderella Man) and lifelong Boston Red Sox fan.

When he swapped the rarefied world of academia for the more boisterous life of heading up the American League, he declined the courtesy limousine that came with the job and drove around in his yellow Volkswagen Beatle with a Red Sox sticker on the car bumper.

Giamatti belonged to the generations of Red Sox baseball fans for whom disappointment was as reliable as autumn and came in just as many hues. No team managed to blow big games as spectacularly or as weirdly as the Red Sox did.

But this week, Red Sox fans experienced a heightened state of disillusionment as their team completed what has been declared the biggest collapse in the history of American sport: the team lost 20 out of 27 games in September and just crashed out of the sky.

Their misery was made complete on Wednesday night in circumstances that lay somewhere between the epic and farcical. The Red Sox had a one run lead in the ninth inning and needed just one out to complete a 3-2 win. Instead, they gave up late runs to lose 4-3 to Baltimore.

Their last hope depended on their nemesis, the New York Yankees, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays but right on cue, the Yankees (already safely through to the play-offs) fell to a late, extra innings strike and lost 8-7. It was close to midnight and the Red Sox had failed to make the play-offs. The misery could not have been more excruciating and the blame game is back.

No body of sports fans have made such a virtue of being let down by their team as the Red Sox., There was a symmetry about the fact John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox, should also become the owner of Liverpool FC because both fans share a sense of fatalism about their place in the folklore of the respective sports.

When the Red Sox shocked themselves by actually winning the World Series in 2004, the novelist Stephen King felt compelled to publish a book about it. Faithful chronicled a series of exchanges he shared with a friend throughout that season, when thousands of Red Sox fans couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

For the Sox didn’t win – it had become an acceptable rule. They were cursed and that somehow made them special – chosen by the fates for special treatment. When the impossible happened in 2004, it was the first time Boston had won the World Series since 1918, a ridiculous lapse in time given the club is a perpetual contender.

The near-misses they suffered to preserve that miserable streak had passed into folklore and, prior to that 2004 win, it seemed most Red Sox fans had accepted that watching their team conspiring not to win the thing was the essence of what being a fan was about.

That and going along to the wonderfully ramshackle home ground in Fenway Park.

“Like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg,” was how John Updike described the place in his famous, wistful essay, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, on Ted Williams’ last game in Red Sox colours, a no-matter end of season game.

This was a Wednesday, September 28th 1960 – the ground was only half full, as befitting a team considered the worst in 27 years. Most of those in attendance were there because they had nothing better to do in the afternoon or to witness the concluding act of Williams’ tempestuous relationship with the club.

The serious baseball was going on elsewhere, but this grey day was illuminated by a fantastic combination of good luck and technical brilliance – Williams actually managed to produce more than those in attendance could have dreamed of. A home run with his last strike. Suddenly, the place was alive in the ecstasy of that moment.

“He ran as he always ran out home runs – hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of,” Updike wrote. “He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense, open anguish, a wailing a cry to be saved.

“But immortality is non transferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.”

That passage contained the essence of the Red Sox experience – pining for something lost or unobtainable. Bitching, in other words, about life through their sports team.

The World Series win in 2004 – which was promptly followed by another in 2007 – instantly removed the right to gripe of thousands of fans. There was nothing to complain about and for a while, it was wonderful. But it was also strange. There was no point in hating the Yankees as they had, at last, been conquered. All of a sudden, being a Red Sox fan was a place of privilege and ease.

All the pain had gone.

Until now. As of this weekend, the Red Sox players have brought shame to the club, the newspaper headlines are demanding scapegoats and the team manager, Terry Francona, might well be on his way out.

But against that, a curmudgeonly satisfaction that things are getting back to how they used to be is returning.

The new mood was best summed up by Jay Caspian King, on the Grantland.com website, who wrote from the unapologetic stand-point of waking up on Thursday morning to the new reality of being a Red Sox fan.

“When I woke up this morning, I thought, ‘Hey, maybe this crushing defeat will kill some of the Cowboy-Uppers and the Pink-Hatters and we’ll be closer to the ideal mix of Red Sox fans – old angry drunk guys in bars, young angry drunk guys in bars, old and young angry drunk guys at Fenway who heckle Harvard-y fans and/or minorities, minorities who feel weird about being Sox fans, openly hate the city of Boston, and, as a result, secretly want the Sox to lose forever.’

“That’s what every Sox fan over the age of 30 can’t quite admit, because to be a productive human being you have pretend to be interested in success and winning and enjoying moments of glory. Winning was nice, but man, I miss the bile.”

The bile and the element of tragic-comic opera are back with a vengeance at Fenway Park. The Red Sox couldn’t simply fail to make the play-offs, they had to set themselves up in what looked to the world like an unassailable position in August only to set a bonfire under it. The Red Sox Nation is far-flung and varied; Simon Schama, “Markie” Mark Wahlberg, Stephen King are among the luminaries who count themselves as fans.

A few more years out of fashion and the Red Sox will once again be the exclusive property of the fans who glory in persevering with a team in spite of everything they do on the field of play as much as because of it.

Next year, Fenway Park will be 100 years old. With Yankee Stadium gone, it is the jewel of American ball parks and nostalgia and expectation will mingle like never before. Red Sox fans can look forward to that auspicious season in familiar mood; grumbling, grousing, playthings for the gods and ever hopeful.