Fall From Grace

Someone once said that if you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. The Red Sox have an entirely new season ahead of them, but one thing that will linger is the collapse last season that left the Sox out of the playoffs. I understand that for some people that this will be difficult to read. For me, it will be hard to write, but it has to be done. So before I can talk about the season ahead, what happened in the past needs to be taken care of.

The Orioles celebrating after beating the Red Sox.

 Baltimore Blues

After beating the Rangers on September 3rd, the Red Sox were looking at a nine game lead in the American League East. With only twenty-four games left in the season, they looked like a shoe-in for the playoffs. Former Baseball Prospectus statistician Clay Davenport gave them a 99.78% chance to make the playoffs. Let me bold that for you. 99.78% chance!!! That's a straight up guarantee. That's almost like saying that you think you're pregnant after you've had the baby. There was almost no way they could screw this up. But if you're a long time Boston fan, you know that you can't celebrate until it actually happens. The Red Sox are notorious for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Just ask the 86' Red Sox (Sorry Buckner!) In the end, it wasn't really a matter of when they would make the playoffs, but if.

September 28th proved to be a perfect day for the Red Sox to lose. Multiple flood warnings were broadcast across the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area. The game was even delayed for an hour and a half because of rain. If you were a member of the Nation, signs were not pointing in the teams direction. The game started off well enough, though. Lester looked fairly sharp through the six innings that he pitched. He only gave four hits and two earned runs. Pedroia homered in the fifth inning, giving the Sox a 3-2 lead, which lasted to the bottom of the ninth. Papelbon came out and was one strike away from making the Rays win or go home. But as the baseball gods would have it, Papelbon's next four pitches saw the lead disappear.

Papelbon after blowing the save that let Baltimore tie the game.

Nolan Reimold, an outfielder, put the dagger into Sox fans hearts. he hit a ground rule double to deep center, which let Kyle Hudson score. The next batter, Robert Andino, stepped up to the plate. While all of this was happening, I was in the lobby of my dorm, watching the game on the flat screen. There were multiple individuals in the room, but I was the only Sox fan. Most were haters and one kid was even from Boston and he hated the Red Sox. I was nervously wringing my hat, watching with anticipation as Andino got up. He laced a 1-1 pitch out towards Crawford, who was playing a little too deep for his own good. He tried to catch it on the slide, but he missed. He trapped the ball, but by then it was already too late. Reimold made a mad dash towards home and was mobbed by his teammates. 

I was heartbroken. I watched the TV for a while, not really comprehending what was happening. The crowd dispersed and I was left alone in my thoughts. What I had just witnessed was one of the most epic collapses in all of history. I wasn't too worried when we were only five games up and three wasn't too bad, either. But when we were tied with Tampa Bay, my stomach did somersaults. After the game was over, I got on my feet and left the dorm. I walked around campus for awhile, trying to collect my thoughts. What was a certain victory one month ago, turned into sudden despair. I got over it, and I'm certain most people did too. More heartbreak soon followed for me though. The Rangers made it to the World Series for the second year in a row, but they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. This failure ended up with me on the floor of my friend's dorm room in a fetal position. Baseball can be a harsh mistress, and if you don't accept that fact, she will make you pay for it.

The Beginning

I believe that my true obsession with baseball began back in 2009. My church had hired a new youth minister and he was the biggest Braves fan I had ever met. He gave me so much knowledge about the game that I will never be able to repay him for the amounts of awesome he showed me. He even took me to my first Major League game in Atlanta (and guess who they played... that's right: the Boston Red Sox.) David Ortiz crushed a ball out into right field and I was the only fan to even react in a excited manner in my section. This is when I first began to watch baseball religiously throughout the season. But the true premise of this story starts in October of 2004.

The Idiots and I

Keith Foulke and Jason Varitek celebrating the final out in the 2004 World Series.

The year 2004 was a little rough for me. I was still getting used to the big move we had just done. We had moved from Bay City, Texas to Hendersonville, Tennessee and I was still getting used to the new school and the entirely new culture of Tennessee. People from the north will read this and think "All those Southerners are exactly the same. There's no difference between them." Trust me, my Northern friends, there is. I was born in Texas and some say I sort of had some culture shock the first few months. But then the summer came and I was at home with my mom and my two siblings. Everything was going well that summer. We had visited my dad's parents in Texas and had just returned home. My dad was in the living room watching the his favorite team, the Texas Rangers. Now at this point, I really didn't enjoy baseball. I thought it was too boring, too slow, and just plain dumb. The only sport that I even liked at that time was football and if it wasn't the Dallas Cowboys, I wasn't watching. But all of this changed come October.

When the Red Sox defeated the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS, I had a feeling that something special was going to happen. No team in the HISTORY OF BASEBALL had ever come back from three games down in a best-of-seven series. No one. This blew my mind and for an eleven year old kid, that wasn't very hard (even now at nineteen, it still isn't hard at all.) Even though I had never heard of the Red Sox, I was still fascinated with their ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 

Johnny Damon's Game Seven Grand Slam

When the Red Sox went to the World Series, I was probably busy with schoolwork or something of that nature. At this point, I could have cared less about the Red Sox and their little run at history. I still admired them for their tenacity and it will be something that I'll never forget about that season. But I was too busy trying to get by in a middle school that wasn't all together very friendly. I never was a victim of physical bullying or even verbal abuse, but being the new kid (and from Texas, no less!) people didn't necessarily give me too much attention. I did make friends with some of the other kids who had moved from out of state and most times they were enough to get by. So on October 27th, 2004, the Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in four games. While all of Boston and The Nation celebrated the end of 86 years of futility, I was at home in Hendersonville, fast asleep and contentedly dreaming of what I would be for what was most likely going to be my final Halloween to dress up. The next day while we were getting ready for school, my dad turned the TV onto ESPN. They were showing highlights from the night before and the reactions from the fans in Boston. My first thought was 'Dang. Those people are CRAZY!'. They were so excited over just one little baseball game. I still admired the fact that they won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, but I mean, come on. It's one game (okay, okay, four...). Even my dad, who loathes Boston almost as much as he hates the Yankees and the Oklahoma Sooners, was a just a little bit happy for them. And I mean very little. But something about their victory sort of stuck with me.

The In-between Years (November 2004- October 2007)

The dates that I put up in the subtitle are some that I really have no recollection of. I can hardly remember what I had for breakfast this morning. We moved out of the apartments that we were living in and moved into the nice little house that we live in to this day. I had just started high school and I had garnered a plethora of friends in that short amount of time. But then I started to see all of the snippets of rumours on ESPN and other sport networks. Could the Red Sox do it again? Could they win two championships in four years, something they hadn't done since 1916-1918? The "Curse of the Bambino" had been buries in 2004, but this would just be an extra nail in the coffin. Since 2004, nobody exciting had won the World Series (although my dad's other favorite team, the Houston Astros, did get swept by the White Sox in 2005). Another championship would make them one of the best teams of the decade, the first of two team's in the 2000's to win two in the decade (and it they would've been the only ones if it hadn't been for those stupid Yankees.) So on October 28th, 2007, three years almost to the day, the Sox won again, beating the Rockies in four games.

"The Papelbon Freak Out" as I like to call it.

The True Fan Comes Out (November 2009- Present Day)

Like I said in the beginning, it wasn't till Daniel became my youth minister at church that I really began to appreciate the true game of baseball. I now watch baseball games on TV even if it isn't the Red Sox playing. It's sort of become a hobby for me. With baseball, I have truly come to appreciate hockey (Go Preds!) and soccer as well. I watched almost every game of the 2010 Men's World Cup. But baseball has become such a great mainstay in my life and I really do not know what I would do without it. I've dabbled a bit in fantasy baseball (I'm not very good at it). My friend Dakota and I talk about baseball a lot when the season falls into our school schedule. He's a Marlins fan, so I give him grief every now and then. I'm friends with Cardinals, Braves, and yes, even Yankee fans (God Bless their souls). My favorite season next to fall, is spring. Everything turns green, flowers start to bloom, and the crack of bats ca be heard out at the baseball field on campus. Spring is great because it means that baseball is just around the corner.