Opening Day Closure

I find Major League Baseball's Opening Day celebrations better than just about any other. For one, the start of the baseball season marks the transition from winter to spring, so the sense of renewal is amplified. There's a reason "hope springs eternal" was written about baseball, or at least it should have been. 

Beyond the seasonal angle, ballclubs have gotten really good at using their home openers to celebrate their city, their team, and their history. This week, my own team did it up right.

The Red Sox were already going to have an epic home opener this year, given this is the 20th anniversary of what Sports Illustrated called "The Most Amazing Season in History". But when the members of that team gathered at Fenway on Tuesday for the first home game of the 2024 season, they were also there to celebrate the life of one of their own, gone too soon.

We wrote about Tim Wakefield's untimely passing when it happened last year. Wake might not have been my favorite Sox player of all time, but he was on the short list. That affection was based as much on his character and humility as it was on his on-field exploits, but he did wind up third all-time on the Sox' pitching wins list, and he pitched more innings in a Boston uniform than any other pitcher.

And so it came to pass that the normal anticipation that accompanies opening day was mixed with sadness and appreciation when Brianna Wakefield, the 18 year-old daughter of Tim and Stacy (in an epic bit of shitty business, Wake's wife passed from cancer shortly after her husband), took the mound to throw the first pitch of the 2024 season to Jason Varitek.

@nesn Yesterday Tim and Stacy Wakefield’s daughter, Brianna, threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park surrounded by her father’s 2004 #RedSox ♬ original sound - NESN

Dry eyes? I assume there were a few at Fenway. But not in my house.

Lotta ball left. Stay on target. Godspeed, Wake.

The Red Winning

All over the greater DMV today, giddy, nervous, white-knuckled Washington Capitals fans are dealing with personal maelstroms of conflicting emotions. The long-choking Caps are a mere single victory from clinching the club's first Stanley Cup title, and the city's first major sports championship since 1992. (DC United says hello, several times, but nobody listens to them.)

As someone with a great deal of relevant experience in such matters, I come here to offer advice to Caps fans, many of whom I hold in great esteem. I'm not one of them myself, but in the same way Mets fan Whitney jumped on the Red Sox bandwagon to support me in 2004, I'll be pulling for the team in red this evening.

After Game 3 of the 2004 World Series, with the Red Sox one game away from snapping their legendary losing streak, and from changing forever my relationship with sports, I wrote this*:

"The Red Sox are 1 win from capturing a World Series championship so elusive that 3 generations of Sox fans have never seen one. They find themselves on this precipice because they believe in themselves and each other to the exclusion of all distractions, and I and people like me find ourselves silently mouthing, "Believe" as games draw to a close. Though the karmic cruelty supposed by a Cardinal comeback in this series would be legendary in its devastating impact, we still hold on. "Believe," I tell my family. "Believe," I implore as Pedro Martinez faces a 0-out, 2nd and 3rd situation in the 3rd inning of a 1-run game. "Believe," as Pedro retired the next 14 Cardinals, and then watched Mike Timlin and Keith Foulke shut the door. 

It's a new thing for us, this believing. We're all still dipping our toes in it, hoping that it's real. We know the facts, and the stats, and we understand that the Cardinals team, while terrific, really isn't set up well for postseason baseball, especially with so many control pitchers who don't make many batters swing and miss. Pitchers that throw a lot of strikes against these Red Sox tend to get battered - no change in this series thus far. We also understand that the Sox have gotten all the breaks thus far - that the Cardinals, the league's best fundamental team, essentially gift-wrapped Game 3 with 2 colossal base-running errors in the game's first 3 innings. We see the Sox rap 2-out hit after 2-out hit, and belief comes a little easier. We know that the bullpen is rested, that Derek Lowe is confident, that the offense is on fire, and that the Sox players are looser than the intestines of a dysentery patient. (Did he just introduce dysentery into this paragraph? Forget it, he's rolling.) 

We know all these things, and we're so ready to really, truly believe. And yet, we're Red Sox fans, so the exhale won't truly come until Keith Foulke induces the last Cardinal batter to fly softly to center, until the last out of the last inning of the last game of the World Series is recorded, and the Red Sox have more runs than the Cardinals. And if that happens, well...my God...I can't even imagine."

Honestly, it was even better than I could...even imagine. The Sox' Game 4 victory ranks in the top five most joyous moments of my life. I cried like a baby.

I really hope the many fervent Caps fans get to experience that.

And so my advice to them, like Curtis Armstrong's Miles to Tom Cruise's Joel, is: say fuck it. If you can't say it, you can't do it. Or, more directly, if you grip too hard on your hopes, you won't enjoy the moment. And goddamn is it a moment to savor.

Fuck it, Caps. And Godspeed.

* If you think I used the occasion of the Capitals potentially winning the Stanley Cup to talk about the Red Sox and highlight my own writing, well, you nailed it. Congrats for your grasp of the obvious.

Baseball Poetry, of a Sort

I'm in Boston this week for work. The city of my recent ancestry has a special place in my heart for a great many reasons, but this particular trip will linger in my memory. If you'll indulge me (and this strongly-poured Woodforde Reserve), for just a moment, I'll explain.

My paternal grandparents were born in 1920. They met in 1938 during their very first week as freshmen at American International College in Springfield, MA, went dutch to a movie on a Saturday night, and have been together ever since. (For the liberal arts majors in our readership, that's 75 years.) They were married July 1, 1944, and after my grandfather finished a stint in the Navy during World War II, they settled in the Boston suburb of Winchester, MA.

They raised three children in that quintessential New England town, rearing them on a steady diet of puritan stoicism, stubborn notions of right and wrong, Red Sox baseball, and love. Especially love. They survived two of those three kids, something I can't imagine.

Dr. Seymour Russell, DDS, practiced here from 1946 - 1984.

My grandfather opened a dental practice, and built a community around it. He ran it for 38 years before retiring in 1984, most proud of the fact that he never hired a bill collector to chase late payments. I used to think that he did so because he didn't have delinquent customers, but in fact,  he cared more about that community than he did his income. Today, we'd call that hopelessly naive, perhaps. But his business was people, and the people of Winchester frequent the practice even today, nearly 30 years after his retirement.

They retired to a 90-acre farm in New Hampshire that he'd renovated over the years and then to a smaller house once the farm's remote locale began to be a concern for a pair of 80 year-olds. Finally, they moved back to Winchester to be near family.

I'd make trips to see them from time to time - they met their great-granddaughter on Cape Cod when she was less than a year old, and we made it a practice to visit their apartment on all our trips to the Cape thereafter. My sister and I traveled to New Hampshire in 2005 when we were convinced that my grandfather was near death. The Red Sox were a part of that trip, too. He pulled through then, and most of us are convinced that he simply wasn't willing to leave her alone.

She fell last March, injuring her hip and elbow. She'd been increasingly slowed by age, her back bowed and her neck muscles no longer able to keep her head up for more than a few seconds at a time. But this time, the doctors made her go to a convalescent center, despite his protestations (and they are many - he's the last of the great New England conservatives). She's been in a bed ever since.

And so I didn't know what to expect this afternoon when I knocked off work and went to her nursing home. He was already there when I walked in, and was expecting me - I thought it best not to surprise a pair of 92 year-olds. But she didn't know I was coming, and the way her face lit up will stay with me forever.

"She still has the greatest smile," he said when she took my hand and beamed at me. "She's still beautiful."

I spent the better part of the afternoon with them. We turned the Red Sox/Yankees Opening Day game on the television and watched the last six innings. Some of the time, she was completely aware of the game situations. At others, she rooted for the Sox to get out, thinking they were the Yankees. There were moments when she thought I was her late son, my father (and she can be forgiven that, as we look too alike for my own comfort - my soul patch is a late, futile attempt to create some distance) and others when she struggled to remember the names of other relatives. She was frail, and distracted, and almost completely deaf. But her eyes were bright, and her smile quick, and her mind inquisitive.

Jackie Bradley, Jr. made his major league debut

She'd take his hand, and she'd ask him how long they'd been married. And he'd tell her, "68 3/4 years". And she'd tell me how handsome I was, but not as handsome as the love of her life. She used that precise phrasing over and over again. And he'd smile every time.

Throughout the afternoon, we watched the Red Sox game. We talked about Jackie Bradley, the Sox' rookie outfielder, and Dustin Pedroia, her favorite and mine. We lamented the Bobby Valentine era, and we laughed at Kevin Youkilis in pinstripes. Mostly, we rooted for the Sox. And when the final out was recorded, and the Sox won, 8-2, I kissed her on the forehead and told her I loved her. She told me how proud she was of me, and I whispered, "I'm very lucky".

I'm very, very lucky.