Fan For A Day

As an Oakland A's fan, it's not hard to hate the Yankees. I hate them with every ounce of my being.

Well, I severely dislike them, anyhow. Or hate them.

Aside from all of that, though, it's really easy to be a Boston Red Sox fan today.

It's not that they won, it's that they beat the Evil Empire. And it's not just that they beat the Yankess, but it's how they beat them.

No team in the history of baseball had ever come back from a three game deficit to win a best-of-seven. Any number of teams could have done it, and it would have been exciting, newsworthy, and something to talk about around the office.

Boston vs. New York took exciting and newsworthy to transcendent. If a sportswriter were to sit down last spring and fictionalize the perfect storyline to end the season, he might have written it just like this. Going down three games, the last a massacre, hope all gone everywhere except... in the Boston clubhouse. They scrape out two improbable extra-inning wins against the best closer in baseball, then go back to the home of the Evil Empire. They win a nailbiter. Then, they don't just scrape out their last win, no, they CRUSH the enemy in their own ballpark, even daring them to come back by putting their whipping boy, Pedro, on the hill in the seventh, and, at the very end, not one of their big bats, for which they paid $185 million, could do more than whiff and whimper as they finally rolled over and died.

That was, perhaps, the best thing about it. In the face of all of the trash New York could muster, Bucky Dent, pics of The Bambino, the number 1918 all over the park, the Red Sox would not be intimidated, cowed or denied.

At this point I don't care who wins the NLCS. The Cardinals would be nice, in a way, since they had a direct hand in the perpetuation of The Curse. Whoever it turns out to be, it will be a good series.

However, it will be a great series if the Red Sox end the Curse of the Bambino, a series baseball fans will tell the grandkids about years and years from now.