Suspend my passport if you like: this once loyal citizen of Red Sox Nation hadn’t watched an inning all season, until Wednesday night. I kept hearing, of course, that they were an interesting and likeable bunch, in contrast with their recent predecessors. No more Bobby V. (though I somewhat enjoyed him, in the rubbernecking sense). No more Beckett. No more Youkilis. (I know this may be blasphemous, but the Greek God of Walks had long since stopped embodying discretion at the plate, and his beards were all menace, with none of the chuckle that his dainty batting stance might recommend—they lacked the klezmer charm of the current lot.) Even John Lackey, I gathered, had become a redemptive figure, absolved of the chicken and biscuits, and the double-fisted Bud Lights.
What explains the inattention? Much has been made recently about the presumed retreat of baseball from the so-called national conversation, and the aging of its fan base. (The median age of last year’s World Series viewers was 53.4, more than a dozen years older than the equivalent for the NBA Finals.) As Keith Olbermann observed on Thursday night, the ratings for this World Series will be far lower than those for the last Series between the Red Sox and the Cardinals, a decade ago, and something like a fifth of what they were in the days of Roberto Clemente’s Pirates. Surely some of these demographics have to do with the flight from live television itself—I streamed Games One and Two over the Internet—but Olbermann’s contention is that the sport has become a localized fixation, and, well, I don’t live in my team’s locale. The tabloids down here, in New York, spent the final month of the regular season parsing the legal woes of a man more famous for kissing his own reflection in the mirror than for his six hundred and fifty-odd home runs.
I’m all for regional sports—I love hockey, for example, and my favorite team on ice, the New Jersey Devils, has a Q rating that only a bowling phenom would envy. My Red Sox malaise, if anything, stems from the opposite problem: the growth of a national brand so strong that its particulars are only compelling when opposed to those of an even more dominant and pervasive one. (Bring back the Evil Empire!) Outside of New England, at least, rooting for the Red Sox in the second decade of the John Henry era has become a little like wearing a Livestrong bracelet or a tattoo. After the third or fourth standing ovation for Bill Buckner, you’re no longer honoring a tradition of noble failure in a “lyric little bandbox”; you’re gloating. You’re saying, essentially: we revived Neil Diamond.
But, as I’ve been reminded anew these past couple of nights, we also have David Ortiz, and who wouldn’t celebrate Big Papi? Last week, the Red Sox adviser Bill James wrote on his personal Web site that he thinks of Ortiz “as a modern Babe Ruth literally every day.” This was after Ortiz hit his grand slam against Detroit, the one that gave us the bearded-bullpen-cop meme. Three years ago, I wrote about the Nation’s collective angst over the seeming demise of its great hero. Yet here Papi still is, the only remaining link to the 2004 team that erased the supposed Ruth curse. He’s no longer spitting into his batting gloves with such regularity; instead, he seems consumed with the Velcro straps, as if in homage to his old teammate Nomar Garciaparra. I’ve watched—and rewatched—the clips of his two Series home runs thus far, and also the would-be slam that Carlos Beltran sacrificed his ribs to yank back, but the image that I’m sticking with, as the games shift to St. Louis, is not of the ball but of Ortiz himself in flight. The sight of his airborne slide, after he scored from first on a double, on Wednesday, was enough to keep me tuning in, for now.
Photograph by Charles Krupa/AP.
