Random Musings from Beantown

Now that the requisite day of mourning the 13-6 loss to the Indians has passed, I’m ready to talk about Saturday’s trip to Boston. 

The Bee and I paid a visit to Phalanx of Fun member Prospero, who lives a few T stops away from Fenway. We had a tasty dinnah at Eastern Standard and then strolled toward Fenway in the (vain) hope of either getting tickets or getting into a sports bar. Here are some random musings based on that experience:

• Red Sox fans like to get kitted out in Sox gear. Big time. In fact, if you show up with nary a Sox logo somewhere on your clothing, you’ll stick out like Shaq in a crowd of preschoolers. It’s also possible that people will point, laugh, and whisper while glancing in your direction.
• Red Sox fans ignore mathematical truths. A small number of tickets go on sale at the box office before playoff games. Maybe 100, maybe 200. But that doesn’t stop 500 people from standing in line for 90 minutes until five minutes before the game starts, hoping against hope that 80% of the “other” people will change their minds. I say this because we, too, left our math skills at home that night (about 400 people stood in front of us).
• Everyone is your friend. Erica Beck blogged about this phenomenon in tennis, and the same thing happens among Red Sox fans: Strangers who identify other strangers as Sox fans (see first bulleted point for elaboration) become very chatty when standing in close proximity to one another. Suddenly, we’re all on a reunion tour, talking baseball, tracing our individual fandom ancestries (kudos to the anesthesiologist from the Bronx for being a Sox fan!), sharing life histories, and reveling in our collective loss of math skills concerning the tickets-to-line-length ratio.  
• Dogs mistake cheers at the TV screen for signals to play with tennis balls. OK, this applies only to Prospero’s pooch, who was subjected to our game-time shouts after we gave up on tickets and returned home. But it was pretty funny to learn that hoots and hollers about homeruns and good plays are, in the dog world, not that far removed from “Drop the ball here and I’ll throw it.”
• Lastly, we all noticed that Fox Sports was rah-rah Cleveland. Take, for example, the deafening silence when Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell hit back-to-back HRs. (Not commentary on how “crisp” it sounded like when Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore clocked one earlier that inning). And don’t think we didn’t notice “Cleveland Rocks” at, oh, every commercial break. (What, they couldn’t find a Boston chant to even things up?)

Nothing gets by us, let me tell you. Except for that basic math and available tickets thing.