This one’s filed under History, for indeed, we saw history made last night. And history that would have made my late maternal grandfather beam.
The Boston Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit to beat the New York Yankees in the ALCS. In New York. Simply astounding.
Born and raised in Connecticut, I was torn between Red Sox and Yankees loyalty. My father’s family were all from the New York area, and were die-hard Yankees fans. My mother’s family were all from Massachusetts and have similar feeling about the Red Sox. I wore a Yankees baseball hat between the ages of 2 and 6. I also attended games at Fenway Park and cheered mightily for our doomed heroes. I always loved the Red Sox. ALCS match-ups between the two teams tended to leave me confused. But I tended to root for the Sox, since America loves an underdog. Something that got very hard to do when my family lived outside Albany, NY during the late 1970s. I was a 90lb Red Sox fan among the horde.
Being a Red Sox fan requires a certain amount of Slavic fatalism. Bucky Dent. Bill Buckner. The Curse. And in typical seasoned Sox fan style, going into this Series I hope for the best but expect the worst. Much like a Russian would have meant when they said, “Stalin has defeated the Germans.” Yay. Yippee. We’re probably screwed.
But today we celebrate. And like the apocryphal story of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, the band plays The World Turned Upside Down.
Note: Today would be my grandfather’s 98th birthday. He died a month to the day after my birth, after returning from a game at Fenway. This one’s for you, Charlie.