I miss the good old days.\u00c2\u00a0 I miss the Octobers past where a lead against the Red Sox was as good as a win.\u00c2\u00a0 I miss the fall series where Bostonians refused to celebrate success, because they knew that failure was a heartbeat away.\u00c2\u00a0 In those good old days, dread was the permanent October forecast of Fenway Park.\u00c2\u00a0 Any negative turn of events caused conversations to shift from balls and strikes to Babe Ruth, Bucky Dent, and Bill Buckner.\u00c2\u00a0 For members of the Nation, losing was a rite of passage.\u00c2\u00a0 You weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a true Sox fanatic until they broke your heart.<\/p>\n
As a result, the players would respond to the general feeling of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh no, here we go again.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 In the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s, when the Yankees and Red Sox began to meet up regularly in the postseason, we Yankees fans could always count on the Fenway Faithful to cause the Sox to tighten up in big moments.\u00c2\u00a0 As Nomar Garciaparra circled a routine grounder and prepared to fire to first, you could hear 40,000 people hold their breath.\u00c2\u00a0 Would this be the moment that the ghosts reared their fickle heads?\u00c2\u00a0 As Nomar gathered himself and loaded up, muscles tensed and pulses raced across the Red Sox Nation.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, as the throw sailed just wide of first, the prophecy would once again fulfill itself.\u00c2\u00a0 Karma would once again make the citizens of Boston pay for the transgressions of Harry Frazee.\u00c2\u00a0 The game, followed closely by the series, would spiral out of control.\u00c2\u00a0 The Red Sox would fade into the night.<\/p>\n
Then Dave Roberts stole second base off of Mariano Rivera.\u00c2\u00a0 Taking the words of Dylan Thomas to heart, Bill Mueller, Trot Nixon, and Kevin Millar raged against the dying of the light.\u00c2\u00a0 In 2004, karma finally said enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Had you walked around Boston that fall, you would have seen Pedro Martinez wandering around Massachusetts with a handwritten list of his past misdeeds, which he would cross of in the style of My Name is Earl.\u00c2\u00a0 That postseason, players that had only experienced and became synonymous with Red Sox heartbreak (Garciaparra) were replaced by those that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ascribe to any belief in curses or karma (Orlando Cabrera).<\/p>\n
Everything bounced the way of the Sox.\u00c2\u00a0 Nobody bunted against Curt Schilling throughout the entirety of October.\u00c2\u00a0 I mean, why would you want to force a near forty-year old overweight pitcher, who was bleeding through his sock, to move around?\u00c2\u00a0 Over the course of those three weeks, Keith Foulke threw somewhere between 65 and 3,000 pitches, but never broke down.\u00c2\u00a0 With October 2004, those killer B\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s of Boston (Babe, Bucky, Buckner, Boone) were removed from the back of the franchise.\u00c2\u00a0 Players stood taller when they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t weighed down by 80 years of futility and misery.<\/p>\n
Now, the Red Sox simply will not die.\u00c2\u00a0 They used to quietly lie down in the graves dug by their opponents and offer little resistance as the dirt began to pile on.\u00c2\u00a0 These days, the Sox play the role of some horror movie character, on which you can never turn your back.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter how closely the Yankees, Indians, or Rays push them to the edge of oblivion, they still rally back.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, seven outs from destruction, the Sox completed the biggest comeback in a postseason elimination game ever.\u00c2\u00a0 On Saturday, Josh Beckett, suffering from some kind of oblique muscle injury, gamely led his team through five innings, giving them a chance to remain in the series.\u00c2\u00a0 As their pitching held, emotional captains David Ortiz and Jason Varitek (who hit .223 after the All-Star break) came through with huge hits.\u00c2\u00a0 Finially, an admittedly sore Jonathan Papelbon closed the game out with a 1-2-3 ninth.\u00c2\u00a0 By the end, the Sox looked loose, energized, ready to play another nine innings right then and there.\u00c2\u00a0 In stark contrast, the typically electric Rays seemed tight, nervous, and on the precipice of collapse.\u00c2\u00a0 The weight of history rested squarely upon their shoulders.<\/p>\n
On Sunday night, Boston\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s John Lester matches up against Tampa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Matt Garza.\u00c2\u00a0 The winner moves on to the World Series.\u00c2\u00a0 There is nothing more exciting than a game seven in the baseball postseason, but I feel nothing but dread.\u00c2\u00a0 This is a brave new world where the Red Sox don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t give in and fight to their last breath; where simply blaring Journey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Stop Believing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d over the Fenway loudspeakers causes fans to beat their hands bloody against the walls lining the field; where a groundball trickling beyond the glove of Bill Buckner and down the first base line no longer signifies the franchise.\u00c2\u00a0 This team is the Jason Voorhees of Major League Baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 This world worries me.\u00c2\u00a0 I know as I watch Sunday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game, I will long for the good old days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I miss the good old days.\u00c2\u00a0 I miss the Octobers past where a lead against the Red Sox was as good as a win.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}