Today is Fenway Park’s 95th Opening Day, starting the annual five-month Red Sox season of endless small-talk about injuries, contracts, ticket prices, Yankees, and gossip culled from Boston Dirt Dogs. Perhaps my loathing of the Red Sox comes from being surrounded by literal fanatics, like when I was a pre-teen in the midst of New Kids on the Block mania and felt them to be talentless boobs (correctly, time told).
But the fact remains: I’m simply not a baseball person. Many people wax lyrical about how baseball is a metaphor for life; how the players with their no-nonsense grit and determination are our modern-day heroes; how it’s the incremental differences in each game that determines the ultimate winner. Perhaps that is my problem. I don’t see baseball’s poetry; I see a drawn-out repetitive game in a long, boring season.
Football is a more apt metaphor for life. For one thing, baseball doesn’t have a clock, and life revolves around time. Then there’s the constant turmoil. From the moment the football snaps, chaos: Bodies flying into one another, the quarterback controlling the action with his decision as to where the ball goes, and the players either sticking to their pre-determined jobs or going where they see an opportunity to excell. The ball can go nowhere or end up in the other team’s end zone. The possibilities are endless, and the action is constant.
Today a co-worker who is a particularly ardent Red Sox fan asked if I minded if he “blasted” (his words) the Opening Day game on a radio, at 2pm on a Tuesday. I said “I guess not” in a way that reflected my lack of enthusiasm, and he looked at me like I was a total bitch for not panting at the thought of hearing a baseball game at work. And this guy is a very nice and congenial man. I can only guess it’s the baseball fervor.
I wanted to ask him why it’s so important to hear the Opening Day game. Because it’s not the first game of the season; they’ve played about five already. It’s Fenway Park’s opening day. It’s only a special game if you have tickets to go to the ball park, because there’s about 160 more games left in the season, all of which count just as much as this one. If a trip to the World Series depended on it, I would consent in a non-passive aggressive way. But it crystallized why Red Sox fans annoy me. They think that the Red Sox are so holy that anything done in their name is permissible. Whether it be rioting in the street or forcing your co-workers to listen to radio broadcasts, it’s all okay, because the Red Sox are sacred.
Morris Raphael Cohen, a Jewish philosopher who said a lot of heavy things about pragmatism, logical positivism, and legal theory, is primarily remembered today for declaring baseball to be America’s national religion. And I don’t like people forcing their baseball religion on me anymore than I like Christians forcing their doctrine on me. You believe Jesus is magic? You believe the Red Sox are sacrosanct? Fine, but don’t compel me listen to the worship.
