Fenway Faithful: Or, All Baseball is Local

To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all baseball is local. As fans, we all come to baseball in a specific place and at a particular time. We are introduced to the game within a community or within a family.

I grew up in southeastern Connecticut, roughly one hundred miles from Boston, quite firmly within the boundary of Red Sox Nation. “The pith of Red Sox Nation,” as Mark Sappenfield, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, observed in 2004, “is invariably grounded in New England soil, starting with the grass at Fenway.”¹

My Red Sox reflected the time of my introduction to them. My Red Sox included a height of his powers Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Carlton Fisk, Jerry Remy, and a late career Carl Yastrzemski. I came to those Red Sox through my parents. Though both were fans, they enacted their fandom quite differently.

My mom followed the team, but was less likely to watch their games with us. She wanted to spare herself the agony of losses due to late game collapses. She weathered those losses with us, but from a distance, while reminding us that in the end, the Red Sox would only break your heart. I was most likely to watch their home games on television from our couch in Connecticut, alongside my dad, who taught me to stay to the very last pitch. He taught me to be faithful to the end, even if the Red Sox were, in fact, likely to break your heart in the bottom of the ninth.

Truly, the faith of all Red Sox fans is Calvinism, appropriate for a New England franchise. Cotton Mather himself would be comfortable sitting in the bleachers at Fenway, living our individual faith in a crowded park, where we learn again and again that the ways of the Lord are often dark and never pleasant.² Growing up a Red Sox fan, I have never found the words of Jonathan Edwards to ring of anything other than absolute truth. Who else were we in 1978, in 1986, if not sinners in the hands of an angry God?

Growing up the child of parents whose grandparents were Catholic immigrants to New England, my adopted Calvinism made far less sense. My lineage, in point of fact, were not the people whose ancestors had heard Edwards preach in 1741 and believed. Yet, in another way, of course they were. I, too, the descendant of Polish Catholics (my mother’s side) and French-Canadian Catholics (my father’s side), was a New Englander. As a child, I never set foot in a Protestant house of worship, but of course Johnathan Edwards was my forebearer. We too were New Englanders and, as New Englanders, that Calvinist heritage was my heritage too, even if it came to me through the Red Sox and not through my family. In some strange way, the history of the franchise served as a primer to the history of New England for my immigrant family. Rooting for the Red Sox brought us deeply and inexorably into the New England fold.

The idea of the latent Calvinism of Red Sox fans is, of course, not original to me. A famous debate in 1986 captured the terms of the theological debate well. As Yale University president A. Bart Giamatti put it, “There’s a sense that things will turn out poorly no matter how hard we work. Somehow the Sox fulfill the notion that we live in a fallen world.” Others, however, disagreed. Tufts University president Sol Gittleman countered Giamatti’s thesis, offering the example of the Boston Celtics. If ours is still a Calvinist culture, he observed, why do Bostonians believe that the Celtics will win?³

Sportswriter Charlie Pierce would surely interrupt at this point to suggest to us that the answer is not only painfully obvious, but it also lies well outside of the realm of theology. “The Red Sox of my youth were losers,” Pierce wrote, “and not particularly lovable ones, either. They were shamefully late to integrate, and they lost enthusiasm for their work reliably around Memorial Day. They...