Musings of a Recovered Red Sox Fan

I am a recovering Boston Red Sox fan. I rooted for the Bosox mostly because my Strat-O-Matic team featured Carl Yastrzemski, Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, and Dwight Evans. In Strat-O-Matic, just as in fantasy baseball, you rooted for individual players.

At the beginning of my baseball odyssey, there were the numbers. I loved the statistical aspect of baseball, which was far more interesting than weather report numbers (my first numerical love). Strat-O-Matic Baseball was a revelation; I spent many happy hours throwing dice and compiling statistics. I can recite most of the 1970 players’ batting averages; the numbers made sense to me. I investigated baseball run production using regression analysis for my college senior thesis back in 1979 (slugging average and on-base percentage explained 95 percent of the variation in baseball run production).

In any event, I suffered through the summer of 1978. The Red Sox’s huge lead over the despised New York Yankees melted throughout August and September, including a four-game sweep by the Yankees in Fenway Park. The Yankees didn’t just sweep the series, they pounded the Red Sox. Even though the Red Sox fought back during the last week to tie the Yankees at the end of the regular season, Red Sox fans worried.

Boston got home-field advantage for the playoff game. On the West Coast, where I was attending the University of Oregon, the playoff game started in mid-afternoon. Students crowded into a small room with a television set in the Erb Memorial Union, the university’s student union (made famous by comedian John Belushi in Animal House, who exclaimed, “I’m a zit!” before spewing a homecoming queen with cottage cheese). Two of my high school buddies, both lifelong Yankees fans (I believe they inherited this affliction from their fathers), were in attendance.

I recall there were more Yankees fans than Red Sox fans in the room, but not so disproportionate to shut up us Red Sox fans. Most of our fellow students probably weren’t too invested in the game’s outcome. After all, we were West Coast kids watching two East Coast teams, and the Yankees were more likely to have a national following.

The Red Sox faced Ron Guidry, who had experienced one of the greatest seasons by a pitcher in modern times, but the Sox clung to a 2–0 lead heading into the top of the seventh inning. Sox starter Mike Torrez gave up singles to Chris Chambliss and Roy White. With two out, shortstop Bucky Dent approached the plate. Dent, batting ninth in the order, exemplified the good field, no hit shortstops of the 1970s; he had hit just five home runs during the season. Most of the Red Sox fans figured that, at worst, Dent might get a cheap single, possibly scoring a run.

What happened next, of course, became another exhibit in the burgeoning “Curse of the Bambino” lore. Bleeping Bucky Dent hit a home run over the Green Monster, putting the Yankees ahead, 3–2. The Red Sox supporters could have handled such, had it been Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, or Graig Nettles delivering the heroics, but Bucky Dent? During the subsequent winter, we had to watch Dent parade in his underwear as a model. I’ve nothing personal against Mr. Dent; he seems to be a decent enough fellow, who wore his underpants well. But having Bucky “[insert rude word of your choice here; one that sort of rhymes with Bucky]” Dent hit the crucial home run was too painfully absurd. Red Smith’s description of Bobby Thomson’s home run in the 1951 playoff game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers could be recycled: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”¹ I think the Yankees fans were as stunned as the Red Sox fans; who would have “thunk it?”

To be sure, the Red Sox gamely hung on. They battled back from a 5–2 deficit in the bottom of the...