Monday, April 19, 2004

 

I lucked into a ticket to Saturday's Red Sox game, against the Yankees. It was a perfect, beautiful day for baseball. I got chills looking around Fenway when the National Anthem played. If America is about anything, to me it's a sunny day, the smell of freshly cut grass, and baseball.

The game started well; Schilling was pitching inspired baseball, striking out 8 in six innings, including Jeter twice & A-Rod once. The Red Sox were hitting, but Mussina got out of enough jams to keep the game decently close. We were out in the bleachers, and they were rowdy all day; not just normal rowdy, but Red Sox - Yankees rowdy. There were N.Y. fans there, and I think the first one made the perp-walk out of the park, surrounded by security, in the third inning. There was about one per inning thereafter, and everyone in the bleachers would stand up to watch and jeer every time. The Sox stretched the lead out by the sixth or seventh, and with the beer really kicking in, the bleachers started to get really ugly. A full-out brawl errupted about 30 feet from us, when a shouting match led Sox fans to start pelting a Yankees fan first with popcorn and then with beer; that's when the shoving started, and soon enough there were punches thrown, and a crowd surge that security had to fight through to break things up.

The rivalry is cool. Kind of. But it's also poisonous. The fans really HATE the Yankees, and Yankees fans, and to some extent New York itself, and all its inhabitants, by extension. Hate is . . . unpleasant. And dumb. It's one thing when it's directed at an essentially abstract construction, like a sports team. It's another thing completely when you see it directed at real people, and turned into mob violence.


Still, it is fun to laugh at the fact that Alex "$25,000,000 per year" Rodriguez is batting .156 so far in a Yankees uniform!

posted by Miles 8:30 AM