Legacy

Sometime around 1910, a Boston boy named Joseph Goode (above, left) began work at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. The Grounds, built in 1901 for $35,000, housed the Boston Red Sox baseball team, which had set up shop there in '01 as the Boston Pilgrims. While at work, Joe watched Babe Ruth pitch and Tris Speaker patrol center field and saw such visiting future Hall of Famers as Ty Cobb.

Players were approachable in those days, so Joe didn't think much of it when early in the 1911 season he ventured to ask a member of the Philadelphia Athletics if they had any promising rookies. The player pointed to a rangy 24-year old: "Him. He's going to be good." "Him" was Pete Alexander, who won 94 games from 1915-17 en route to a career record of 373-208 and the third-most wins of all time.

(The Huntington Avenue Grounds)

Joe raised his children to be Red Sox fans, and 10-year old Paul (top, right) caught the fever for good in 1938, twenty years after the Sox won the 1918 World Series -- a feat they wouldn't accomplish again for 86 years. Paul saw Joe DiMaggio, who had earlier signed a $100,000 contract, come off the DL in 1949 to lead the Yankees to a key mid-season win over the Sox in Fenway Park, their home since 1912. The Yankees swept a three-game series; they left Boston at the end of June with a 8-game lead, thus setting the stage for one the early letdowns experienced by Red Sox fans.

The Sox stormed back, and needed to win one of two final games in Yankee Stadium to clinch their first pennant since 1918. They lost both, and then lost a one-game playoff the next afternoon. After that, the Red Sox faded into mediocrity until The Impossible Dream year of 1967 changed the franchise's fortunes for good.

Paul saw Ted Williams -- the Splendid Splinter -- and Professor Dom DiMaggio on many afternoons and, for good measure, also went to Braves Field where he watched Warren Spahn hurl for Boston's National League franchise, and once saw Satchel Paige pitch for the Cleveland Indians.

(The Ted Williams swing was a thing of surpassing elegance and beauty.)

For better or worse, Paul passed the family legacy onto his children. In 1961, the same year that Joe Goode passed away, I went to my first game at Fenway park at age 6. A talented rookie left fielder named Carl Yastrzemski stood guard over the Green Monster, but the team had little else of note.

Nonetheless, I loved Red Sox. My parents would often have to fetch me from Sullivan's grocery store, where I stopped while walking home from school to listen to Curt Gowdy and Ned Martin call afternoon games on the radio. (Parents thought nothing of letting first-graders walk to and from school in those days.) At home, I perched on a kitchen stool and listened to summer games on the AM radio atop our refrigerator.

Ensconced in South Texas, I experienced the heady days of the Sox winning the greatest pennant race ever in 1967 with the happy naivete of youth. Losing the World Series in seven games wasn't so bad because, geez, that Bob Gibson was good. (Ever the Red Sox realist, Dad didn't think they could get past Gibson.) Next came the transcendent peaks Luis Tiant's corkscrew delivery, Dwight Evans' catch, and Carlton Fisk's home run, all of which nearly toppled the mighty Cincinnati Reds in 1975. In the end, these only served as heights from which to be cast after the horrors of 1978, 1986 and 2003. (The less said, the better.)

(The Evans catch and the Fisk homer. Watch Pudge gallop around the bags!)

My father called me after the '78 debacle, asked how much more we could take, then added philosophically that he had been taking it since 1938 and that he guessed he could handle a little more. Little did he know. Mercifully, he was in Italy for Grady Little's meltdown in 2003, and actually defended Little to the incredulous children and grandchildren who had not fled the country.

In 2004, confident Red Sox fans watch in dismay and disbelief as the hated Yankees leapt out to an impregnable three-games-to-none lead in the American League Championship Series. But the Sox did the impossible: Summoning the spirit of 1967, they won three close games to tie the series, then pummeled the Yankees 10-3 in Game 7 to become the only major league baseball team to win a series after being down 3-0.

Slumping center fielder Johnny Damon, sitting on a pitch if anyone ever was, put the seventh game out reach early with a third inning grand slam. Red Sox fans exulted, and the Sox went on to win their first World Series since 1918, when Joe Goode was 24 years old. One of my sons called me from school in London, where he had recruited a number of European Red Sox fans; the other cheered with me -- half in disbelief -- here at home.

(Damon's grand slam.)

A year later, in a move emblematic of the modern game, Johnny Damon signed a long-term contract with the Yankees even though he once said that he'd never play for them. Sox fans reacted angrily; a popular t-shirt said in reference to the hirsute, rag-armed Damon:

Looks like Jesus.
Throws like Mary.
Acts like Judas.

Now a Detroit Tiger, Damon returned to Boston yesterday amidst a debate as to whether he should be booed or cheered now that he's out of a Yankees uniform.

Me, I think of Joe Goode talking to an A's player about Pete Alexander almost a hundred years ago. I think about my father watching the Splendid Splinter in his salad days, when the team was never quite good enough. I think about him taking me to Fenway Park in 1961, and about celebrating my boys' high school graduation by taking them to Fenway for a Yankees series. I think about the fans in the Boston bar pulling together for one night whatever else their differences outside the bar. I think of the kind of joy that came only after 86 seasons of heartbreak. Only one player hit a grand slam to win the biggest game in franchise history, and I'm not going to let money keep me from cheering him.