Word: sox
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...National League championship last week consisted of six games decided by a total of seven runs, the last two games comprising 26 innings of struggle more nearly reminiscent of rugby union than of sunlit summer afternoons at the ball park. In the American League, the Boston Red Sox's lightning comeback against the Cleveland Indians in the first round was more histrionic than their testy five-game loss to the hated Yankees, but not remotely as dramatic. No script in baseball comes close to the 80 years of back story that informs all Yankee-Red Sox encounters...
...course, the Red Sox lost. But not because of the Curse of the Bambino--the infamous mojo said to hover over Fenway Park ever since Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1919--or because of a pall of New England Puritan guilt, or decades of nerves frayed into vermicelli by the exploits of Bucky Dent or Bill Buckner. The Sox lost because two mighty players--Pedro Martinez, the best pitcher in baseball, and Nomar Garciaparra, the finest shortstop whose first name happens to be his father's name spelled backward, at least until there's a better shortstop...
...matchups that would have made the best stories didn't eventuate. Mets-Red Sox would have been a replay of the Buckner series of '86; and Yankees-Mets, presumably, the mythic second coming of the famed Subway Series that marked the 1950s--mythic because, these days, people who ride subways don't often get tickets to Series games in New York City. After the corporate box-seat ticket holders and other big shooters are taken care of, it would only be accurate to call a Yankees-Mets engagement a Lincoln Town Car Series...
...wonderful it was to be in Boston this past week, as the city of Boston experienced a similar connection with its beloved Red Sox...
...North End, we witnessed three different exclamations of joy. Two cars drove by, honking at anyone and everyone in sight and yelling about Boston's victory over New York, and one group of four guys just walked down the street with signs proclaiming the greatness of the Sox...