Breaking Camp and Heading North

Last night I told my older son, who's seven, that Monday is Opening Day. Then I had to clarify that it's Opening Day for Major League Baseball so that he wouldn't confuse it with opening day for his own baseball season, farm league, which is still a few weeks away. Which is fine, since basketball season ended just last week.

I haven't yet told my four-year-old, which is just as well considering that he's now obsessed with hockey. It's my fault, since I brought him to a coupld of late-season UMass-Amherst hockey games and he got hooked. I figure if I don't teach him how to skate, I can avoid the need to get up at ungodly hours to shuttle him over to the arena for some ice time or weekend-long road trips for tournaments and what not.

But that's a story for another day. We're here now to talk about the Red Sox.

I asked Sam, my older son, who he was going to root for this year. It was kind of like my last check before I plunge ahead with this project. Plus, I wanted to make sure that he was still a candidate for Red Sox Nation. Sure enough, he told me that he was going to root for the Olde Towne Team this year.

Then I did one final check: "Would it be good if I rooted for the Red Sox this year, too?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, nodding so vigorously that I could feel the breeze from the bill of the Red Sox cap he was wearing.

So that's it: I'm in. Come Monday, it will be no more dipping my toes in the wather and theorizing about what this whole thing will be like. Monday is Opening Day and I'll be watching the Sox as they take on Kansas City. And, gulp, I'll be rooting for the Sox.

To prepare for this, I've been listening to a lot of local sports talk radio. Now, I feel compelled to mention that my intent here is not to become a FINO--fan in name only--and use the pretense of rooting for the Sox as a way to show how dysfunctional Sox fans are. My goal is to have a bonding experience with my sons and to test the bounds of fandom, to boldly go where no Yankee fan has gone before, so to speak. I mean recovering Yankee fan, to be exact. That said, I am not far enough along in the program yet to completely avoid lapses into an anti-Red Sox mindset. So, take this for what it's worth. But apparently, based on what I've been hearing on the Radio, Dice-K is the best pitcher ever, but he hasn't pitched in the Major Leagues so we can't count on him. Papelbon is back in the bullpen, and he's probably the best closer in the league (can you hear me coughing at that one?) but he's coming off an injury and could be trouble. Francona is one of the best managers in the league, but if the team doesn't make the playoffs, he should be fired. And spending money like drunken sailors or George Steinbrenner is still wrong, but spending slightly less than the Yankees is good business.

Oh, and we still have to obsess about the Yankees.

In other words, Spring Training has been all about flights of fancy and optimism that are in severe danger of turning to pessimism come play ball time.

But of course, first there's Opening Day, when everyone's hope springs eternal...

Game on.

This Is Hard

This is hard. Not building-a-deck or renovating-a- bathroom or rocket-science or listening-to-an-Amway-salesman hard, but hard nonetheless. I sit here in the early—and very, very unseasonably cold—days of March and read about Spring Training and the other baseballs goings on, the speculation about rookies and prospects and the ever-widening steroid scandal; and I have to remind myself not to root against the Red Sox and not to automatically feel a swell of pride when I read about something positive happening at Yankees camp. In some ways, I feel like I'm on a diet, but instead of having first to become conscious of and then second to begin to change, my eating habits, I have to become conscious of and then begin to change my cheering habits. So far, I'm getting pretty good at recognizing when I react to something, like the news that Daisuke Matsuzaka's first two outings in Spring Training have been tremendous. Normally, this would elicit an internal groan on my part, but I'm recognizing that reaction and doing what I can to at least quarantine it so that it doesn't poison the rest of my soul.

See, that's the hard part. And two things make it harder. The first is the fact that I can't explain this to Sam, how this whole fan-thing works and how I'm sacrificing something special to me for him. The second is the fact that fandom, or maybe fandemonium, is a difficult thing to get away from in this society. I'll give you one example that illustrates that: two weeks ago I was in Indiana on business. I had to visit a small, evangelical Christian school and help them deploy a new intranet. On the first day of my visit, I had lunch with the school's Chief Information Officer. He told me how he first became interested in this particular school when his children began to go to school there (this school is 200 miles from where he and his children lived at the time.) He said he liked the school's campus, the school's piety, and the school's athletic facilities. His mention of the athletic facilities turned the conversation predictably to sports and we spend the rest of the lunch break talking about big-time, Division I football. It turns out that the CIO at this school is an Ohio State University alumnus. Oh, I'm sorry: THE Ohio State University.

Granted, that story may do more to show the biases inherent in my thinking than anything else, but to me it demonstrates how pervasive sports are in our culture. They've become so pervasive that they've entered the realm previously occupied by the weather in that it's the only thing that everyone has in common.

So, like the dieter trying to pick the healthy path through the holiday party buffet table, I find myself taking baby steps towards fully embracing Red Sox fandom. For me, this seems like it's the only way this whole thing is going to work. But I ask you to be patient with me and take pity on me when necessary, because I'm new to all of this stuff and I have a lot of emotional baggage to deal with.