It's Not Enough to Win

Sunday was the first day of practice for Sam's Farm League team. This marks a shift in a baseball experience that had been defined by balls on tees, a strict hour time limit, and no score keeping. While this year there still won't be any scores kept, Farm League is decidedly more intense than what Sam's done previously; after all, this was his first baseball practice, ever.

His coach began the practice by having everyone introduce himself and state who his favorite player is. That caused a bit of a stir, because more than one of the kids said that it was too hard to pick one favorite player. So, the coach relented and everyone felt better about being able to name their three favorite players.

Not surprisingly, most of the kids named the same players: Big Papi, Alex Rodgriguez, Daiske Matsuzaka, etc. When it came time for Sam to answer, he said Big Papi, Dice-K, and Jason Varitek, which was a bit of a surprise. Of course, it also happened to be the same favorite players as the kid who went before him. So, I asked him afterwards why he mentioned Varitek, and he explained that he's always like Jason Varitek, and that he also likes A-Rod and Johnny Damon, because Damon used to be a member of the Red Sox.

I thought Sam's inclusion of Damon on the list was really interesting, since most people in Red Sox Nation have seemed to turn their backs on Damon for precisely the same reason that Sam has decided to embrace him. And I have to admire that innocence. He likes the players he hears about, the players his friends talk about and he hears about on the radio and TV. While he enjoyed the fact that the Sox swept the Yankees in their first series of the season, he's just as happy when A-Rod does well. In other words, he's missing that essential element that defines most Red Sox and Yankees fans: schadenfreude . In other words, while it's good when your team wins, it's better is your team can beat its bitterest rival. It's even better when your team beats its rival while doing something that's remarkable, like hitting four home runs in a row. And better still is when your team can beat its rival while at the same time humiliating a key player, as when the Sox beat Mariano Rivera in the first game of the series.

So I realized over the course of this first Red Sox-Yankees series of the season that shadenfreude is another reason why this project of mine is so difficult. I've spent years not just rooting for the Yankees, but rooting against the Red Sox, as a team and as a group of individuals. While I can see coming around to the point where I can root for some of the Sox as individuals, like Dice-K for instance, I've realized that it will take me longer to actively root against individuals on the Yankees, the ones I've been rooting for for so long. I have to face the fact that a lot of my reactions are so deeply ingrained that they're simply automatic, like when A-Rod his his second home run in the series opener, the one where Coco Crisp went over the wall in his attempt to catch it, and I found myself shouting, "Go, Go!" to the ball.

How does it get to that point?