How I Became a Red Sox Fan for All the Wrong Reasons
By Joe Broadmeadow
I did not arrive at Red Sox fandom through the front door. I came in through the bulkhead, after dark, carrying a duffel bag and a shredded conscience.
For years, I was a Yankee fan. I owned a Paul O’Neill jersey I wore unironically, then ironically, then unironically again. I once explained to a woman on a first date why the designated hitter was a moral good. There was no second date, but there was a principle.
That man is gone. In his place stands someone who says “wicked” without a hint of shame and refers to a nine-figure payroll operation as a scrappy little ballclub. What follows is a full accounting of how it happened. None of the reasons are good. Not one of them has anything to do with baseball.
Reason One: Real Estate
I live in New England, which is a sentence that should carry a warning label. Nobody tells you that a mortgage in this region comes with a loyalty clause buried in the paperwork, somewhere between the flood certification and the termite inspection.
Once, a new neighbor came over with a plate of something and a question phrased as small talk. “So. You follow the Sox?” I have been interrogated by professionals. This was better. There was no good answer, only a range of sentences, and I took the plea.
Reason Two: My Aunt’s Freezer
She is a woman who holds grudges the way other people hold savings bonds, patiently, for decades, and with an eye toward eventual payout. She also makes the finest stuffed quahogs on the Eastern Seaboard and keeps roughly two hundred of them in a chest freezer in her cellar, distributed according to a system of merit that only she understands.
For two years, I got the ones from the back. Then, at a cookout, I heard myself say that Bucky Dent’s home run was a fluke off a tired arm. Something shifted in the yard. The conversation stopped. She looked at me the way a parole board looks at a man who has finally said the right thing, and that Christmas I got a tray from the front of the freezer. I have not gone back to the back since. I am not proud. I am, however, extremely well fed.
Reason Three: I Got Tired of Being the Villain
Here is the part nobody warns you about. Yankee fandom is a lifetime appointment as the guy everyone else in the room is rooting against. You walk into a bar in Providence, and the temperature drops four degrees. You take your kid to a Little League game, and other parents form a small, quiet perimeter.
New Englanders chant “Yankees suck” at hockey games. At soccer games. At a wedding I attended in Fall River, during the toast. I once heard it at a wake, admittedly under the breath, but I heard it.
After enough years, a man tires of carrying the weight of an empire he did not build and receives no revenue from it. Switching sides was not a conversion. It was witness protection.
Reason Four: Suffering Is a Better Look
This is the ugliest reason, so I will be direct about it. Winning has become unfashionable. Nobody wants to hear about your twenty-seven championships. It is like bringing your tax return to a dinner party.
Suffering, on the other hand, plays beautifully. It suggests depth. Character. A soul weathered by decades of near-misses and cruel Octobers. Of people like me saying, “There’s always next year.”
I wanted that. I wanted to be a man with a haunted past, and Red Sox fandom offered one off the rack, in my size, no questions asked.
The fraud, of course, is that the suffering ended in 2004. Since then, the franchise has won four titles, which is four more than most of the league and precisely four more than a person is entitled to while claiming underdog status. But the aesthetic survives.
New Englanders have kept the grief the way people keep a wood stove after the house gets central heat, not because it is needed, but because it looks good and the neighbors expect it.
Reason Five: I Studied for the Exam
You cannot simply announce this. There is a test.
I made flashcards. I am seventy years old, and I made flashcards. Front: 1986. Back: the ball, the legs, the ground crew tarp of the American soul. Front: 1978. Back: a light-hitting shortstop and a wind that has never been forgiven. Front: 1919. Back: a theater producer, a bad musical, and a century of penance.
I learned to say Yaz like I had said it my whole life. I learned that the Pesky Pole is not a person, and then, humiliatingly, that it partly is. I learned to stand for “Sweet Caroline” in the eighth with an expression of shared civic feeling rather than the expression of a man wondering how this happened.
I did not learn any of it because I cared; I learned it because I had been asked a follow-up question at a barbecue and had frozen. I resolved never to freeze again.
Reason Six: The Merchandise Was on Sale
A liquidation rack at a strip mall. Four shirts for thirty dollars. I want to say I agonized. I did not agonize. I checked the sizes.
The Relapse
Last September, my grandson went into my closet and came down holding a Jeter jersey, number 2, still in the dry-cleaner bag like a body they had not gotten around to processing.
He held it up. He did not say anything. He is five and doesn’t really care about baseball much, but he knows his father does.
“Costume,” I said. “Halloween.”
He nodded slowly, the way you nod at a story you will think about later, and put it back.
So that is where I am. A man with no team, only an address. I stand and sing at the eighth. I say we when the standings go up. I have been welcomed into a community I have not earned, on the strength of grievances I inherited from my father and his father.
They will never fully trust me, and they are right not to. The pinstripes are still in the attic, in the bag, waiting like everything else in New England that refuses to stay buried.
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Author’s note: I enjoy writing fiction; there is no limit to the imagination. You can create worlds and situations that will never, ever happen in real life.
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