Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Boston’s Masquerade

I like to analyze crowd behavior. Every big league city has its own style, and their fans have their own characters.

Today, the Red Sox spent almost the entire game behind, and the Boston fans passed the time sitting silent and crestfallen. Their faces had that breathless, 2,000 yard stare quality of the patient in shock. They looked like livestock waiting to be pole-axed. Immediately after the eighth inning, three-run home run, with the score now 8 to 1 against them, most of them simply turned their backs on their team, and their pride, on national television, and walked out.

Those who remain are quietly booing their own players who happen to be having a bad series. It happens, people. The same superstars who got you to the American League Championship are trying just as hard now as they did in July and August. They have not given up. It’s just not happening for them today. Maybe it’s the cold weather, but the Tampa Bay Devil Rays don’t seem to be suffering the effects of the cold so that’s probably not it. Who knows? Maybe they just saw in your eyes that you did not deserve them, and they stopped caring about pleasing you.

The Red Sox are still a team of great professionalism and accomplishment, the present shitty performance notwithstanding. Boston, we may be forgiven to notice, is still a college town, with some history, masquerading as a city.

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