The Red Sox Fan Finally get some real get back

The Red Sox Fans Finally gets some real get back

I was born in DC and spent half of my childhood summers on the streets of East Elmhurst and Corona, New York.
The same streets where Malcolm X’s house was bombed, where Louis Armstrong lived. I’ve got fond memories of Queens, which always seem to linger. My first baseball game was watching the Washington Senators, because Paul Casanova was the catcher and he ate over my great aunt’s home in Mt Pleasant in DC. Then I got to see the Mets, those amazing Mets with Cleon Jones, and Ron Swaboda and Tom Seaver in Flushing Meadows in Queens. Between playing marbles and handball and stickball and fighting off DC hoods in DC, baseball was a religion when you grew up afro-Cuban. La Pelote, the hard ball as you say in Spanglish, you followed it like a river. It was natural to understand the game and its tendencies.

I fell in love with the Yankees. The Yankees, when Mickey Mantle’s career was dieing out, no longer the great home run hitter, but a man fighting alcoholism. The great Thurman Munson, Horace Clark, Willie Randolph, I remember just being mesmerized by Mel Stotlemeyer, the lanky Yankee pitcher in the rotation. These Yankees were not the great winning Yankees of tradition, but a gritty bunch that waged battle to represent the pinstripes in style and grace. Great Yankee teams followed, but always the Yankees mastered the Red Sox. The Red Sox were hated by New Yorkers and Black Bostonians from their treatment of Boston Black baseball players. Boston had a poor reputation as a racial hostile town that treated the Black athlete poorly. Boston was the last of a string of Eastern seaboard towns with blue collar origins and hard core politics and mob ties. When the Yankees beat Red Sox, it was a whole lot of crap going down. It was factions of Irish, Italian, and old ethnic machismo and pride rolled up into a baseball game. The Yankees were hated by everybody. Their wasn’t an American League team that didn’t dislike the Yankees lore. And if you know anything about New York, the most hated fan was the Yankee fan right within the boundaries of the five Burroughs. The Dodgers, the Giants had their own fans and New Yorkers were diced and sliced by their distinctive dialects of the five Burroughs and which team did you follow. Yankees fans were corporate, they had money, Yankee stadium itself was located in a tough neighborhood where you could get your feelings hurt. Brooklyn and the Giants at the Polo grounds as told to me by my uncle, was more personal, more like home, it was a family affair. The Yankees were the big, bad boogiemen who would rip your heart out. With Reggie, and Craig Nettles, and all the muscle and power that comes with Yankee money and Yankee pride.

The Red Sox finally had the lights on. It’s been a full century of disaster and misery for the Red Sox. Now they achieved some true redemption for all these years of futility. They will probably sweep the cardinals and Boston will riot. I kind of feel for Boston, I think about big Jim Rice, Yaz, Carlton Fisk and all those great Boston green Wall machine teams. Finally they beat down the Yankees, in Yankee fashion. They performed the unimaginable, with pitchers ankles soaked in blood, getting out in front of the Yankees after being brutally pummeled in the third game of that series. Baseball is a strange mathematical game, a game of inches and decisions by committee. For over a century an organization, lined up men, held them to high standards, told them about guys named, DiMaggio, Mantle, Ruth, Ford, Berra, Jackson, Munson and many others and told them put on this uniform and good things happen. The only thing is they forget to tell them about a strange team, in a city only fours hours north and east, a place as magical and mystical with its own quirks and traditions. A place that has never experienced the thrill of baseball supremacy but once. Every once in while we know a greater power really does rule. Ask the Red Sox.