I posted the following on another Internet site. The World Series came to town, for better or for worse. I've been to the World Series once, in 1996 when I went to Atlanta to watch the Yankees beat the Braves. A World Series game is like no other, with a certain electric buzz that no other game has. I decided to pay it a visit, and described it like this:
It's bad enough that my Yankees got knocked out of the postseason, by the loathed Red Sox no less, but for me it's even worse. For while ... most other Yankee fans can commiserate with their own, I. Live. In. Boston. Oh, the horror.In fact, not only do I live in Boston, but I live less than a mile away from Fenway. I live so close that this evening when the F-18s did the flyover during the pregame I could hear them out my window.
But I decided to make the best of it because, really, how often does one have the World Series down the street. So in the top of the first I left the house, and risking life, limb, and expulsion from school (I'm not kidding about that!!)* I walked over to Fenway.
The atmosphere was fall-like and festive. Half a mile away I could see the glow of the lights and even hear the roar of the crowd. As I got closer I saw the Prudential Building, with the office lights left on in such away they read, "Go Sox." I saw hundreds if not thousands of people walking around outside the Park, most of them holding up signs looking for tickets. (My favorite: "Semi-healthy liver 4 tickets.") Some just bought sausages from vendors on the street outside, others queued outside the bars on Landsdown, and still others sat hopefully on the curb below the Green Monster, hoping to catch a wayward homerun ball. I was able to walk right up to the building, touching its brick walls and green girders. I walked halfway around it, to Yawkey Way. Along the way I stood on my toes at one of the entrances, catching a sliver of a glimpse of the green, glowing field.
At first it was exciting, and I liked being there even though it was the wrong team. Baseball is baseball. It's the World Series. It's exciting. But soon I felt ready to leave. The police presence was unnerving, although a little more low key than I'd expected. But whereas during the playoffs on Monday there were all sorts of tvs and such on outside that people could mill around and watch, tonight they turned them away. It just sort of felt like the city was turning on its own, and I feel the fans deserve better than that.
And it was the wrong team. The empathetic excitement for my neighbors wore off pretty quickly. They're all being really annoying, and I dread how insufferable they'll be if they somehow manage to pull this out. So go Cards. Please!
* This was a reference to the tragedy that took place during the celebration after beating the Yankees to clinch the ALCS. Police treated revelers like rioters and killed a woman. Certain public officials make this out to be a crowd-behaving-badly problem. I think it's a civil liberties problem, because the mechanisms used for "crowd control," mechanisms no more appropriate for the protestors expected for the Democratic National Convention this summer, were inappropriate. The part about expulsion came from an email the BU dean of students sent out, threatening it if we got in trouble but also implying that simply going to the Fenway Area - on public thoroughfares - might earn us such a consequence. I resented that insinuation and so further resolved to go myself.
Posted on 10/28/04