Sweet and Sour

The thing I most worried about when the Red Sox waltzed over the Cardinals in four straight to win the World Series last year, were the grapes.
Not those fancy, imported grapes they use to make the expensive champagne they pour all over each other in the clubhouse on such occasions. No, the cheap, uncultivated, tough-skinned red variety that had been ripening in the basement of our psyches for the past 86 years.
You know, the ‘Sour Grapes’.
Red Sox fans have, over the 86 years we were marooned on Loser Island, developed a remarkably sensitive palate when it comes to the taste of sour grapes: a talent that has allowed us to take a ridiculous amount of satisfaction from the misfortune of our enemies, long after the Sox were ‘out of it’.
That is no mean feat, and it has meant, in practical terms, sold out games, year after year, whatever the last season’s team’s record.
Has there ever been a more successful group of losers than the Boston Red Sox from 1919 to 2003?
Fenway Park too –in the blurred vision of a populace drunk on the wine of failure, has been transformed from a rusting relic with seats too small for the average 21st Century cheeks, to something regarded the way travelers view the Roman Coliseum.
Tourists (most likely disguised fans from the far reaches of New England who can’t afford tickets to a real game) actually pay to take guided walks through Fenway during the off-season.
If Rome had fallen short as many times as the Red Sox have over the last 87 years, their coliseum would have been reduced to a pile of sand. But Fenway Park, even before last year’s uncharacteristic string of successes, has been treated like a 300 year old Plymouth saltbox: reinvigorated with new technology, without tampering with its ‘historical’ design.
You know that if it is ever decided to build a new stadium, Fenway won’t be torn down: rather it will be disassembled and moved piece by piece –like London Bridge, to some tourist-starved city in the desert, or to a massive amusement park.
And all of this because Bostonians have been unwilling or unable to admit defeat, again and again and again, and again.
But now what, I wondered, before the fans had even left the field in St. Louis last October? Would this happy state of befuddlement, this appreciation for the fine taste of failure fade away as October turned to November, and November to a holiday season awash in World Series trinkets?
Nah!
Never fear: it will take a hundred more gentle springs, sultry summers, and bountiful Octobers to red-direct the gnarled and twisted trunk of our Red Sox tree. Last year was just an aberration, a lovely, giddy aberration; the exception that proves the rule.
I came to this conclusion only recently though, weeks after what some are still arguing was a successful season.
I had noted that the usual angst that descends at the conclusion of the baseball season did not seem to be present this year.
I had taken some satisfaction in the elimination of the Yankees from the playoffs, but not nearly as much as I had in the past.
In the past in fact, after the Red Sox had been eliminated, I often found it too painful to watch the playoffs. But there I was watching, with relative disinterest, the Houston Astros on the verge of going to their first-ever World Series.
“It looks like the Astros are going to their first World Series,” I remarked blandly to my wife.
If I had really cared, I might have noticed that the Astros might also be on the verge of something else, something especially familiar to Red Sox fans.
In a luxury box behind home plate, the cameras panned to former Astro great Nolan Ryan watching the game attentively.
In the bullpen in the outfield Astro relievers were jumping about, unable to contain themselves.
In the clubhouse Astro personnel were busy preparing the champagne, placing plastic wrap over the lockers to protect them from the bubbly, setting up the platform where the trophy presentation would take place.
There were none on, two out, and two strikes on the Cardinal’s David Eckstein.
If the Cardinals lost demolition teams were set to begin to level old Bush Stadium in St. Louis.
Then the Astros World Series hopes broke open like a Piñata, and their guts spilled all over the field.
When Cardinal’s slugger Albert Pujols three-run shot finally came to rest on beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, Mary and I looked at each other.
“Sweet”, we both said, in unison.
But what we really meant was ‘sour’.
The sweet taste of sour.
There’s nothing like it.