What This Means For Us: Boston Red Sox

It's a long road to the World Series, and perhaps only the diehards truly understand how far their team had to come. We've asked two writers who lust for their favorite teams to describe what it means to be here, in the World Series. Now: The Boston Red Sox. Your author is Lockhart Steele.

Lockhart Steele is the founder of Curbed.com, the neighborhood blog network. On the first day of the World Series in 2004, he got a job offer to come work for a different blog company, a job offer that he'd accept — and one where six months later, he'd make a job offer to this writer he sort-of knew to come start a sports blog that would be called Deadspin. That worked out okay.

(Oh, and the painting is by presidential candidate Jim Cooke.)

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If the conventional wisdom about Sox fans just wanting to be like all other fans is true — which, more or less, it is — then the real value of the Red Sox victory in the 2004 World Series is that it allows Sox fans to approach each new team, in each new season, with only the burden of that particular season upon it.

This is, of course, the way anyone who loves baseball has always experienced the sport — the irrational hope of the spring; the ups-and-downs of the summer; the horserace of September, when all you can reasonably ask is that your team is still playing games that matter past Labor Day. And, despite larger karmic pressures from above, it's always been the way New England has charted its summer. For all the talk of Red Sox Nation, following the Red Sox from afar — as I've done from New York City for the past decade — is really about following summer in New England from afar, about finding yourself on a boat off Nantucket or a back porch in Maine when you're actually sitting at your desk in an office tower, listening to the game over computer headphones. Thirty years after he wrote it (at the close of another unfulfilled season at Fenway Park, naturally), has Giamatti's The Green Fields of the Mind ever felt more relevant?

Were Bart here today to watch this 2007 edition of the Sox, I think he'd be happy with what we've seen unfold. It's just an incredibly likable group of guys, that certain mix of veterans who've been with the team forever — or, in the case of Tim Wakefield, since before forever — and young talent from the farm system. It's thanks to this group that we're waking up on the first day of the World Series with a game to play tonight at Fenway.

There's something else that 2004 did to the Red Sox and its fans that I think matters to understanding the meaning of this year's team. It allowed those on the edges of fandom — I'm thinking here of my mom (hi, Mom!) — to dip their toes back into baseball, to discover the game anew.

As a mother growing up in a family of Red Sox-obsessed men, she was of course already passingly familiar with the game. She even made it to two postseason games at Fenway with us in 1986, the first time her strange powers of baseball prognostication came fully on display. Game 1 of the ALCS, we had a young Roger Clemens on the mound, he of the unreal 24-4 record that year. A lock, right? "I don't like Clemens at all," my mom stated, and the Sox went on to lose the game. (In this conclusion, she was about a decade ahead of the rest of us.) And then there was what we all had to endure a few weeks later. There's probably a great book in interviewing mothers of mid-1980's Boston-area teenagers about their memories of the night of Game 6; my mom's includes hiding in the kitchen while my father and I wailed.

In any case, it was understandable why her normal reaction to our Red Sox obsession after that was to flee the room. The outcome simply mattered too much.

Which explains my surprise last summer when my mom stepped onto a porch in Maine where I was watching a Sox game and inquired, "Is that Papelbon?" Seems she'd been watching some Sox games lately and really happened to like this rookie pitcher. Um, yeah. Me too, mom.

This summer, she had a new favorite player: Jacoby Ellsbury. His first major league at-bat came on June 30; three days later, he'd enshrine himself in New England lore by scoring from second on a wild pitch. (The photo of the play that ran in the Times edited his first name to Jacob, a mistake seemingly repeated during the lineup read by Kevin Millar on Sunday night. Jacoby, people; it's a great baseball name.) But soon Crisp was healthy again, and Ellsbury was back to the minors until his September 1 call-up. Okay, yes, there was one mid-August start in there, but none of this adequately explains how by Labor Day weekend my mom already loved this guy — a weekend when, by all appearances, she cheered his first major league home run as genuinely as the rest of us did.

The emergence of Ellsbury is at the core of what makes this edition of the Boston Red Sox so likable. From just the seventh inning on in Game 7 against the Indians, he stretched a ball deflected off Casey Blake's glove into a double, the cameras catching him floating between first well on his way to second before anyone even had time to react; made a running catch in center to snag Garko's fly to end the 8th — a grab nearly as impressive as Crisp's epic tumble an inning later; and then, to start the ninth, made a sliding catch in left on a sinking liner off Lofton's bat.

OK, so this year's Sox World Series roster only has six homegrown players on it. That's still four more than we had in 2004, and a big part of what has drawn people like, gulp, my mom into this team. It's a nifty little list, though: Lester, Pedroia, Papelbon, Youkilis, Delcarmen, Ellsbury. Show that to any Sox fan and see if they can suppress a smile.

So Red Sox Nation has swelled since 2004. Count me among those who don't care, and who welcome the pink hats to our bizarre obsession, with open arms and all flags flying. That so many people choose to care about a game that goes against every short-attention-span rule of this modern age is a good thing. That my mom has somehow discovered it as part of this new generation of Sox fans, too, makes it somehow even a bit more special for me.

There's a ballgame tonight at Fenway. Ellsbury's starting.