This is how this whole contrived “sellout streak” was always going to end. Not with a bang, but with a coddled general columnist’s whimper.
You know the Red Sox have lost their touch when guys like Boston Globe
columnist Brian McGrory and his elitist friends don’t want to bother making the trek to watch the second through seventh innings of Opening Day from box seats at Fenway Park.
My reason for not going? I’m getting an oil change. Or sorting my sock drawer. It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to sit in the wind-whipped confines of Fenway Park watching a collection of pampered prima donnas courtesy of owners who seem to have lost interest in the game.
Maybe I’m a fair-weather fan, but that fair weather has lasted about half a century. It began with Lonborg, Petrocelli, and Andrews, escalated with Lynn, Rice, and Fisk, and easily survived the World Series drought that ran through the 1990s and a few years on either end.
First off, the fact that the same guy who doesn’t change his own oil is also afraid of a harmless spring breeze in the Back Bay Fens should surprise nobody. Secondly, it’s telling when a “fan” attempts to explain how diehard he is by listing players he enjoyed watching who played on two World Series teams. Those teams, by the way, played four and five decades ago, respectively.
McGrory goes on:
This isn’t about wins and losses. The real problem is there’s no narrative, no story, and beyond the trio of Pedroia, Ellsbury, and Ortiz, precious little charm.
Give us fun misfits; give us nervous rookies. But instead, we’ve got a bunch of sharp edges crunched together in the absurd hope of creating something whole.
The point is easily conceded: the 2012 Boston Red Sox aren’t the 1967 or 1975 Boston Red Sox. Holy shit!
Now that those inconvenient truths are out of the way, the club’s phony “sellout streak” can officially come to an end. All the “diehard” fans who have a problem with that can jog on to their racquet clubs and tee times. Better late than never.
Meanwhile, perhaps the millions of other Red Sox fans who were also paying attention all those other years between media-darling success stories can order themselves a beer without some waiter carrying McGrory’s white zinfandel getting in the way.
After all, any real Sox fan paying attention during the last decade knows that the “pampered prima donnas” in the stands have become a much bigger problem than the ones out on the field.
Fenway Pastoral 