RED SOX (AND THE) NATION

When Hank Steinbrenner earlier this year doubted the existence of Red Sox nation, he was widely and perhaps justifiably ridiculed. Sure the existence of some virtual, unofficial community of sorry ass chowderheads can in fact be detected in the universe. But I think he was trying to say something else. I think he was trying to dispute the perception promulgated at ESPN aka Red Sox Network that the Sox had replaced the Yankees as America's team. In that I think he was both right and wrong. The Yankees had not been America's team before, in my view, and the Sox are not America's team now except in the minds of the Baseball Tonight crew who blithely dismiss the heartfelt and entirely correct charges of East coast bias hurled by baseball fans from Atlanta to Seattle. The truth is baseball is too regionalized, despite the existence of national networks, to sustain an" America's team." There are debates about who is the midwest's team (Cubs or Cardinals), California's team (LA or SF), and even Florida's team (the Marlins or the Rays, the latter having recently entered the specious America's team debate).

What the Sox have become, however, since the advent of John Henry's ownership, is an American team. Under the stewardship of the Yawkeys, the Sox remained at once an utterly provincial phenomenon, restricted to Boston, and a strangely international phenomenon, taking their ethos from the mother country of the great majority of the chowderheads, i.e. Ireland. As the great Irish literature of the modern period tells us, byt the end of the Victorian age, if not before, sanctified defeat had become the semi-official ideology of the Emerald Isle. There was seen to be something holy in failure and something correspondingly vulgar in success. The Irish saw their geo-political struggles as at once fated and improving, soemthin beyond their control but something that both contributed and testified to their moral superiority. Such was the attitude of the Red sox fan during the long drought from the sale of Ruth to, roughly, the acquisition of Ortiz. As the ever tiresome, Dan O'Shaughnessy would mander in that insufferable accent of his, The Red Sox were a team of dark destiny, condemned to lose in bizarre and painful ways. But far from accepting this fate as a mark of organizational, let alone cultural inferiority, Boston fans took it as the sign of their purity as supporters of their team and devotees of the game. Losing somehow made them holier than thou, particularly if the thou was a Yankee fan. I would submit that it was not the losing itself that produced this defence mechanism. I come from Philadelphia and our franchise is the losingest in history, and yet I have never heard anyone even suggest the possibility of some moral uplift in that sad state of affairs. No, it was the Irishness of Boston, its infusion with the historical outlook endemic to that land, that gave rise to the single greatest loser-superiority complex in the history of American sport.
But now it is all about winning in Boston, the effect of a certain organizational commitment, the series of near misses after the acquisition of Pedro and Manny and the ultimate breakthrough in 2004. Now when the chowderheads preen themselves on their collective superiority, they do so on the same grounds that Yankee fans always have: the winning quality of their team. The Boston Red Sox are not, Hank is right, America's team. But they are now, at long last, a properly American team. For if, as has been said, America is the one country built not on a bloodline but an idea, that idea is not freedom or equality but winning. The chowderheads have not just joined the party, they have joined the country.