A Hidden Red Sox Tradition: Of Books and Boston, Baseball and Bazemores

My father has told me more than once the story of how he became a Detroit Tigers fan.  When he was eight or so, which would make this about 1957, his father asked him and his brother a momentous question: what is your favorite baseball team? Now my father had an answer at the ready. This boy bore an important legacy, that of the middle name his father passed on to him and, naturally, he loved his father. He listened to baseball games with Grandpa Roy (no, we aren’t the Hobbeses), and knew with the knowledge that he breathed that his father’s favorite team was the Boston Red Sox and that, as naturally as he loved his father, that they were his team, too.

However, my father was the second son in his family. His brother David had entered the world two years before him, and it fell to David to answer the question first. I have never known Uncle David well enough to gauge his passion for sports, though from what little I can recollect across the decades since I last saw him sports seemed far from his mind. I can’t assess hislove of baseball, so I can’t say whether he chose the Red Sox out of love of the team, love of baseball, or a desire to please his father. Whatever the case, he chose the Red Sox.

This left my father in something of a pinch for he, certainly, loved the Red Sox and he, certainly, wanted to please his father. But, as yet offstage, was another figure in this drama. My grandmother, who loved the Detroit Tigers as much as her husband loved the Boston Red Sox, was waiting for the answers, too. Torn between the options of further pleasing his father and leaving his mother bereft of allies, my father chose the Tigers.

And as far as I could tell, well into adulthood, my father was a Tigers fan. He was thrilled when they won the World Series in 1984. He watched them on T.V. whenever he could, a much dicier proposition in the days before 24-hour sports coverage. Inasmuch as he wore sports logos, Detroit is the only one I remember seeing when I was young. Sure, he flirted with the Atlanta Braves in the ‘90s—but who didn’t, what with their entire season being broadcast nationwide on the Turner Broadcast System, and fielding some damn fine teams in that stretch of five appearances in the Fall Classic across the decade? His baseball heart, always, was Detroit’s and Detroit’s alone.

Or so I thought.

Now, as I said, I never knew that the Red Sox were his first baseball love. I did, however, have some sense that my grandfather had been a fan. Nobody seems to know why the poor son of a poor tobacco farmer born in North Carolina in the first decade of the Twentieth Century was such a Boston partisan. Grandpa Roy died two years before I was born, when my father was nineteen. Still, sometime between 1909 and that day in 1957 or so, Roy had come to love the Red Sox and detest the “hated Yankees” with all the passion of the New England-born.

I like to imagine young Roy on the tobacco farm where he was raised, and from which he would flee in the 1930s, listening to games on the radio with his father. In my romantic imagination he listens, nine years old, when Babe Ruth pitched two games in the 1918 World Series and Boston defeated the Chicago Cubs four games to two, the last time the Sox would win the Series for eighty-six years (the Cubs, of course, wouldn’t win one for almost a century). 

Romantic twaddle. Major League baseball wasn’t first broadcast on radio until 1921, and didn’t become an important means of enjoying the game until well into the 30s. By the 60s it would be supplanted by television coverage even though in my opinion, if you can’t be at the game, radio is the best way to experience baseball.

When I pressed my father recently for insight into his father’s fandom, he said only that his father hated the Yankees and loved DiMaggio.  Dominic, of course, who played for the Red Sox from 1940 to 1953, and was the subject of the famous cheer, “Who is better than his brother Joe? Dominic DiMaggio!” This dates an important part of my father’s fandom to the period of Sox teams with the quartet of DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams, the time of careers shortened by the call to service in wartime, of titanic struggles with the Yankees, and of near World Series misses. By then, though, Roy had moved to Detroit, where he would meet my grandmother and work in a gas station where he would meet one of the actors (no one seems sure which one) who played the Lone Ranger on the WXYZ radio show, and where my father and Uncle David were born.

            

If he became a fan in the 40s, but lived in Detroit, again we must ask how? Again, though, we must resign ourselves to not knowing. Say only that baseball is a mysterious beast that does with those who love it what it wills according to its own ineffable purpose.

I, by the way, was by no means a born fan of either baseball or the Red Sox. When I was young, if I sat down to watch a few innings with my father, it was not out of genuine interest, but to spend time with him, and out of the desire to please my father which seems to run in the family like some ersatz allele. My patience, though, had its limits and baseball was B-O-R-I-N-G.  Inasmuch as I cheered for a team it was for my father’s beloved Tigers. When my grandmother returned from one of her pilgrimages—they were literally pilgrimages, as sacred as if she had walked to Santiago de Compostella, or to a sage on a mountaintop—to the fabled realm of Detroit with a baseball “signed” by the World Series team, I was suitably impressed, until it quickly found its way into one junk drawer or another and vanished, so far as I know, from this universe.

I came to baseball as I came to everything in my life: through books. In 1985 I became a fan of the ABC-TV series Spenser: for Hire, and very soon after began devouring the novels by Robert B. Parker. Spenser was everything a certain type of teenage boy wanted to be: he was tough, smart, funny, dangerous, and good with the ladies. And he loved baseball. Parker’s third novel, Mortal Stakes, which centered around a conspiracy to force a Red Sox pitcher to throw games (and one of the bad guys was named Doerr…how am I only now realizing this?), brought this home, while simultaneously demonstrating that sport can be more than just a game. A professor of English, Parker was then in the habit of including in each book an epigram, a snippet of poetry, that linked to the story. This time, he quoted Robert Frost:

“Only when love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done,

For heaven and the future’s sakes.”

Something in these lines spoke to me, speaks to me still, though I have never been a particular Frost fan.

Many years later I would impress my then-future wife, unbeknownst to me also a fan of this particular poem, with my recall of these lines. By that point it was more than just a snippet; Parker also made a better poetry reader of me. Our daughter, who will appear later, is an important reason I write this now.

In 1989, I saw the movie Field of Dreams, quite by accident, having gone to the second-run theater in Newport News, Virginia—where Roy lived from about 1951 until his death in 1969 and where my parents, who met there in around 1960, still live—to see some other movie that had apparently moved on. This moving, mystical story of baseball’s ability to bridge space and time, connecting fathers and sons across generations, led me to the work of W.P. Kinsella, and his worlds where baseball fields extend to infinity, where the dead can play again, where the winning of a pennant, by the Cubs naturally, can signal Armageddon, and where determined fans can, one square foot at a time, replace the Astroturf in the Kansas City Royals’ stadium with real sod during the strike-shortened season of 1981. There was heartbreak, too. How can there not in a game where the best fail two-thirds of the time, hoping with each swing to, as the title of Mark Kingwell’s recent book on why baseball matters exhorts us, borrowing from the playwright Samuel Beckett, fail better?  Try to read the story of love and loss with the improbably title “K-mart” in Kinsella’s collection Go the Distance without shedding at least one tear in the protagonists’ triumphant final inning together.

I recognized in myself a nascent fandom, springing from the works of Parker and Kinsella.

Flash forward now to 2013, the last time the Red Sox won the World Series. It’s October 30^th. Eight days earlier, I had celebrated my 42^nd birthday. Ten days before that, my only child was born, a beautiful little girl named Gabriella. She is nestled against me, unable to sleep, both of us bathed in the soft glow of the television as the Sox finish off the St. Louis Cardinals 6-1 to clinch their third championship (third!) in less than ten years. Tears flow as we share this moment that she will never remember and I will never forget.

In 1990 I read David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49. There, in the stories of mythic struggle between Ted Williams’ Red Sox and that other DiMaggio’s (the one Dominic was better than, according to the Red Sox faithful) New York Yankees, my fandom blossomed. Something about the character of those Beantown squads, especially the core of DiMaggio, Doerr, Pesky, and Williams, whom Halberstam would revisit late in their lives between the covers of The Teammates, appealed to me. Sure, Joltin’ Joe was amazing, godlike as he hit safely in 56 consecutive games, a feat the biologist and Yankee fan Stephen Jay Gould once referred to as the only bona-fide miracle in sports, but was The Splendid Splinter’s .406 season in 1941 any less majestic? Neither has been duplicated. It was the humanity of those players that drew me in, that made me a Red Sox fan for life. 

I can’t remember my father’s reaction, if indeed there was one, as I began openly supporting the Sox, occasionally wearing a hat, or watching a game. I was in college anyway, and even though I was a commuter student, our schedules diverged greatly.

It was probably in about 2003, the year my grandmother died and the year of heartbreak in the American League Championship Series, that my father spilled the beans. He told me the story of making a choice and how, despite about half a century of rooting for the Tigers and a short fling with the Braves, deep down he had always loved the Red Sox. They were his father’s team, after all, and though they had had their differences towards the end, the abiding love and respect my father had for his father spilled out in every word.

How is this possible? It was as if I had come to my fandom not through the slow accumulation of knowledge and burgeoning affection, but through genetic inheritance. This would make sense were we from New England, or New York, or Dallas, or from dozens of other places; love of team would be the air that we breathed. However my grandfather, raised in Bertie County, North Carolina, came to it, he instilled it, at best, inadvertently in my father. I came to it barely, if at all, aware of my grandfather’s interest and, devoid of any personal connection with the figure that now looms so large in this personal story, and knowing nothing of my father’s crypto-fandom nurtured in the secret chambers of his heart.

Did I mention that baseball is a mysterious beast that does with those who love it what it wills according to its own ineffable purpose?

And now, as the Red Sox contend for another shot at another World Series crown, I wonder if my daughter will inherit it, or if it stops here along with the middle name Roy, my father Michael, and I, share. Perhaps her mother, stalwart San Francisco Giants fan, has other plans. But at this moment, in these moments, I feel connected across the years, through the love of a game, however it came to me, and of a team. It makes no sense at all, but it’s true, and that’s all there is to it.