At Fenway Park, We’re Partying Like It’s 1977

I took my ever-loving wife to socially distanced Fenway Park, where we joined a crowd of approximately 4,000 fans who witnessed the Sox dismantle the Tampa Bay Rays.

Writers often compare Fenway Park to a cathedral, but it was so quiet today with so few fans that it really felt like you were at Notre Dame or Lourdes.

The experience took me back to the first time I went to Fenway Park, all the way back in 1977, when the world and I were young.

Back then, baseball games didn’t sell out.

There were probably about 12,000 people, and we watched the Red Sox give up eight runs in the top of the eighth inning and then score 8 runs in the bottom of the eighth.

So it was pretty quiet then, too.

But I was in love with the old barn.

The following year, Fenway was electric as they went on their ill-fated dash against the hated Yankees.

The Boston College football team moonlighted as security, and part of the fun was watching those louts in ill-fitting red blazers rushing to the scene of the latest fist fight among drunken fans.

The way they handled things: they just simply beat up everyone in sight.

Those were the days.

Back then, pitchers and batters didn’t take forty-seven years between pitches, in order to text their agents about their endorsement deals.

Pitchers threw, batters swung, and everybody had fun.

Today, the real virus affecting baseball isn’t COVID; it’s statistics.

Specifically, it’s the whole thing about launch angle, the idea that you should be constantly trying to hit a home run and avoid infielders and outfielders.

If you strike out these days, it’s not a cause for shame.

Which means that baseball has become as dull as everyone always said it was, except this time, they’re right.

Sports Illustrated recently did a piece decrying the disappearance of the rally, and they might as well play baseball games and libraries, since they barely have rallies anymore.

But the Red Sox put up crooked numbers, a three and then a six, in consecutive innings, giving the Fenway faithful our money’s worth of action.

And we got to sing Sweet Caroline.

Baseball is busy marginalizing itself, turning itself from the national pastime into a purveyor of statistics and hats about as relevant to America as soccer’s Premier League or the NHL.

Games take twice as long as they used to.

Sports talk radio callers talking about baseball invariably reference their age, which is seldom below sixty-seven.

But I don’t care.

I love baseball, I love the Red Sox, and I love Fenway Park.

The best thing about the game today, aside from the Red Sox winning and being with my ever-loving wife, was that my kids weren’t there.

This meant that I got to dance my you know what off, during the dance-off.

I lost, but who cares?

Don’t stop the party.

Baseball’s back.