The Red Sox won the World Series. Wahoo. I’m thrilled. I’m speechless. I am one of about 30,000 Red Sox fans who have ever seen their team win the World Series in person. My dad and I shoveled out a couple thousand bucks and flew 2,000 miles to see our beloved baseball team win the World Series. And it was great.
But.
There’s a but.
I don’t want to sound like a bitter old man, but thousands of Red Sox fans travelled thousands of miles for this game, and we got virtually no thanks from the players. Sure, the fans back in Boston, who flipped cars and brought out the riot police, get rewarded with a huge parade today. But the ones who stayed for two hours after the game at Coors Field to express their gratitude towards the Red Sox got virtually no respect.
The players and management spent that entire two-hour period talking with the media in the middle of the field. They held up the trophy in the middle of the field. They didn’t bring it around for the fans to see, even after the fans chanted “trophy” constantly for about 10 minutes. The ones who got to shake the players’ hands and congratulate them were the people who get paid to go to the World Series - not the ones who paid out of their own pockets to go to the World Series.
There were only four moments in which the Red Sox recognized their fans after the World Series:
1. Following the celebration in the locker room, Mike Timlin came out of the dugout to spray the crowd with champagne. This was the only truly unprovoked interaction between the players and the fans that night.
2. Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima both bowed in gratitude to the crowd. I don’t know if it’s a Japanese custom to do such a thing, but I think more players should adopt this attitude.
3. During a TV interview with Theo Epstein, the crowd started chanting, “Re-sign Lowell! Re-sign Lowell!” Epstein turned to the crowd, took off his World Series Champions hat, and held it out to the crowd, as though he was indicating that he would need fan donations to keep the World Series MVP in Boston. This was not exactly the vote of confidence the fans wanted to see on a night meant for victory.
4. Jason Varitek came over to the crowd on the third base line, and high-fived the fans in the front row all the way out to left field. It was very much like Varitek, as the captain of the team, to take time out from interviews to do this, but it was only after he was asked by WBZ reporter Alice Cook, who was interacting with fans who were feeling neglected by the team.
These moments lasted a total of about three minutes. Three minutes for the fans, and two hours for the media. Something seems wrong with that. I can’t say that the Red Sox are necessarily to blame, but in this media-obsessed world, professional athletes might want to take a step back and ask themselves who really matters: the columnists who chewed out the team all season long in the local papers, or the loyalists who paid thousands of dollars to see the team clinch and stood behind them through thick and thin over the years?
Maybe it would have been different if it were in Boston, though like you said, there were a lot of Sox fans in Denver.
I worked at Pac Bell Park in 2000 and was in the portwalk in 2002 when Kenny Lofton got the pennant-winning RBI, and I was sprayed with champagne by damn near the entire team both times. It really is wonderful.
Personally, the last thing I want to see two minute after the last out of the World Series is a vaguely annoyed baseball player answering stupid questions from some reporter. I’d be happy to never see any media personnel on the field ever.
Troy McClure SF
October 30th, 2007