In Homage to Opening Day
What baseball brings us.
It was early afternoon when I realized I wasn’t going to make it.
I was seven years old, home from school with a raging fever, and determined to watch Opening Day at Fenway Park.
My Red Sox fandom was still in its infancy. I’d first visited Fenway on my sixth birthday, glove in hand, baseball cap propped on my head. The hat’s brim was no match for the sun that afternoon. I remember squinting at the field and barely making out the players, let alone the ball. I’d never felt so hot.
Still, when you’re that young, scale is everything. Something big is something cool or scary. And Fenway immediately registered as something awesome to me. I gawked at the Green Monster. I marveled at the pristine expanses of dirt and grass. I admired the thousands of people clapping and chanting in unison. For perhaps the very first time, I sensed a community beyond my own.
I wanted to be part of this collective, but I knew I had to learn its language and customs first. I started playing T-ball, studying box scores in The Boston Globe sports section, and collecting a few baseball cards, including a wood-backed one of my favorite player, Mo Vaughn. In time, I learned to decode the game’s hieroglyphics (a “K,” an “RBI”) and glean its events from numbers alone.
But it wasn’t until the 1998 season, when I was seven-going-on-eight, that I resolved to watch or listen to the Sox every day. It was, admittedly, a convenient time to become a diehard fan. Nomar Garciaparra had won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1997, and the team had traded for a young ace by the name of Pedro Martínez that offseason. Along with Vaughn, the team fielded veterans like John Valentin, Troy O’Leary, and Tim Wakefield. Its prospects were looking up.
The season didn’t start on a high note, though. The Sox lost a handful of games on the West Coast, leaving them four games out of first place. Even worse, many of these games started well after my bedtime. I’d have to wait until the team returned to Boston to follow along as I’d planned.
The home opener against the Seattle Mariners was scheduled to begin at 3:12 p.m. Normally, it would be a perfect start time for an elementary school kid—after dismissal and well before dinner and bed.
But I was sick that Friday. And by early afternoon, staying up for the whole game had faded from the realm of possibility.
I don’t recall when I went to sleep, but I do know that I didn’t wake up until the next morning. My first two observations were that my fever had broken and that I’d missed the game. I don’t remember in what order.
I was dejected when I went downstairs, having no concept of what happened at Fenway the previous day. But my mother soon lifted my spirits: She’d videotaped the game for me, apparently at the behest of my brother.
Nick was the reason I had any interest in sports. He made sure SportsCenter was always on in the house; cartoons were for other kids. Still, his forethought struck me, even then, as uncommonly generous for a big brother, because Nick wasn’t a big baseball fan at that time. Taping the game usually meant taping over something else, perhaps a game he’d wanted to save for himself.
Which is all to say that, by the time I settled into the couch to watch the recording, I already felt pretty lucky. For most of the game, it seemed like that feeling would have to be enough. Mariners ace Randy Johnson stymied the Sox over eight innings, striking out 15 batters while giving up just two runs. In the top of the ninth, the M’s extended their lead to 7-2.
The Sox entered the last half inning with virtually no hope of winning. Fans had lost faith, too; the legendary Globe baseball writer Peter Gammons reported that only about a third of the crowd remained for the final frame.
It was a sad scene. To be sure, after eight decades under the Curse of the Bambino, pessimism and fatalism were about as common at the ballpark as peanuts and Cracker Jacks. But Opening Day was always supposed to bring a sense of hope to the region, no matter how fleeting. Even if the hometown team didn’t turn out to be a contender, even if the weather didn’t cooperate on that particular afternoon, sunnier days were certainly ahead when the local nine took the field at Fenway for the first time. The worst of winter was behind us; we could officially crawl out from hibernation.
As it turned out, no other home opener would signify hope quite like the ’98 home opener.
After 132 pitches, Johnson had to exit the game for the Mariners. The M’s tapped a fresh arm—Heathcliff Slocumb, the pitcher the Sox traded the previous year for future championship pillars Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe—to relieve him in the ninth.
But Slocumb was no Johnson, and the Red Sox began to piece together a rally against him and a procession of relievers.
O’Leary singled to lead off the inning. Mark Lemke walked. Darren Bragg doubled to right. Mike Benjamin walked. Garciaparra singled. And Valentin was hit by a pitch.
Suddenly, without the Sox ever committing an out, the score was 7-5, the bases were loaded, and Vaughn, my favorite player, was stepping to the plate.
The hulking slugger took the first pitch on the outside corner for a strike. Ohhhhhh, the bundled masses complained together.
But they wouldn’t have to wait long for their faith to be rewarded. If they could’ve heard Joe Castiglione on the radio call, they would’ve heard this:
“The set by Spoljaric, and the pitch: swing and THERE’S A DRIVE TO RIGHT FIELD DEEP DOWN THE LINE, WAY BACK, AND IT IS GONE! A GRAND SLAM AND THE RED SOX HAVE WON IT!”
You can watch and hear it for yourself:
(The internet still has its moments, doesn’t it?)
On the couch at home, I was both ecstatic and relieved. It would’ve been devastating to miss such a dramatic game and clutch performance by my favorite player.
Not all games would be so memorable or joyous, I’d learn over and over again. But the home opener in ‘98 was my initiation into a New England ritual that knows no state or town lines (well, maybe except in Connecticut).
On Friday, the Sox will play at Fenway for the first time this year. And for many in our region, a glimmer of hope will return again.
Even when the Sox lose, I hope we never relinquish that rite of spring.