Flipping through yesterday’s Globe and I see this big-ass, full-page photo of a brooding, staring-from-the-shadows Pedroia with the headline “What’s Broken Can be Fixed.”
This is all well and good, Red Sox. But you’re a bit too late. I’ve already been to the promised land of a World Series Championship. In fact, I saw two more Red Sox World Series titles than I ever expected to see in my life. If we never see one again, I’ll still die a happy man. (Preferably not anytime soon, mind you. Or at least not before someone finally makes the definitive Spider-Man movie, with Heidi Watney as Gwen Stacy.)
When I really could have used this ad was back in the late ’80s/early ’90s, when the Red Sox teetered between perennial cellar-dwellars and wannabe champs who just couldn’t close the deal. I spent an entire decade being haunted by images of Mookie Wilson and Dave Stewart kicking me in the nuts, my hopes living and crashing on the likes of Jack Clark, Tom Brunansky and Danny Darwin. I punched more walls and washed away more John Wasdin/Heathcliff Slocumb implosions with the demon alcohol than I care to remember, and literally thought that this team was going to kill me. If you’d just once given me a sign–something like a full-page ad in the Globe–telling me to hang in there, that you were working on it, that salvation would be coming soon… it might have not shaved precious years off my life.
In the post-2004 world, I never want to seem so spoiled that I need this sort of thing to keep me tuning into NESN or parking my wide ass in Fenway’s narrow seats. You’ve got me for life, motherf#$kers. But in those younger, leaner days, this sort of thing would have served me better than any Dante Bichette press conference.
