Tag Archives: Red Sox

A spoiled Boston licks its sports wounds

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Eric Wilbur takes stock of the city’s last decade in sports:

This was the fifth year in the past decade in which Boston didn’t claim a championship.

Bummer.

It began with heartbreak in Indianapolis, where the Patriots choked away their second-straight Super Bowl. It didn’t get any better for the Bruins in April, when the defending Stanley Cup champs lost in seven games to the Washington Capitals in their first-round playoff matchup. A few weeks later, the Celtics gagged against LeBron James and the Heat, who went on to win the NBA title. Meanwhile, the Bobby Valentine experiment tossed one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises into new levels of embarrassment.

By all accounts, it was not a banner year for Boston sports.

The Cannons lost their only playoff game. The Revolution stunk.

Mike Napoli came and went. We think.

Maybe.

They cheered in Manhattan, San Francisco, Miami, and… at some point, Los Angeles. In Boston, there was little but angst and disappointment. The Celtics are an enigma, the Red Sox are in total disarray, and the Bruins are mixed in a web of greed that could ultimately ruin the NHL.

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Red Sox on the trading block?

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I don’t know whether this is a “say it ain’t so” moment or a time to shout “good riddance,” but the speculation is likely to stick around for awhile:

Whether or not Henry, Werner, and team president Larry Lucchino ever want to admit it, they have a credibility problem in this market and they always have. Much of it stems from their inability to honestly and sincerely communicate with the media or the fan base. Nonetheless, the first six or seven years of the Henry era were wildly successful, the Red Sox winning a pair of World Series titles and twice reaching Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.

As angry as Sox fans have been, dating back to September of last year, here’s the question: are the Red Sox owners and operators capable of recreating the operation that existed from roughly 2003 to 2008? Can winning here (and not money-making) ever mean as much to Henry and Werner as it did then? If you believe the answers are yes, then you should not want this group to sell. If the answers are no, then let’s hope Henry and his partners are telling lies and have every intention of unloading the franchise sooner rather than later.

Whatever you choose, be careful what you wish for. Frank McCourt is a native Bostonian and wanted the Red Sox back in 2002 … and he bankrupted the Los Angeles Dodgers several years later. The answer isn’t always inside of 128. The most frustrating part of the Henry era is that the Red Sox had a budding baseball dynasty, then let it slip through their fingers solely because they wanted to move on to new, bigger, and more exciting things.

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Music to my ears

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This is a book blog. I know that. But, as with the Red Sox, Google Buzz, and, yes, the Red Sox again, from time to time my entries have reflected a certain distractible sensibility. (This is a nice way of saying it’s hard for me to stay on point – one of many reasons I am relegated to Internet Siberia and not your local bookstore’s display windows.)

It really cannot be helped this time. And, showing signs of improvement, this one’s not about the Sox. No, I am devoting this post to fawning adulation. But first, the back story. For years now, I have been a fan of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. From the moment the first lilting twangs of “Njosnavelin” reached my ears in the movie Vanilla Sky, I knew I’d been hooked. Lead singer Jonsí’s (Jon Thor Birgisson) voice had an ethereal quality that is unmatched in music today. Soon I couldn’t get enough. As I began to discover more of their tracks, an entirely new universe unveiled itself before me. From the thumping rock anthem of “Glósóli” to the lighthearted giddiness of “Hoppipolla,” it was obvious the band had its pulse on a sound the rest of the world had yet to capture.

In a way, Sigur Rós changed my expectations of what good music should sound like. It most certainly raised the bar, but it wasn’t just that: Sigur Rós’ pieces – at times haunting, at times dreamy, but always unique – unfolded like a canvas, evoking an almost physical reaction, something previously unknown to my uncultured ears. (Keep in mind, my favorite song at the time was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me.”) Although it took time, my love of Sigur Rós gradually led to appreciation of other bands who refused to be bound by the vagaries and expectations of pop culture. Most notable among these was Radiohead, whose leader Thom Yorke exhibited, albeit with more swaggering panache, the same spirit of musical rebellion embodied by Jonsí. (In what is perhaps the most compelling evidence against apocalyptic prophesies, the two bands once toured together without precipitating the universe’s explosion – somehow avoiding death by musical nirvana, so to speak.)

Fast forward to 2010. Jonsí had announced a world tour to promote his new album, Go. I purchased tickets for a New York show at Terminal 5 as soon as they went on sale. Last year, Jonsí had released an instrumental record, named Riceboy Sleeps, with his boyfriend; and embarrassingly, I didn’t realize until the concert this month that he’d compiled a new album since then. So imagine my surprise when Jonsí took to the stage and began performing “Hengilas,” “Animal Arithmetic,” “Tornado,” and the like.

I went home and immediately purchased the entire album on iTunes and have since listened to it incessantly. (My valiant college housemates can attest to my inability to diversify my playlist: when I discovered a new song, I would play it ad nauseum until, inevitably, even I grew sick of it.) But before I even get to that part, allow me to describe the concert itself. The set was designed to look like an old museum. Large panes of windows towered behind the band, on which projections of animals in the wild (the concert heavily utilized a nature motif) lent an epic quality to the accompanying music. I agree with the online commenter who stated that it felt like a film to which Jonsí was performing the accompanying soundtrack. The light show (and the entire production, for that matter) made it obvious that Jonsí intended to continue the creativity displayed at Sigur Rós’ live performances. (I had attended one of their concerts in Chicago in September 2008 and was equally impressed by the scale of the production.) In the most grandiose moment of the concert, house lightning bombarded the stage, then faded to a deer being chased by a wolf-like predator through dense forest, as Jonsí’s otherworldly falsetto rang out in “Kolnidur.”

Now, for the music itself: Go is a beautiful album. Because it is Jonsí’s voice on all the tracks, shades of Sigur Rós may initially sneak in, but the similarities are less real than imagined. Jonsí strikes out on his own path on this one, even if his musical decisions are clearly influenced by his prior works with the band. In arguably the best song on the album, “Hengilas,” Jonsí, singing in Icelandic and accompanied by an ominous ambient chord progression, evokes a deep melancholy. A repetitive piano theme in “Tornado” yields to booming percussion as Jonsí, soaring high above the melody, sings, “You flow through the inside/you kill everything through/you kill from the inside/you’ll, you’ll learn to know.”

The most well-known track on Go is “Boy Lilikoi.” Jonsí, in the chorus, urges his listeners to “use your life, the world goes and flutters by.” I’m trying, but his musical ingenuity has kept headphones glued to my ears. Flutter on, world.

Happy new year

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For those of us who measure the passing of time by the first pitch of successive baseball seasons, our annual celebration is now upon us. Tonight, the boys of summer return. Even better for those of us who plead allegiance to the vaunted red B, they will descend upon Fenway Park in Boston, where the hometown Red Sox host the World Series champion New York Yankees. (My fingers nearly mounted a mutiny as I finished typing that sentence.)

With a pitching rotation that includes newcomer John Lackey, Josh Beckett, and Jon Lester as the first three starters, the Sox are looking to be a team of solid defense and great pitching. For the first time in recent years, however, Boston’s lineup is looking vulnerable. We’ll need either a few career performances from unexpected players, a major acquisition sometime prior to the trading deadline, or both. For many years, the Sox used to be a team built to make it to the playoffs but without the depth to last once they got in. This year they may have the opposite problem.

Tonight, at 8:05 PM, be near a TV. Josh Beckett. C.C. Sabathia. Red Sox-Yankees at Fenway Park. And happy new year.

A brief digression

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I’ll be honest: I love to rip on the media. My frustration is neither strictly ideological — although, as an avid New York Times reader, my jabs tend to come from somewhere around center-right — nor completely random, but this current explosion is admittedly a bit out of left field.

I love Nomar Garciaparra. An All-Star shortstop for the Red Sox and a baseball icon for the youth of Boston from the moment he first stepped onto Fenway’s glistening diamond in 1996 until his contentious last days in the summer of 2004, Number 5 was the king. His obsessive-compulsive batting rituals, mysterious middle name (you mean you didn’t know his first name was Anthony?), and searing line drives were tailor-made for baseball-mad New England. Comparisons with Ted Williams became ever more frequent; in 2000, Nomar flirted with a .400 batting average. He graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, and soon suffered from its notorious curse; the ghost of Al Reyes (who joins Sox fans’ eternal blacklist, along with Grady Little) haunted him and eventually derailed his 2001 season. He was never the same afterward, but still we loved him.

Then came 2004. Or that’s what certain members of Boston’s sports-writing elite would have us believe. In reality, the rapid downward spiral of Nomar’s time in Boston began in the winter of 2003, when rumors were swirling as to the possible acquisition of Alex Rodriguez, then the shortstop for the Texas Rangers. The persistence of the public speculation was a slap in the face to Garciaparra, who’d played for his entire career with an intensity and vigor that stood in stark contrast to the lackadaisical approach of fellow Sox superstars Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez. Nomar ran hard on every play, whether at bat or in the field; his numerous throwing errors were usually a result of attempting spectacular plays that most shortstops could never have attempted.

So it was understandable, then, that his attitude heading into the 2004 baseball season, immediately following his seventh full year with the Sox (he was on the All-Star team in five of those years), was less than amiable. If Nomar had a fault, it was not comprehending the nature of the beast that is the Boston sports media. And no one embodied this vindictive spirit more than Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe. This was the same guy who once criticized Sox outfielder Carl Everett so vociferously that the player famously dubbed him the “curly-haired boyfriend” of Gordon Edes, a fellow (far more talented) baseball writer for the Globe. To this day, members of online Red Sox forums still refer to Shaughnessy derisively as “CHB.”

During the summer of 2004, Shaughnessy and several of his colleagues from Boston media outfits — notably including the then-novel bostondirtdogs.com, which at this moment has a sub-headline that reads “The Nomar Phonyfest Is Now Over, Everyone Go Take a Steaming Hot Shower” — went to work ruining the stellar reputation Garciaparra had nurtured over his long and illustrious career. The coverage launched a vicious cycle, as Nomar became more disillusioned with perceptions of him as a lazy and uncommitted player — allegations that, up until that season, were unthinkable — and the media caught on to his frustrations, perpetuating his misery. When he was finally traded just before the deadline in July 2004, his departure was heralded as the relieving end to a burdening era. Boston’s World Series triumph just three months later — its first in eighty-six years — appeared to lend credence to the view that Nomar had been expendable at best, a serious detriment at worst.

Fast forward six years. Nomar has just announced his retirement, and in a move that prompted a wave of hardball nostalgia for me and thousands of other like-minded fans, signed a one-day minor league contract with the Red Sox. “I’ve always had a recurring dream,” Nomar said, “…to be able to retire in a Red Sox uniform, and thanks to Mr. Henry, Mr. Werner, Mr. Lucchino, and Theo [Epstein] and the Red Sox organization, today I do get to retire, I get to fulfill that dream and retire as a Red Sox.”

Nomar, then, has achieved his dream of retiring with the team, and the city, that has always adored him. In response, the Boston media — and Dan Shaughnessy especially — have taken to excoriating him once again. His crime? Although they’d never admit this, it is only Nomar’s disinclination towards engaging the media that eventually led to the demise of his public image in Boston. Unlike Pedro, who embraced his larger-than-life role in Boston sports, or Manny, who was seemingly oblivious to it all, Nomar was actively uninterested in burnishing his reputation through exclusive interviews and media hobnobbing. This would cost him dearly.

On March 11, Dan Shaughnessy wrote a column which began, “Great player. Total fraud. Welcome home, Nomie.” His unfounded vitriol underscored his own prejudice and, even worse, highlighted his ignorance of that intangible factor that makes baseball so transcendent: the heartfelt connection between a player and his fans. Unlike members of rock bands, or politicians, or any number of other public figures, a hard-nosed and talented baseball player like Nomar Garciaparra has the potential to capture the hearts and minds of millions and remain in their memories for a lifetime. Dan Shaughnessy and his vindictive cohorts will be long gone before the echoes of Nomar Garciaparra’s legendary years in Boston ever fade from the city’s collective consciousness.

Welcome home indeed, Nomar.