Toeing the Rubber

One of only five photos I took on Friday ~ Will Middlebrooks

So I went to Fenway on Friday night with Kelly O’Connor. She sent me a message the night before that read “… we have good seats tomorrow, which means rain.”

Historically, whenever we sit in good seats together the game is usually interesting and almost always includes inclement weather.  The baseball gods smiled on us Friday night in one sense, the only rain was at around 6:30pm and was gone by the time we took our seats.  So while we didn’t sit in the rain we certainly sat through a storm.

Honestly, the game was a lot of fun. Great seats, good fans and fantastic company.  Heck it was an extra-innings game which at least means the Sox weren’t losing for most of it.  The ending was certainly not how I want a 13-inning Red Sox game to finish but we got a four hour and 37 minute game in great seats with mostly really good fans around us.  So I didn’t leave Fenway on Friday feeling too terribly about the way it all went down.

I find that the better the seats are that I’m sitting in the more likely I won’t take that many photos.  In many ways I’ll always be that pre-teen girl walking into Fenway for the first time just completely enthralled with the park.  I spent so much time just looking at it all and taking it in that taking photos of what I was looking at was a bit of an after thought.

My favorite interaction of the evening was with the guy next to me.  We were sitting in a row of four seats and the two guys in the row with us were from Canada and at least the guy next to me was a huge Red Sox fan on his first trip to Fenway.  He jumped up at every opportunity, took a picture of Cody Ross rolling into home in the second yelling “My first run at Fenway”; he was a lot of fun to be around.  Kelly and I must have been cheering especially emphatically for Will Middlebrooks because after his third or fourth at-bat the guy next to me asked me if we knew him. (I’ve had that happen for two other players, Kyle Snyder in Pawtucket and Michael Bowden at his Fenway debut.)  By the end of the night we had apparently influenced the guy to be a Middlebrooks fan because he started cheering as loudly for him as he had been for Papi and Pedroia.

It has been decided that I shouldn’t go to any games that Jon Lester starts.  I consider the fact that I never called him “Crabby” out loud in Fenway that night a win.

It’s been a rough week for the Red Sox and their fans.  With any luck, Clay Buchholz will at least save them from getting swept and help start this next week off with a win.