Toeing the Rubber

When your team is in last place and you still want to watch them play you have to adjust your goals for them.  You start to hope for personal milestones for some of the players and, come September, you hope maybe that they can have some impact on the playoff race even if they aren’t in it.  If you’re still reading this blog after the season we’ve witnessed, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you were watching (or at least following in some capacity) last night’s game. My favorite tweet from last night came right after the game from Chad Finn over at the Boston Globe:

It sure doesn’t look meaningless, does it?

The team looked insanely happy about the walk-off win, the fans who were there also were in a typical walk-off frenzy. Chad Finn gets it. There are actually people in the world who care that the Red Sox came back and beat the Yankees last night. The entire fan base hasn’t deserted their team and the team hasn’t given up regardless of how it feels on days that DON’T end with a walk-off win against New York. It was fun to watch Jacoby Ellsbury get four hits on his birthday and have it mean something, even if that something is only a win for the team and a loss for the Yankees. It was fun, and I know there are a lot of people who won’t agree with this one, to hear ‘the chant’ at Fenway Park. I don’t love ‘the chant’ and I bet if I thought about it I could honestly count the times I’ve ever joined in with it, but the fans, much like the team, have been completely defeated lately and if the idea of beating the Yankees and helping Baltimore tie for first place again is what gets the fans to make some noise (and by the quotes following the game it seems the team enjoyed the fans last night) then I’m sorry but I’m all for it.  Getting lectured about how stupid it is to chant “Yankees suck” when your team is in last place and the Yankees are in first does nothing but make me want to chant “Yankees suck”.  We know the Yankees don’t ‘suck’ as in ‘boy that team is lousy’ but last night when they couldn’t beat the last place team to ensure that they stayed alone atop the American League East…well last night they sucked.  At least for the purposes of the fans getting to stick it to the rival team during their last series of the season (last series at Boston, anyway).

I get why people hate ‘the chant’ and usually when I’m at Fenway it makes me cringe but last night all those fans got a pass from me. These are desperate times and I’m good with just about anything the fans start to do in the stands to make noise and get behind their team.  Although many of us would like to make some, there are no set rules for fandom. If that was the way some chose to show their support for the team (and it is supporting them in a weird, roundabout way), I’m just happy there were fans there to cheer the hometown team on and who got to witness that walk-off.