Two things I'm afraid I'll never understand.
But, good grief, apparently baseball means an awful lot to some people. An article in this week's Health & Science section of the Boston Globe suggests that the Red Sox World Series victory is going to improve the character of our entire region.
The Red Sox went from being perennial underdogs to champagne-soaked world champions in a few short minutes last Wednesday night, but the psychological repercussions could reverberate for years, say psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists and sports historians.
"In a tiny way, but a great way, kids are more likely to have more potential to overcome adversity" now that they've seen the Red Sox do it, said Dr. Jim Recht, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "I think that kids now are going to have a 1 percent extra sense of their potential in life."
Sounds like a scientific conclusion to me. I would counter that this "1 percent extra sense of their potential" will be more than outweighed by the number of hours they spend watching these monkeys chase a ball around a field, and by the amount of money they waste on sports-related merchandise.
"There's a certain type of Boston character or Boston life that might have been partly due to the curse of the Babe," Recht said. "You think about these guys whose whole conception of their possibilities in life was so severely limited, so depressingly limited and boxed in."
Boston might not be the City of Sunshine and Cotton Candy, but I never realized that this surly attitude had so much to do with their lousy ball team. I always figured Bostonians were surly because they could be surly; that once they'd told the British to take their tea and shove it up their arseholes, they realized that they didn't have to be nice to anybody unless they damn well felt like it. I kind of liked Boston for this, but now I'm not so sure.
"Boston's win will not necessarily change the overall surly attitude of New Englanders," Thomas Zeller, a historian who teaches a class on baseball and society at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in an e-mail.
Well, thank goodness for that. (But kids are paying college tuition to take a class on Baseball, that doesn't even teach them how to play baseball? And their parents aren't desperately trying to abort them?)
Fans who claimed they only needed to see the Red Sox win to die happy need to find something else to keep them going.
Do they? Do they really? They could just die happy, instead.
"We're entering a new stage of maturity in our relationship with the Red Sox," Recht said. "I think they have made it possible and we've made it possible to enter into a deeper sort of commitment to each other."
Listen, you're not married to the Red Sox. You're not even distantly related to them. They don't give a shit about you, unless they're sodomizing you or taking your money. Most of these players are not even from Boston! If they were folks you grew up with and went to school with, maybe I could understand. You'd be cheering for your buddies. But they're strangers who are paid more money to play a single game than you'll see in your entire life. And it's because of retards like you that they get it.
