When I first got to Florida on a balmy Saturday back in October of 2004, my lone duffel bag and I checked into a dingy efficiency motel by the Tampa airport. I'd left my girlfriend on the West Coast and knew exactly one person in the state. Monday morning I went to my first day of work in my one decent pair of pants, spent eight hours pretending to know what the hell I was doing, then headed back to my room for a dinner of cold refried beans eaten straight from the can (I was still two weeks away from my first paycheck). I kept the door locked, slept in my clothes for fear of touching the sheets and prayed that the serial killer doubling as the front desk clerk had the night off.
But the knot in my stomach wasn't from the beans, or the off chance that I might be murdered in my sleep. My beloved Boston Red Sox, losers for 85 years and counting, were set to play the New York Yankees the following night for the American League pennant.
The Sox lost that opening game. I watched all nine innings alone in my motel room, calling my brother ecstatic after the Sox put up five runs in the seventh and despondent when they came up empty in the ninth. They dropped the next two, Game 3 a depressing 19-8 loss at home. No baseball team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series. My brother stopped calling. My inbox flooded with friends from New York offering mock condolences. My dad could barely bring himself to watch.
Just as it seemed the Red Sox had blown it again, as every ESPN talking head rattled on about The Curse of the Bambino, things started to pick up — for me and for the team. I got my first paycheck, went trouser shopping, ate a decent meal, even found an apartment.
And I made a friend, a friend with an HDTV. I watched Game 4 at his house, saw Dave Roberts' historic steal in all its 57-inch glory. I was on the same couch for The Bloody Sock and Papi's heroics, for Damon and Millar and Manny. The Red Sox — the pathetic, doormat, loveable Sox — staged The Greatest Comeback in Sports History™ and headed for the World Series.
I watched all four games from the same spot on my new buddy's couch, my phone ringing after every pitch. John, an old friend from Boston, called screaming from a bar in San Francisco. My girlfriend's mother — a Sox fan for all of a week — wanted to talk baseball history. The Red Sox cruised, winning the first three games handily. One left.
Dad called as the Sox took a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth of the final game. We sat on the phone, speechless, just listening to each other breathe as one Cardinal flied out and another went down swinging. Two away. "Oh my God," he started muttering. He'd watched the Sox lose for 60 years. "Oh my fucking God."
Edgar Renteria, the Cardinals shortstop, stood at the plate, the only thing between Red Sox Nation and their first championship since 1918. We'd been here before, 18 years earlier at Shea Stadium, and blown it. I stood, then ran in place — I might have blacked out for a second or two. I could hear Dad yelling for Mom to come watch; she had spent the last few innings camped out in the kitchen.
A weak ground ball back to the pitcher. The careful throw to first.
Your 2004 Boston Red Sox. World Champions. I heard my mom scream. My father melted, said he wished his dad could've lived to see it.
As I sat there, warm, glowing, punch-drunk and giddy, I never would've imagined that three years later I'd consider rooting for another team:
The Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
On the ride home the night the Sox won the Series, the radio broadcast crackling through the car stereo, the phone rang again. It was Dad again.
"What happens now?"
Here, in short, is what happened:
"Red Sox Nation," as we came to be called, ruined it. We squandered the good will garnered after one of the most magical runs in sports history, causing fans across the country to loathe that "B" on our caps. The front office spent money at an outrageous rate, giving every Yankee fan the chance to argue, correctly, that we're no different from their soulless squad. They let Orlando Cabrera, the clutch-hitting shortstop who helped bring the clubhouse together for the 2004 playoffs, leave town.
Why? To replace him with the slightly taller, slightly bigger, slightly better-hitting Edgar Renteria, the man who made the final out for the Cardinals in the World Series and left Boston after only one season. The team also attracted more bandwagon fans than any squad since Jordan's Chicago Bulls. Worst, these new fans were cocky.
Don't believe me? Head out to Tropicana Field this weekend, where the Red Sox will be in town for the first time this season. Look around the sold-out stands — only the Sox and the Yankees can bring a crowd to the Trop. It will be, in effect, a Boston home game 1,500 miles from Fenway. Conservatively, 70 percent of the fans will be pulling for the Sox, who at press time were 7.5 games ahead of the Yankees and 21 ahead of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the American League East. In the past few weeks, the Yanks have been clawing back up the standings after a dreadful first half. We should be petrified. But ask Boston fans on their way into the stadium who they think will win the division, and they'll say, most of them anyway, that the Red Sox are in control.
Fools.
What happened when the team with an incredible propensity for choking finally won? Its fans started buying World Series tickets in July and wearing atrocious pink Red Sox hats year-round. They lost their edge.
What happened to me? I started to wonder if I was rooting for the right team. Something was missing, something that had defined my life as a baseball fan since I was old enough to feel it: Pain. Gut-wrenching pain.
And I wanted it back.
My parents keep the family photos stuffed in a drawer. Reach in and you'll find 1988 vacations next to dinner parties from last fall. But no matter what era you happen to pull out, if I'm in the picture, chances are I'm wearing a Red Sox hat. A few months before I landed the job in Florida, I put down "Center Fielder, Boston Red Sox" when asked what my dream job was on another application. I wore Red Sox wristbands to school long after it was socially acceptable, have watched games on four continents and am not ashamed to admit that, on occasion, I've teared up after a few particularly excruciating losses.
Of course, I had a lot of opportunities to cry.
When we moved from Boston to New York in 1995, just in time to see the Yankees win four of the next five World Championships, my father took me to Yankee Stadium to watch the Sox. We rode the subway prepped for battle, me in my Red Sox hat, him in a Boston T-shirt. As we walked through the gate, he pulled me aside.
"We're gonna root just like we would at Fenway," he told me.
It took until the bottom of the second for him to get pelted with a hot dog.
I lived in New York for five years, and with every one of those Yankee titles, my devotion to the Sox increased. Every blown lead, every late-season collapse, every defecting superstar or boneheaded signing only made me love them more. I'd nod when I passed another fan on the street, the way you might to someone you'd known in a POW camp.
Sure, we weren't winning. But at least we were the underdogs. At least we weren't them.
A few years ago, Bill Simmons, who turned his love for the Red Sox into
ESPN.com's most popular column, wrote a sort of Ten Commandments for fandom. Chief among his violations was "sports bigamy" — that it's simply unacceptable to root for two rival teams. But in Florida, a state full of transplants, those loyalties are routinely tested. Each non-native faces a moment when he or she is forced to decide whether or not to officially become a Floridian. For some, the tipping point comes when they realize how much they suddenly hate tourists. Others might feel the pang when they change license plates or buy a house. But for sports fans, it's the decision to shift allegiance from the Bears or the Bruins, the Chiefs or the Canadiens, to the Bucs and the Lightning. Whether these people hail from the Northeast or the Midwest, they live here now, and they're going to root for the hometown team.
Of course, not that long ago you could walk up to Tampa Stadium on a Sunday and still get a decent seat to watch the sherbet-colored jerseys get trounced. And until the Lightning made their Stanley Cup run in 2004, they may as well have been playing in the minor leagues. It took success for those teams to be embraced. But 10 years into their existence, the Devil Rays still seem decades away from a title — or anything close to a decent following.
They've got the lowest payroll in baseball; Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, the game's highest-paid player, makes more than the entire Rays team. The Red Sox drew more fans last season than the Devil Rays did in 2005 and 2006 combined. The Rays have finished out of last place exactly once, topping the Toronto Blue Jays by three games to capture fourth in 2004 and are the only team in the history of the game never to finish a season above .500. They routinely trade away veteran talent that's become too expensive for their meager budget, are often out of contention by the All-Star break (see: this season) and, despite the new ownership's laudable attempts to make the place more inviting, play in the ugliest stadium in the majors.
Add all that to the Yankees' presence in Tampa and the Gulf Coast's long history of spring training, which created local fans for teams from Cincinnati to Toronto, and the Devil Rays' tiny fan base makes sense. They're a miserable team to root for.
Perfect.
"I'm so ashamed of you."
"I'm so ashamed of you," he whispered again, leaning forward in his chair from the row behind me so his chin rested on my shoulder. For three innings, I'd been sitting in the bleachers next to my brother, who had informed our young neighbor Trent and everyone else in our vicinity of my little experiment. I had come all the way to Boston to root for the biggest underdogs I could find, a team whose supporters had no chance of getting cocky, whose front office had no chance of overspending, whose bandwagon potential was less than Ron Paul's. For at least one night, the Rays were my team.
And they were losing 13-2.
Thinking the game was perhaps out of reach, I took a walk around the stadium looking for someone — anyone — there to see the Rays. It was a sea of red and blue, of Ortiz jerseys and "Yankees Suck" T-shirts. I'd planned to buy a Rays hat at the souvenir shop across Yawkey Way, which used to sell caps for every team in the majors, but after 2004 the place had gone 100 percent Red Sox merch. "There's a few Yankee hats around," a security guard told me when I asked where I could find a Rays cap. "But you don't want those."
Finally, I spotted Branden Ballasco under the right field grandstand. He was 9, doe-eyed and decked head-to-toe in Devil Rays gear. The poor kid looked terrified standing there next to his grandpa, so I tried to contain my excitement — I didn't want to scare him any more.
"Is it lonely being the only one here?" I asked.
He didn't look up. "Uh-huh."
Over the next six innings, I saw a grand total of three other people wearing Rays paraphernalia. They were together. But when I ran up to greet my long-lost brethren, the threesome recoiled.
"We're not Rays fans!" they spat back, a particularly harsh response for a bunch of guys in Tampa Bay hats. "We're Yankee fans. Just doing this to piss off the crowd."
It seemed a bit excessive, but there were only two possibilities: One, they were in fact Yankee fans and just happened to be bored, rich and have a weak understanding of irony. Or two, a far more disturbing proposition: They were Rays fans. Horribly embarrassed, spiritually broken Rays fans.
The innings wore on, both teams putting up a few more runs. The crowd gave the Devil Rays a sarcastic standing ovation at one point, and just before they went home, Trent and his buddy poked me in the shoulder.
"Go back to Florida and cry," they hissed. Then they high-fived.
And that's when I knew my experiment had failed: I laughed. Maybe I should've been more wounded, but the game had been out of reach almost from the first pitch. And what I needed from that night — what I need from the Rays before I can devote myself completely — was for it to be close. Just close. Because what I miss isn't the pain of losing — it's the pain of almost winning. Throughout my life, save one amazing month nearly three years ago, rooting for baseball has been about agony. And there's nothing agonizing about losing when your team is down 11 runs in the second inning or out of the playoff hunt two months into the season. It just sucks.
Teams also thrive off rivalries, and aside from a few short-lived skirmishes with the Sox, the Rays haven't pushed anyone enough to be seen as a threat. The Red Sox and Yankees depend on each other; the Rays can't even depend on their own bullpen.
"Wait till next year," the fans used to say in Boston when the Sox inevitably blew it at season's end. For all the crap that team put us through — Bill Buckner, Bucky Dent, Aaron Boone — we still had hope. These days, the Devil Rays are simply hopeless, and I'm not sure I can wait around for the next, oh, 86 years to see what happens.
For now, I'll be rooting for the Red Sox. To win, sure. But also to choke one more time. That way Trent and all the other fans too young or too recently converted can get a taste of the pain we held so dear, for so long.
That way, they'll understand.
This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2007.