This Is Not A Sports Board, But . . .

Johnny Damon after hitting his grand slam.

I am a Boston Red Sox fan, and this is a special day for anyone who loves the Sox. It also happens to be my birthday today and birthdays do not get much better than this. Consider:

The Red Sox are now the first team to come back from an 0-3 deficit in a championship series in the history of baseball. And they did it against their historic nemesis, the New York Yankees, at Yankee Stadium. That alone is simply too wonderful for words.

The game was never really in doubt after the second inning. Johnny Damon hit a grand slam. The Red Sox hit four home runs total. Alex Rodriguez, the would-be cheater and proven whiner, who could have been on the Red Sox, but instead opted for the Yankees, the "glamor team," has now ended up eating the Red Sox' dust. For Red Sox fans, who were disappointed at losing "A. Rod," that alone is sweet justice.

And forevermore, Red Sox fans will have this on the Yankees: Our team made the greatest comeback in sports history, and did it against THEM! (By the same token, the Yankees committed the worst collapse in sports history, and they did it against THE RED SOX. As my 14 year-old son said, how great is that?)

Red Sox fans everywhere are rolling around in all of this like pigs in mud.

My wife and younger son gave me a Red Sox jacket and hat for by birthday. At their insistence, I opened the package after the sixth inning, put on both the hat and the jacket and wore them the rest of the game.

(Warning: Blatant political partisanship follows.) I am trying to put this in a political context. Yes, soft-headed liberals like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and half the Harvard faculty are Red Sox fans. Well, that's OK, I'm glad they are not wrong about everything.

Even John Kerry pretends to follow the Red Sox, but as noted here earlier in the summer, in an interview he named Eddie Yost as his favorite Red Sox player, even though Yost never played for the Sox. A classic Kerry moment. When Kerry tried to throw the first pitch at a Red Sox game, he bounced it in front of the plate. (Fittingly, President Bush threw a strike at Yankee Stadium a few weeks after 9/11.) So Kerry is in no position to bask in the Red Sox' success or draw strength from it.

To me, the Red Sox win is simply evidence that this year, the hard-working Everyman, like the Red Sox or George W. Bush, will defeat the more glamorous Blue State elites like the Yankees, or like John Kerry. It's our year.


So: Go Red Sox. Go George W.!