Study: Red Sox fans have fuzzier memories of 2004 ALCS 7th game

BOSTON --There's a cruel twist for Red Sox fans when it comes to remembering Game 7 of the 2004 American League Championship Series.

The wonderful memories of that 10-3 win over the New York Yankees, the culmination of an unprecedented comeback from three games down in a seven-game playoff series, are likely to be a bit fuzzy, according to Harvard University researchers studying the effects of emotion on memory.

Yankees fans, meanwhile, are likely to have more accurate memories of what -- to them -- was perhaps the most unpleasant moment in the franchise's storied history.

The study of 76 baseball fans appears to show that pleasurable memories tend to be less accurate than unpleasant memories.

The study volunteers -- men and women, some Red Sox fans, some Yankees fans, and some neutral fans with no emotional stake in the outcome of the game -- filled out questionnaires within six days of the Oct. 20, 2004, deciding game, and then again approximately six months later.

Study results also show that Red Sox fans not only had less accurate recall, but were more confident in their distorted memories than the Yankees fans were with their negative memories.

"It was a surprise," said Elizabeth Kensinger, one of the lead researchers in the study that will appear in an upcoming issue of the scholarly journal, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

The researchers chose to focus the study around a Red Sox-Yankees game because sporting events are among the few situations in life in which there is such a polarization of emotion.

"This is a topic of emotion and memory, and the question of what kinds of emotion promote less or more accurate memory is a fairly new field," said Harvard psychology professor Daniel Schacter. "This was a way of getting at it in a more naturalistic way."

The researchers not only investigated memories of the game itself, but personal details, such as who the fans were with, where they watched the game, what they wore and what they ate during the game.

Fans of both teams remembered those personal details at roughly the same rate, but when it came to the game itself, Yankees fans had better recall.

Fans made mistakes trying to recall who was pitching when, and who hit home runs in what inning, said Kensinger, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard at the time of the study and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College.

"Red Sox fans made a lot more of those errors, and yet they were more confident in their memories," she said.

For example, one Red Sox fan insisted that Johnny Damon hit a home run in the first inning. In fact, David Ortiz homered in the first inning, and Damon -- who now plays for the Yankees -- homered in the second and fourth innings.

Another Red Sox fan expressed confidence in remembering that the Yankees' Hideki Matsui homered in the game. There were no Yankees home runs in the game.

Ernie Paicopolos, a Red Sox fan who runs the fenwaynation.com Web site has noticed that in discussions about that game with friends, there are often discrepancies in their recall.

When contacted by a reporter, Paicopolos said he remembered Damon's leadoff home run in the first inning. When informed that it was Ortiz who homered with two outs in the first, and that Damon did not hit a leadoff homer until the fourth, he gasped and said, "That's embarrassing. I guess I just proved their point."

Of course, the game was nearly two years ago.

"I can see the legitimacy of the research, because I bet if they did a similar study for Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, they'd get similar results, just reversed," he said. In that game, Aaron Boone hit an 11th inning home run off Tim Wakefield that gave New York a 6-5 win. "I bet Red Sox fans remember that vividly."

Schacter cautioned against applying the findings of the study to more traumatic events, such as combat or the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which elicit a higher emotional intensity. A baseball game is more likely to reflect the range of emotions experienced in normal, everyday life, he said.

The study opens the door for more analysis.

"I guess to me, one of the more interesting questions to come from this is how the brain processes positive memories and that's an area for lots more investigation," Kensinger said.

There's a chance for more memories being made by both Red Sox and Yankees fans. The rival teams are meeting up for a five games in four days in Boston beginning Friday -- and a chance to see the Yankees' two-game lead in the American League either dwindle or expand.