Outside Fenway, fans brimming confidence for Game 1

(AP Photo/Lisa Poole)

Boston Red Sox fans, including Mike Mooney (right) of Malden, cheered today outside Fenway Park as they waited in line for tickets to Game 1 of the World Series.

By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff

With the confidence of fresh-faced champions -- not historic losers -- Red Sox fans are gathering outside Fenway Park this evening under gun-metal gray skies, predicting sure victory over the Colorado Rockies in the 2007 World Series. Or at least a victory in Game 1.

"The Sox are going to win tonight," said Becky Stosse, a Sox fan who drove from Connecticut to be at the game. "The Sox are definitely going to win tonight. With Beckett on the mound, we can't go wrong."

For those of you living off the grid -- or perhaps in a cabin tucked away in the Rocky Mountains -- Stosse is talking about Josh Beckett, the American League Championship Series MVP and the Sox Game-1 starter tonight.

In Beckett, a Nation believes.

Or maybe it's just that Sox fans don't respect the Rockies, a team that has won 21 of their last 22 games, yet for now remains mostly unknown to people living in the Eastern Time Zone.

"They're a young team," said Steve Harvey, a Hopkinton man going to the game tonight. "I think it's beginner's luck."

Harvey, who purchased $100 worth of souvenirs for his daughters and wife outside the stadium today, predicted a comeuppance for the Rockies.

But near the front of the day-of-game ticket line, where some have been waiting for more than 48 hours in the hopes of getting last-minute tickets to tonight's game, two Rockies fans, Eric Gardner and Chris Bianchi, predicted otherwise.

"The Rockies took two of three (games) against the Sox this year," said Gardner, a Ft. Collins , Colo., native and student at the Berklee College of Music. "Everybody's underestimating them."

It has been a long two days for the two Rockies fans, sleeping on the pavement among the Sox faithful. There have been both boos and chants directed their way. And then, Bianchi said, things almost got uglier.

"There were some guys who wanted to beat us up last night," said Bianchi, a Boston University student. "But cooler heads prevailed."

The fact is, said Liz Roderick, Sox fans almost pity the few Rockies fans bold enough to wear purple and black outside Fenway.

"We've been giving them a heck of a time," conceded Roderick, a Boston waitress who has been skipping shifts for the last two days hoping that she too might land a ticket to tonight's game. "But it's all in good fun. It's not like there's a rivalry between us. We kind of feel bad for them."

Only time will tell whether Rockies fans need any sympathy. But these are heady days in Boston, where fans talk no more of World Series collapses (see 1986) but rather World Series championships (see 2004). And a little sympathy for the other team is apparently OK.

But Jim Morgan, a concession stand worker on Yawkey Way, still found it in him to gloat a little bit today, hours before game time as he grilled up a batch of sausages – "October sausages."

"October sausages are sausages that they don't serve in Cleveland, they don't serve in New York, and they don't serve in Anaheim," he said. "We're still working – that's the thing. The concession workers in Cleveland and New York are all out golfing."

• Comment
• Permalink
• Email