Boston vs. Anaheim: Columnists face off

October 6, 2008 10:44 AM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

Sprawl, Disneyland, picture-postcard weather. Crowded streets, Revere Beach, molar-jarring cold.

As the Angels-Red Sox battle continues, Boston.com asked Globe columnist Kevin Cullen and Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit to trade impressions about the pros and cons of the two regions. See a more wide-ranging e-mail exchange here.

Here are their opening salvos; stay tuned for Round 2 this afternoon.

By Frank Mickadeit, The Orange County Register

Frank Mickadeit

My impressions of Boston? Really haven’t thought about them in years. Didn’t the lead singer die recently?

Oh, there’s a city. Kind of a branch office of London, no? A less-sophisticated Sydney? A local economy based on filtering taxes paid by suburbanites through the pockets of corrupt politicians and then into the paychecks of union workers who are propped up half the day by their shovels as they stand around next to ditches, manholes, and other urban excavation that typify the city’s interminable public-works projects?

I really don’t have anything bad to say about Boston. It’s kind of like other European cities – a decreasing core population that realizes its best days are behind it but gamely struggles to reinvent itself. I feel sorry for it.

There was this moment a couple of years ago when I was slogging down a street in one of the reclaimed swamps (another great public-works project!) and I came upon a group of Bostonians standing strangely slack-jawed, like a mutant harbor flounder, all of them pointing skyward.

I could tell they were natives because some were wearing ratty Red Sox caps and were speaking in a dialect that approximated English – the product of a public-school system that teaches a 26-letter alphabet but only insists its graduates use about 22 of them.

When we finally figured out what they were saying, my group of Californians took pity. “It’s the sun,” I said.

This was October. Early October.

I’ve not been in your city in the winter, but I can imagine legions of Bostonians, pulling their wool watch caps tight over their ears as they board the T each morning, muttering to themselves through chattering teeth, “At least we’re not Baltimore. At least we’re not Baltimore.…”

By Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe

Kevin Cullen

I suppose any self-respecting Red Sox fan would be fond of Anaheim if only because it was there that Hendu, aka Dave Henderson, homered off Donnie Moore and propelled the Sox into the 1986 World Series.

But I'm a newspaper columnist, so self-respect rarely enters the equation, and besides, Hendu's heroics only made possible Bill Buckner's impression of a matador a couple of weeks later.

In general, people in Orange County are among the most friendly and hospitable I've encountered in this great land of ours.

For example, there was a one-time Miss Anaheim named Margo Adams who sued Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs for compensation because when she wasn't selling real estate in Orange County she was the Chicken Man's mistress whenever the Sox were in town. My favorite line in all the depositions was when Adams' lawyer asked the future Hall of Famer, "Did you ever give Margo the recipe for your mother's black velvet cake?"

Aside from going to Disneyland, there's nothing for Red Sox players to do in Anaheim before and after games, except to have extramarital affairs with the desperate housewives of Orange County, so hopefully the series will end tonight.

No offense, but we don't want to go back to Anaheim. That flight's a killer. And frankly, you guys in la-la land don't want the Red Sox Nation yahoos back. I'm a Red Sox fan and I can't stand them.

There's a huge cultural difference between Anaheim and Boston. Anaheim was settled by a bunch of German grape growers. Boston, on the other hand, is far more like the rest of America, as it was settled by a bunch of religious extremists.

Anaheim is one of the best planned, laid out cities in America. In Boston, they let cows decide where the streets would go.

And finally, Anaheim's number one industry is tourism and they have a hockey team named after ducks and everybody's just so darn nice to visitors. In Boston, we like nothing better than to stand on the corner and flip the bird to tourists as they make traffic worse, if that's humanly possible, by riding around the city's narrow streets in vintage World War II amphibious vehicles known as ducks.

Should be a wicked pissa game tonight.