Family Ties

We've all got our stories, and mine is certainly no more special than yours. It's got three characters: my father, my older brother, and me. I was born in Boston in 1968 and grew up in Rhode Island, where the Pawtucket Red Sox - the PawSox, as we called them - play. Being a Sox fan should have come naturally, but it's funny how life takes you where you least expect it.

My dad was born and raised in New York, a lifelong Yankee fan, which is why all the stories I remember him telling me while growing up didn't star Williams, Pesky, and Yaz, but DiMaggio, Mantle, and Berra. Those were his idols. So I was confused. Should I root for the Sox, whom my father had zero interest in, or the Yanks, which just felt so wrong? In a decision only my therapist-wife could probably make sense of now, I latched on to the Cincinnati Reds. Don't ask. I'd never been to the city. Knew nothing about it. But the Big Red Machine of Joe Morgan and Pete Rose and Johnny Bench just captured me, and I was hooked. My brother had no such dilemmas. He went straight for the Sox and to this day ridicules my wayward loyalty.

So there we were, one big happy family: my father and my mother, both Yankee fans forever, their oldest son, a Sox fanatic, and The Baby, as I'm still known to this day, pulling for - Cincinnati?

Even though our loyalties were split, baseball had a way of pulling us close. There's a line in City Slickers, when Daniel Stern's character, the nerdy and neurotic Phil, tells his buddies, "Whenever my father and I couldn't talk about anything else, we could always talk about baseball." I thought of that line throughout the playoffs this year whenever I found myself at home, lying on the couch, dialing my dad at 10 p.m. just to nitpick over Orlando Cabrera's laughable bunting skills or Curt Schilling's gutsy performance or A-Rod's vanishing act. Even now that it's over, any time there's a lull in our conversation, I know I can always bring up baseball and we can pick right back up.

My memories of Fenway are scattered but specific. I don't remember dates or even big moments from the games we saw, but I do remember how we never got to see the Yankees because it was much easier to see the Royals or Athletics or Tigers, and I remember the thrill of watching my dad bargain in the shadow of the Green Monster with scalpers for seats, and I can still see him with the stub of a pencil behind his ear, score book in his lap, showing me how to score a ground ball to second, 4-3, or a strikeout with a backward K, or a double with two lines at the top of the little box.

Over the years, as I moved from Washington, D.C., to South Carolina to New Jersey to New York, my interest in the Reds waned. I saw plenty of games at Yankee Stadium while living in Manhattan, but I always felt strange there. Sometimes I cheered for both teams, other times for neither. I felt as if I was cheating on someone, but I didn't know who it was until my last move.

Nobody was happier than my parents when I landed back in Boston. And then one night I had a date with a woman who told me she'd never been to Fenway, despite (and you might want to sit down for this) having gone to BU and having lived in Kenmore Square. So I took her. And she loved it. And, together, we became Sox fans. Together, for Game 4 of the World Series, we sat at home, and I was kneeling in front of our television, in a praying position, when Keith Foulke snared Edgar Renteria's ground ball and flipped to Doug Mientkiewicz, and I leaned over to hug my wife.

Big brother called at that exact moment from a Manhattan bar filled with Sox fans, and we both held our phones to our ears, speechless for a few seconds, not quite sure it had really happened or what to say. Of course, he couldn't resist one last dig: "Oh, so now you're a Sox fan?"

Dad called me at work the next day, and we went over the series play by play, gaffe by gaffe, hit by hit. He can have the Yanks. In fact, if he wants them, he can have the Reds, too.

Doug Most is the editor of the Globe Magazine.