Fate at Fenway
THIS WAS supposed to be a normal season, a year when Red Sox fans could follow their team the way other fans do, without an 86-year string of broken hopes turning every close game into a test for the defibrillator. After last fall's World Series victory, there would be no need to stay up late watching night games from Seattle or Oakland. Non-fan spouses would not have to check the schedule magnet-clamped to the refrigerator before making weekend plans. You could take a late-summer vacation in Europe without furtively seeking out the Internet cafe in Montefalco for a Sox fix.
But old habits die hard. The midseason stumbling of the Yankees after the fading of the Baltimore Orioles raised a whole new possibility: that the Sox would become downright dominant in the Eastern Division. This was a different story line, a reversal of the endlessly repeated David versus Goliath chronicle that reached its happy conclusion in Yankee Stadium, and then in St. Louis, last October.
How would it be possible to follow the Sox as though they were a normal team, winning championships now and again, if they were doing something so completely revolutionary, not just winning the World Series but leaving the Yankees far behind in the East, to the point where they, not the Sox, would have to scramble to secure the wild card spot in the playoffs?
That new narrative, of course, came apart over the past month, undone by the Sox' inconsistent pitching and sudden droughts of clutch hits and by an impressive Yankee surge. The season that began in April at Yankee Stadium now dramatically ends -- unless there is a one-game playoff Monday -- this weekend at Fenway. The games here will decide who wins the East, a division title so closely contested that neither club can speak of dominance. Both teams and their fans will also have an eye on Cleveland -- luckily, in the same time zone -- where the Indians will be playing the Chicago White Sox in games that will help determine whether the also-ran in the East will get the wild card slot.
The story line now is not David/Goliath, not a permanent changing of the guard in the East, but the meeting of two high-payroll collections of professionals -- each with an MVP candidate in its lineup but weak spots in its pitching rotation -- to play games 160, 161, and 162 of the season in baseball-nutty Boston. For any fan whose attempt to follow the Sox in a normal way includes a trip to Italy this week, that Internet cafe in Montefalco is just off the town's main Piazza del Comune.
