The day the music died.
I cannot possibly explain what October of 2004 meant to Red Sox fans. I’ve tried before – to my mother, my wife, countless non-baseball or non-Red Sox fans. I’ve failed every single time. From my descriptions they understand how it made us feel, but they do not truly understand what it meant. I had hoped one day to try and relate it to my kids, and then, perhaps, to their kids. With practice, I could become better at it. I could do more than explain that while my father and I watched the first three losses of the ALCS at my apartment, he absolutely refused to come over for game four – deeming the combination of him, me, and the apartment bad luck. I could relate how I sat in my living room, in the ninth inning of game four, still wearing my gym clothes, drenched with over two hours of a failed attempt to stay away from the game by lifting ever-increasingly heavy objects over my head. The euphoria of Dave Roberts’ steal, the defiant “we will not be swept” of Big Papi’s home run in the twelfth inning; the glimmer of hope that all was not lost. Perhaps I could make them understand why I found it necessary to call my dad to “convince” him to come over for games five, six and seven, needing to hear him refuse, all the time wondering whether he was disappointed that he had raised an idiot who was so superstitious that he needed to repeat everything he did before game four for the rest of the games. My fears were unfounded – I was ten minutes late calling before game seven, and my dad (the most non-superstitious person I know) had thought I was in a car accident. He needed to have me call and ask him to come over just as much as I needed him to refuse. Perhaps I could one day relate the pure joy of watching that team win it all -- the joy, the relief, the pure happiness.
That task will be harder now. With yet another leak from the inappropriately named anonymous drug test list of 2003, we now know that at least two members of that Red Sox team had tested positive for steroids. Manny Ramirez was not a shock – the man just had a 50-game unscheduled vacation for failing a recent drug test.
David Ortiz – Big Papi – that, on the other hand, was a debilitating shock. Perhaps it is because I chose to be naïve, perhaps even stupid, but I had somehow hung on to the idea that he was clean. In an era when seemingly every big hitter and every big pitcher were on steroids, I chose to think that the guy most responsible (other than Dave Roberts) for those come-back wins was clean.
Some will say that it doesn’t matter. The Sox beat a Yankees team which had plenty of admitted steroid users as well. Some will say it was not illegal at the time (in the MLB) to use steroids. Some, undoubtedly, will argue that the 2003 tests do not relate to the 2004 result. None of it matters. What once was an almost indescribable emotion is now forever tainted.
And that, my friends, may be impossible to forgive.