It’s been a mediocre season at best for the Boston Red Sox and the only contest I saw from the stands was typically a loss. Yet April 15 was my best day at Fenway Park in four decades of attending games.
The Sox were clobbered by the Nationals 10 to 5, silence overwhelmed the usual noise of the crowd, and even with a scorecard it wasn’t always easy to tell one player from another. Superficially, it wasn’t the most triumphant experience for the hometown crowd.
Despite the generous birthday gift of my children that had me well-seated in the grandstand, I attended with trepidation after turning 60 the week before. Like any good Sox fan, I’m superstitious. The number 60 has an almost kabalistic significance corresponding at it does with Babe Ruth’s greatest season record—60 home runs hit for the 1927 Yankees. The southpaw was a Boston’s star pitcher until Sox ownership sent him to the arch rival New Yorkers after the 1919 season for a fistful of cash. It was baseball’s equivalent of original sin. It cursed the team, keeping them from a World Series crown between 1918 and 2004.
Regardless of my reservations, I attended the game gladly because it’s hard for a hometown fan to feel like a loser regardless of the score when you sit in century-old Fenway Park. It’s an emerald jewel of a
Under a cerulean spring sky the green-painted ballpark so glowed in sunlight that the axis of planet seemed to run through the pitcher’s mound and turn from this very spot. The grass was iridescently verdant, plush and flannel-like, the outfield mowed in a crosshatch pattern. The infield dirt was golden-red, like a seasoned catcher’s mitt.
Unfamiliar with the Nationals, and the Sox lineup having many new players, it would have been nice to check uniform numbers against my scorecard. But this was Jackie Robinson Day celebrating the date the hall of famer first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and began his brave and difficult demolition of baseball’s pernicious racial barrier. Every player wore and was introduced with the great man’s
For a few wistful, emotional moments I felt as if my late Brooklyn-raised father was beside me. A teenager when Robinson first appeared in the uniform of his beloved Dodgers, he thought I was good luck for the team since I was born on opening day at Ebbets Field in the only year Robinson and the Dodgers ever won the World Series.
Commemorating Robinson’s achievement was powerful, but the day’s soul-stirring crescendo was reached at 2:49 p.m. when the game was halted in remembrance of those killed and injured by the explosion of two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon two years ago to the second. The Public address announcer called for silence and for what seemed like minutes an eerie quiet hung in this usually frenzied
The game ended anticlimactically when Mookie Betts grounded to shortstop after taking a called strike, a couple balls, and fouling off a few pitches. In these days when fans don’t seem enough and stadium sound systems artificially broadcast clapping and cheers, some people think silence is for losers. But the winning sound at Fenway Park this season was not the crack of the bat, the pop of a ball into a glove or the sing-song of barkers hawking beer and hotdogs to a joyful crowd. The most electrifying sound at Boston’s famed ballpark in 2015 was silence, a deep and profound silence.