I awoke to the excited buzzing of text messages from my sister who lives in New England, three hours ahead of my home in San Francisco. Family emergency? No, it was the happiest news a Boston Red Sox fan could imagine at the end of yet another dismal season. Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom had finally been fired, after three losing seasons, this last being a furious race to the bottom of the American League East against the New York Yankees, who had to settle for second worst team in the division.

I ran downstairs, grabbed my Red Sox flag, and hung it from our front balcony. On Opening Day, with all signs pointing to an epically painful season, I’d hung it upside down to signal a Red Sox Nation in distress and now, finally, there was reason to fly it right side up in hopeful celebration. I went across the street to take a picture of it. A man from the landscaping crew that keeps the house two doors up looking like a spread in Fine Gardening approached me. He spoke with a Mexican accent. “Very nice.”

“No kidding!” I said. “Three long years, we’ve had to watch Bloom destroy the team and now, at last, he’s been fired.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Your house, Señora. It looks very nice.”

He was talking about the paint job. I should have left it at that, but in the delirium of myopic joy, it did not occur to me that the entire world had not stopped to honor Bloom’s departure. “The Red Sox. See the logo on the flag? Terrible executive, three losing seasons. He got fired today.”

“Oh, okay.” 

I can’t blame him for not sharing my happiness. There are many things not to understand about being a Red Sox fan, starting with why be a fan at all. This is a team whose history includes an 86-year drought in World Series championships, a condition believed to have been brought about by the so-called Curse of the Bambino, punishment to the team for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918. This is a team whose star pitcher, Pedro Martinez, during a bench-clearing brawl in 2003 grabbed the head of a 72-year-old Yankees coach and threw him to the ground. On national television. This is the team that has played Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline in the bottom of the eighth inning at every home game since 1997 because the best friend of the employee who chose game music that day had just given birth to a baby girl named Caroline. This is the team whose owners were so desperate to fill seats as this train wreck of a season ground to a halt that they designated a game in September as Barbie Night at Kenway – get it? Kenway? – and promised pink t-shirts to those in attendance. Even the team-paid on-air announcers were embarrassed.

It’s hard to explain. It’s like when you voice a deeply held religious belief to a friend and the friend turns to you, incredulous, and says, “You really believe that?”

One dreary February evening some years back, I was working late at my desk in San Francisco City Hall when the Jamaican custodian came in to empty the trash. He asked how my day was going. “Great,” I said, turning my computer screen around so he could see a photo of people standing knee-deep in snow waving at an 18-wheeler big rig. “It’s Truck Day!”

“What’s that?”

“Truck Day. The day the Red Sox equipment truck leaves Fenway Park in Boston to make the trip to spring training in Florida.”

“Oh, okay. It’s a holiday.”

“Well, in Boston it is. The fans stand on the street in front of the ballpark and wave good-bye to the truck.” I pointed to the photo as if that would make it all make sense.

It didn’t. “The players are in the truck?” he said.

“No, just the equipment. Bats and balls. Uniforms. Gloves. Sunflower seeds. That kind of stuff.”

“There’s nobody in the truck?”

“Well, the truck driver.”

His eyes narrowed. “But they wave to the truck?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy.” This from a man whose tropical island country has an Olympic bobsled team. You want to talk about crazy? “Why do they do that?”

Why, indeed? Because sports fans do crazy things. You may as well ask why Green Bay Packers fans don hats made to look like giant wedges of cheese. Why Los Angeles Angels fans clutch stuffed toy monkeys at games. What about those squares of terry cloth that teams throughout professional sports distribute for fans to whip over their heads to show support, as if just paying the exorbitant price of a ticket isn’t enough?

And that’s where the real craziness lies, in how much we spend being fans of teams owned by billionaires in sports played by millionaires. Take me, for instance. Admittedly, I could save a lot if I just embraced the Giants, but even after living here for forty-some years, I have never figured out the West Coast style of fandom, which seems to involve supporting your team only when it is doing well and coming home from a game smelling like you rolled in raw garlic.

To fully participate as a Red Sox fan living on the West Coast, here’s how it nets out: I must subscribe to Directv (basic package $183.92 a month) because it is the only provider that offers a regional sports package (another $13.99 a month) that allows me to watch NESN, the Sox’s official broadcast partner. That gets me the pre- and post-game shows, but to see actual games, I also need the MLB package ($149.94 for the season). Then, there’s the digital subscription to the Boston Globe, so I can read the coverage of the disaster I have just watched unfold the night before ($12.00 a month). 

Not counting the flag and the flagpole, that’s almost $2700 a year to watch Red Sox owners John Henry (net worth $5.1 billion), Tom Werner ($1.7 billion), and Sam Kennedy (a paltry $315 million) allow Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom to trade away beloved home-grown talent, like Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, while Chris Sale was paid $29 million and change to pitch eleven games in between injuries. $2700 a year to watch manager Alex Cora make the same post-defeat speech game after game. “Yeah, well, we were swinging the bats pretty well, but our pitching wasn’t where it needs to be.” 

The day after the 2023 season mercifully ended with the Red Sox in last place for the second year in a row, the ownership announced it would be raising ticket prices, already the highest in Major League Baseball, for the fourth year in a row.

How can that be? Won’t the season ticket holders refuse to renew? Won’t single ticket buyers stay home? Ownership isn’t worried about fan loyalty. Why? Because their jewel of a ballpark is one of the most popular for baseball tourists and fans of opposing teams who want to be able to say they saw a game at Fenway.  So what if the people who fill the seats are not Red Sox fans? In the craven collective mind of the ownership, it makes no difference who occupies a seat, be it a lifelong fan who has supported the team through thick and – mostly –thin, or a tourist. A ticket sold is a ticket sold. 

Feeling as I do, have I cancelled Directv and gone with a provider whose latest promotion will save me over $100 a month? No. Have I cancelled auto-renew on the MLB package? No. Will I stuff the flag in the darkest corner of my darkest closet or cut it into dust cloths? Of course not. Somewhere around the first week of February 2024, I will need it to announce to my neighbors that it is Truck Day.

Crazy.

…