Walk Off

You want to know why I love basball? Watch this clip. The first ball is low and away. I sighed. I was at a bar drinking dollar beers, with my hands folded like I was praying. I was the only one rooting for the Sox, and, as usual, the bars were filled with slews of useless Yankee fans; this year, they are significantly quieter.

I'd been useless the whole night. I couldn't hit on girls, because I knew that nothing they were going to say was going to keep my attention from the game if something big happened. Some broads, I have found out, consider this "insulting".

If you freeze that clip at 31 seconds in, it is why baseball is, and always will be, America's game. There are 38,000 fans in that stadium, and they all have their own sets of problems. They have their own addictions, hopes, dreams, dissapointments. Their fathers have died, their kids are in college and they don't know how they're paying for it, the mortgage is due and their husband just got laid off. There's a few million more Red Sox fans watching in bars across the country, like me. We have problems with women, we don't know where our lives are going, and we are paranoid for the world.

But at 31 seconds into that clip, Manny hammers that ball and it flails towards the Charles River like it was shot from a brass cannon, and the crowd stands and roars with their hands up and I punch my hand and scream at the TV "GET OVER! GET OVER!" and a million guys in a million bars are yelling and dying and "Dirty Water" begins to blare over the massive Fenway speakers and Manny comes around third and flips his helmet off and leaps onto David Ortiz and the team mobs him and jumps up and down on home plate... and for ten seconds, just ten seconds... our problems are gone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZPA54T3hS4


"It feels great, man. It's been a long time I don't do something special like that. But I haven't been right all year round. But I guess, you know, when you don't feel good and you still get hits, that's when you know you are a bad man." - Manny Ramirez


Damn right you are Manny. And Red Sox Nation loves you for it. I love October.