Originally published May 5, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
You can pick up the paper, where each page is like a travelogue of trouble. You can turn on TV and watch society slide into the sewer. You can listen to radio as all these lonely shutins fill their daily quota of crank calls.
Or you can simply stand on a sidewalk, viewing a movieola of misery, people honked off about traffic, weather, taxes or the daily acts of incompetence thrown down by government, like some insane gauntlet intended to irritate you right out of your mind. Do any or all of this, and it is easy to get so depressed you might end up tying your shoes with your chin.
That’s why God gave us the Red Sox and Bruins. Both teams are around and playing well in order to send us a message: Lighten up, stupid!
It is amazing but true that when the Olde Towne Team is up, so is the city, the entire sixstate region for that matter. People feel better about themselves and the madness around us when Clemens has the heater working, when Mo is hitting and Timmy Naehring is out there regularly, bringing hustle and a smile to each evening’s labor.
Face it: It’s easier to put the violence on the shelf for a couple hours when you have baseball’s best team so far operating out of the little ballpark in the Fenway. When that happens, you can send your brain to the bullpen for a breather.
Like the other night the evening of the great fight, begun by some fool from Seattle who obviously knows nothing about the sport he plays for a living. Forget all this goober malarkey about the trauma it can cause in a young fan’s mind.
Baseball hasn’t had a legitimate fight since Billy Martin smacked the marshmallow salesman, barside. And the last great bout that took place between the lines was probably Bill Lee versus Graig Nettles. That’s when Lee got the nickname Kid Candle due to the fact that one blow and he was out.
Tuesday, when this moron Mariner charged the mound and Paul Quantrill, was no brawl. It was mud wrestling without the water; sort of fightlite.
But a truly wonderful thing took place: Nearly every member of the Red Sox came out scratching, ran right on to the field to support their guy. Mo Vaughn was first man in, picking ballplayers out of a pile as if they were Kleenex and he was on litter patrol. Clemens, a $5 million contract in his pocket, showed he wasn’t afraid to get his uniform dirty.
The crowd loved it. It was terrific theater. Nobody got hurt badly, choked on a plug of tobacco, got his shirt ripped or had his big toe spiked, the most common injury during baseball fights.
Why, it was so exciting that Mr. Terry Murray, the boss of Fleet Bank, stood up in his frontrow seat to check out the action. Mr. Murray and three other amiable suits with him in a field box were clearly taking in their very first Major League baseball game because all four nearly got booed out of the ballpark for interfering with Red Sox catcher Dave Valle as he attempted to grab a pop foul at the rail.
This resulted in the Mariners receiving the equivalent of four outs in one inning. In the banking world, this would be like giving a customer an extra 90 days to get the check for the car loan in the mail.
No matter. The Olde Towne Team won again. So the evening ended and yesterday began with the odd prospect of living in a city that belongs to a club with baseball’s best record.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Bruins hockey’s lunch bucket lookalikes had done it again to the Devils. Playing in the toxic waste site that is New Jersey, the locals went up two games to none by doing something that the other team that shares their building the Celtics hasn’t done in a long, long time: giving fans their money’s worth.
The two franchises the Red Sox and the Bruins currently have something in common: Both clubs show up and play hard until the final buzzer and the last out.
While this isn’t unusual on the Garden ice, it’s been a while since it has happened at Fenway and customers appreciate it because they know when athletes play like dogs. And they resent guys getting huge salaries who simply mail it in; when you pay for your seat, the last thing you want to see is somebody out there cheating you through indifference or laziness.
Certainly, none of this is going to interfere with reality or slow down the march of numbing madness around us. Kids will still shoot each other. Rwanda will still be drowning in blood. Death will keep on stalking Bosnia and Haiti. Politicians will continue to trim, lie and come up lacking the courage to do the right thing about almost everything that lands in their lap. But for a few shining spring moments, baseball and hockey have added a little light to our day. And there sure isn’t anything wrong with that.
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