Wearing down the fan

Red Sox and Fox, you are running me ragged.

Game start times in late evening, extended innings and nail-biting finishes are giving me a serious case of nervous exhaustion.

Soccer cup competitions, with extra-time and penalty shootout formula are tense, but quickly over in comparison.

In baseball, every pitch is a potential disaster or delight, for hour after hour. No wonder everybody in the ballpark drinks or eats to distraction or spits whatever they spit (and that seems to vary as much as each game).

Perhaps it’s that I don’t understand the nuance of the sport, that it’s OK to throw a ball instead of a strike to certain hitters, or to hit a sacrifice and be out. But I see the same tensions ebbing and flowing on the faces of thousands of fans, players and coaching staff. Commentators and journalists refer to it as ‘the changing momentum’ and boy is it fickle.

Even with the Sox sitting on a commanding lead, I still expect them to blow it in late innings, and I’ve only lived here for the past for seven years, perhaps the most successful since their early years.

I cannot imagine how lifelong fans deal with each experience building on the past, like grains of sand in a sandcastle that is inevitably washed away as the tide turns.

So please stop it. Go Denver and win two more jut like 2004 in St Louis. Please, I need to feel better than this and so do the rest of Boston and the grandiose Red Sox Nation.