Volvo Ocean Racing In-harbor pro-am race day

Great day of sitting around watching others do all the work. No points towards the overall race, but a chance to see these amazing sailing craft in near full sail in a windy Boston Harbor.
All photos taken from shore using a 200mm telephoto lens on Nikon D300.

Road show

It was only right that I should show up to the Red Sox parade. Dashing off an article for this week’s paper on some not very interesting local politics, I dumped the car at Lincoln Station and took a commuter train packed to the gunnels with kids and young adults skipping school or work. Not for the last time that day did I feel old.

Police were out in force, some in riot gear, others regulation issue sun glasses. Others pacified dogs, eager to get in on the action. The crowd boisterous and vocal lobbed whatever they could find and officers would tolerate back and forth. If you needed toilet paper at one of the port potties then too bad. That was among the first missiles to decorate the roadway.

But it was a fun day, the parade passed quickly, but not quietly, and an iron grip descended on the crowd as it wrapped up. North Station was a zoo as massed ranks of weary travelers tried to unravel the station announcements and weave between dazed and tired fellow members of the Nation to reach the right platform.

It was a good day to claim allegiance to the home town team.

Thank you Red Sox

I really appreciate the Red Sox response to my last post. Thanks to everyone, life can get back to normal.

I can shift the pile of Globe sports reports that has been growing taller in their "lucky place" on the dining room chair since the turnaround win in Cleveland.

I no longer have the responsibility of watching games through to the end "just in case" because they lost game 2 and 3 to Cleveland when I retired early on those nights .

It was a great year and I actually got to see a game way back in April on supposedly "unlucky Friday 13th".
Boston beat the LA Angels 8:1 that night - the very team they swept in the AL Series later in September.

Lucky for them I was there to start things rolling.

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.