Obscurorant 2.0

The Gator returns. Awesomeness ensues:

Always felt like I had Red Sox blood in me.”

Courtesy of Shorpy, one of my favorite photo blogs, the Royal Rooters at Shibe Park for the first game of the 1914 World Series.

I can see Truck Day on the horizon…

Goddam that was fun. Let’s do that again.

(more…)

I became a hard-core Red Sox fan in 1988. By hard-core I mean someone who followed the team on a daily basis (which in those pre-internet days meant reading actual box scores in the Baltimore papers and gobbling up the Globe sports sections Dad mailed me) and whose emotional state closely paralleled the team’s fortunes. In short, a fan, as in fanatic.

And so I suffered through the locust years. 1988. 1990. 1995. 1998. 1999. 2003. Post season failure after failure for the Red Sox. 2004 changed all that of course, a experience I’m still not able to adequately express in (digital) print.

So now in 2007 the Sox are making another trip back to the Serious. And it still feels like Christmas, my birthday, customer appreciation night at the Local, and a family wedding all wrapped up together.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this, or get over a feeling that a trip to the Big Dance is something magical and precious. I gobbled up 2004 like a fat kid let loose in Carvel but this one…?

This one I think I’m going to savor.

Hit it here.

From Shorpy, that most excellent (old) photo blog, a picture of Hank Gowdy, late of the Boston Braves.

Other Old-Timers: Oscar ‘Happy’ Felsch and The Babe mugging with John McGraw.

It’s Opening Day.

The Tizzle has just knocked in the first RBI for the 2007 season.

I feel better already.

UPDATE: Not that much better. Schilling just walked in a run…

UPDATE UPDATE: .. followed shortly thereafter by a leadoff triple  The Sox have yet to finish two innings of baseball this year and already my choler is rising. This is why I generally leaven my baseball watching with copious amounts of beer. It balances the humors as the Greeks might say.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: This also explains why much of my baseball viewing is done within the confines of the Local where any aberrant behavior (read: yelling at the television with occasional dancing) is kindly overlooked.