Stephen King: The Gloom is Gone in Mudville

[WilliamPitt]

It's Weird but True. The Gloom Is Gone in Mudville.
By STEPHEN KING

Published: April 3, 2005

It may still be March in the Northeast, with air as raw as hamburger and snow up to David Ortiz's belt buckle, but as the Boston Red Sox take the field against the St. Louis Cardinals here on the afternoon of March 16 for a World Series rematch, it feels like midsummer in Florida: the sunshine is hazy, the temperature is a humid 80 degrees and the clouds over the Gulf of Mexico promise thunderstorms later.

The crowd - it's standing room only today and every day during this year's brief exhibition season at City of Palms Park - is in a jolly mood. Jolly? Call it manic. These aren't your father's Red Sox fans. No longer are they o'ercast with sickly gloom; their faces are as bright as the day.

Very few Red Sox supporters have come to gloat over the considerable contingent of Cardinals partisans in attendance; most of these Sox fans are still reliving the dreamlike, four-game spurt that got their team to the Series in the first place. I spot one T-shirt with the triumphant line, "HEY NEW YORK! WHO'S YOUR DADDY NOW?" above the scores of all seven American League Championship Series games.

At the first Red Sox-Yankees matchup of the spring - a meaningless intersquad scrimmage that nevertheless saw prime tickets scalped for as much as $400 - some enterprising businessman gave out white athletic socks with red stains on them, promotions for a book called "Blood Feud: The Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Struggle of Good Versus Evil." I see several of these at the Sox-St. Louis game. One guy has his pinned to his T-shirt, like a knight errant (a rather overweight one, in this case) with the lady fair's scarf tied to his armor.

Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, do I hear that anxious spring training question: How do you think we'll do? The ones I do hear over and over make me feel slightly unreal, as if all this might be a dream I'm having while suffering from a mild fever: Wasn't it great? Wasn't it amazing? And the question the Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione asked on the air as Sox closer Keith Foulke flipped to Doug Mientkiewicz for the final out of the World Series: Can you believe it? It has taken almost the entire off-season, but it seems most of these fans, dressed in warm-weather clothes and speaking in their cold-weather New England accents, finally can.

All that happiness eventually gets on my nerves. Weird but true. The final giddy touch is hearing the announcer exhort the fans to stick around after the game and watch as the fellas from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" make over some of the Sox players. I need a shot of angst, and fast. I find it, of course, in the barn-sized press suite on the third floor. There may be joy in Mudville, but up here in Scribble City, where the air is rare (not to mention cooled to a nicety), there's the usual sportswriterly gloom as hot dogs and cold cuts are washed down with swallows of designer water. Some things never change.

...more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/sports/baseball/03king.html?

[Bullwinkle925]

1. Great read. Thanks for the post.

I can close my eyes and see the field of green now.

"PLAY BALL"!!