It’s Hard To Explain To Normal, Healthy People What Just Happened To Blue Jays Fans
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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New York Yankees
1 min read
Linked in the article (65 min read)
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2004 American League Championship Series
13 min read
The article references the 2003 ALCS heartbreak and mentions the 2004 Red Sox 'idiots' team. The 2004 ALCS is one of the most historic comebacks in baseball history, where the Red Sox became the first team to overcome a 3-0 series deficit, directly following the painful 2003 loss described in this article.
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Knuckleball
16 min read
The article pivots on Tim Wakefield's knuckleball that 'didn't quite knuckle enough' leading to Aaron Boone's walk-off home run. Understanding the physics and unpredictability of this unusual pitch explains why it's both a devastating weapon and an enormous risk in high-pressure situations.
Back in the fall of 2003 the Red Sox, who at the time hadn’t won a World Series since 1918, were making a deep run. So deep, in fact, that they were one Game 7 away from the World Series. Not only that, but the team standing in our way — yes, our way — was our archrival, the New York Yankees.
Red Sox-Yankees is supposed to be one of the most intense rivalries in sports, but for years it was a rather lopsided one. During our nearly century-long drought, the Yankees racked up TWENTY-SIX World Series titles. So by the time the 2003 American League Championship Series began, the rivalry meant a hell of a lot more to us than it did to them.
I was attending Brandeis University at the time. I tagged along with a high school friend and some other kids to go watch Game 7 on a big screen in a large auditorium at Boston University, probably because we just wanted to watch in a large crowd and mostly couldn’t get into bars (Boston takes, or at least took, a Stasi-like attitude toward underage drinking, in terms of carding policies). A lot of New York kids come to Boston for college, so unfortunately, while the auditorium was mostly Sox fans, there was a large contingent of Yankees fans in the back. Mostly sex offenders, I can only assume.
I am no longer a big Red Sox fan. Baseball was always my third-favorite sport to watch, behind the NFL and NBA (outside of hockey, which I don’t really watch, college sports barely exist in the Boston sports universe), and as I got older I found I just didn’t have it in me to keep up. Back then, though, I was, like perhaps a million other greater Boston residents, deeply invested in the 2003 Red Sox. We had our stars: Anyone with even a passing awareness of recent baseball history will remember Pedro Martinez (watching him pitch was a sui generis experience as a sports fan), Manny Ramirez (one of the top hitters of his era, as well as a bit of a wildman — “Manny being Manny” was a catchphrase back then when he did something weird, like disappear into the Green Monster without explanation), Nomar Garciaparra (a very good hitter in his own right, but a diligent, consummate professional rather than a wildman),
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