I Bet Those Grapes Were Fucking Delicious

As I expected, a Boston fan - the estimable Yank in Texas - has accused me of being a sore loser after my previous post.

I resent that. Really. In any contest, whether as a participant or an interested spectator, I pride myself on being a good sport. I feel I went out of my way not to be a sore loser, to simply and honestly express the way I was feeling after what were up until now my two favorite teams played one another in the World Series. Back in 2004, I was rooting for the Red Sox to win when I went to see them at Coors Field, because in deciding between two teams I loved, I chose the one that was in the midst of a Wild Card chase and had a shot at the division title, the playoffs and the World Series over the one that was wallowing in craptacularity and headed for its third straight 4th-place finish in the NL West.

In the days leading up to the Series, I really expected that if the Red Sox won, I would come away from it thinking, "Well, the Rockies may have lost, but at least the Sox won." Over the course of five days and four games, I really surprised myself by coming to despise Boston (the team, not the town, which remains awesome) and, to borrow a line from an e-mail from my brother, "wishing them ill."

To be a sore loser is to say, "We deserved to win" and make excuses for why we didn't. To say that the grapes were probably sour anyway, as it were. Eric Byrnes was being a sore loser during the NLCS when he griped about how the D'Backs were outplaying the Rockies but still losing.

The Rockies were outclassed and outplayed by a vastly superior baseball team, and I'll make no bones about it. Yankees North were the better team by far and deserved the win.

But they're a long way from the feel-good story of 2004. There's nothing to feel good about here, no breakthrough for the long-suffering underdog, no triumph for a team that did anything more noteworthy than pay more than anybody else. For fuck's sake, they paid $3 Million less than the Rockies' entire payroll for the season just for the right to talk to Dice-K, and that number doesn't even figure into their actual payroll total.

There's an immense dishonesty in the way Boston continues to sell itself - and, more to the point, the way their fans continue to see the team - as the Anti-Yankees, when nothing could be further from the truth. The ghosts of the past have all been exorcised, whether you were a believer in the Curse of the Bambino or just one who marveled at how one team could find a way to bungle every World Series appearance for 86 years. Boston fans will no doubt continue to see their team as a scrappy underdog always struggling to beat the Evil Empire from the Bronx, but it just ain't so. In their desperation to beat the Yankees, the Red Sox have become the Yankees. Nietzsche said, "Whoever would fight with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." Boston failed that test; they're the Evil Empire, too, now, just as much as Steinbrenner's pinstripes.

I congratulate them for winning the Series, fair and square. But I can't be a fan anymore. That's all. No sour grapes, no protests that they didn't deserve to win, no accusations of cheating. Just a sad realization that a team I loved doesn't exist anymore.