Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Red Sox are the 2013 World Series champions!! It was great to see them win the title so decisively, at Fenway for the first time in 95 years. My grandfather, Bill Doonan, who loved the Sox, was 14 the last time they did it, and it was the only World Series win he saw in his lifetime. I had to wait four decades to see them win it. Consider that Red Sox fans who are only 11 years old today have seen their team win the World Series three times in their lifetimes. The team spirit this year has been a joy to be part of, considering they ended last season dead last in the league. The Red Sox, unlike the Yankees, allow players to wear beards, and just before the season started a few players (Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes and Dustin Pedroia are given credit) decided not to shave. The idea took hold that if “playoff beards” can work for the Boston Bruins, who won the Stanley Cup in 2011 for the first time in 39 years, it could work in baseball too. The Sox started winning games, and pretty soon the rest of the players grew in their beards (as best they could, in some cases). Just as each player has his own unique personality, so each beard had a very distinctively style, and a game went up on the official Red Sox website where you could match the silhouette of the beard to its owner. Fans caught the wave and started to wear beards both real and fake, and by the time of the Series fake beards appeared on everything: buses, Wally the Green Monster, and even the venerable statue of Paul Revere! “Fear the beard!” was the slogan. It’s been a great gimmick and a lot of fun. I noticed that during games the crowd spontaneously sang the chorus from Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” possibly in response to a prompt from the PA (“Don’t worry about a thing”). It was a new thing to me, and I think it is wonderful. It seems to me “every little thing is gonna be alright” is a great pick-me-up for a team, and a good attitude for the community, and us all, to have.