October Baseball
If you were to ask me what period of my life I could live again, I would choose the month of October in 2004.
By the end of September that year, I was 18-years-old and knee-deep in my growing collection of newspapers that captured the end of Boston's ā04 regular season. It was also the end of my difficult formative years - years that baseball always made a little easier.Ā
I still remember the first time I caught a glimpse of a game as a freshman. I'd stormed into my bedroom, slammed my door, turned up my radio, and mindlessly flipped through my TV until an expansive vibrant green made me stop.Ā
It was the outfield at Fenway, and despite the thousands of people in the stands, the entire park was buzzing with an electric silence. There was an intensity that creased along the playersā faces and people in the stands. It grabbed me just enough to leave my TV on that station. It stayed there for days, weeks, months - always flickering beneath the music and yelling and mess.
That's how it happened. That's how I fell in love with the game. It was the same way we fall for anything or anyone else - accidentally and out of nowhere.
I loved the patience of the game. The quiet tension that builds for a few innings or hours and how it all comes down to one pitch or swing of the bat. I loved the line drives and diving catches and dirt that takes over the white uniforms. The cold postseason games. The bottom-of-the-ninth, 2-out, bases loaded pitch. I loved the sound of a ball cracking off a bat and how it could bring an entire city to its feet while silencing another.
Looking back now, I know it was more than just the sport. I know it was the human condition at play - the need to connect and belong.Ā
So I fell in love with the game instead of a boy or girl. I was a product of a world in which loneliness and dysfunction prevailed. Baseball was at the other end of that, and it brought me a sense of community and faith and love all combined within the greatest game.
And that's it.
That's the whole entire ballgame folks and thesis of my post and why I'd choose to relive a moment of time that was built around a team.
We were all just kids when the game took over us. When our subconscious connected and transferred our deepest inner selves onto a story that was so much bigger than any of us.Ā
For some, a team represents time with their father. Their grandmother. Their experiences through life - both beautiful and painful.
Boston's stumble into the '04 post-season with a wildcard was how I'd gotten through most difficult events in my life: barely.Ā
Their complete collapse and abrupt rise within the 7 games of the '04 ALCS was an imperfect reflection of my entire adolescence.Ā
Their World Series win and triumph over an 86-year-old superstition was so palpable that I still, fifteen years later, tear up and get chills when I look at photos of the old fans who cried during that final World Series out.
I'd watched all of those '04 games with my best friends - three lively New England boys who'd endured their own chaos. We were kids, yet we were just coming to a point where we could actually feel like kids again instead of makeshift adults. Those games were the heart of it - the campfire that we always congregated around for years.Ā
Two of them have since died from overdoses. The third has drifted.
That October was one of the greatest times the four of us had ever spent together. To get those games and moments and friends back would be impossible. But I can still feel traces of them and us in games today.Ā
For some, a sport is irrevocably tangled with their past.Ā Peel back the layers of the human condition, and you'll find that It's never just a game. It's something so much deeper and meaningful to hundreds of thousands of strangers. Thatās what makes it such a beautiful, collective experience.
Itās part of what makes baseball the greatest sport of all time. Especially in October.Ā














