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The Last Stage of Elimination

Oct. 12, 2006 -- As the baseball world bid good winter to another four teams this past Columbus Day weekend, Red Sox partisans had cause to reflect on our team’s own mortality. Is elimination easier to accept when it comes quick and without warning as at the hand of a wild card limping into the postseason, or after a long and painful bout with woeful pitching and anemic hitting?

For Bostonians, last Saturday’s Yankee Elimination Day was like a second holiday in the same three-day weekend. But for long-suffering Yankees fans whose last October triumph predates those of both the Red Sox and White Sox, it is a hard swallow. When your roster is full of All-Stars, future Hall-of-Famers, and home run derby champions, and your Number 8 hitter is a two-time MVP with a $25 million salary, you must win. The lofty expectation is a small price to pay for a table tilted so much in your favor, for an economic ability to acquire any player you want and retain every player you acquire. Nevertheless, Yankee Fan’s pain is of little concern in New England. We have our own.

September 23 marked the mathematical elimination of our 2006 Boston Red Sox, but their spiritual exodus occurred long before. Agonizingly long before. It may have come a month earlier, when Mark Loretta lined out to Robinson Cano and sealed the Yankees’ five-game sweep, or perhaps nine days later in Oakland as Curt Schilling was chased off the mound during the low-water mark of a 2-7 road trip. It was different for everybody, that personal epiphany that our Friends in The Fens were a not-so-cheap imitation of an AL pennant contender, a malnourished frame to which National Leaguers and the Baltimore Orioles added ten pounds much like television does to bulimic actors.