The Red Sox’ 2004 title was a shared experience, yes. But it was a deeply personal one, too.
“It was all worth it.”
The Red Sox’ 2004 World Series championship had — and 20 years later, still and forever has — enduring meaning in so many ways.
It was about faith, kept and rewarded. It was about redemption, catharsis, and the ultimate fulfillment of fandom. It was about trusting that just the right mix of players — extraordinarily talented, necessarily goofy, and willing to battle history with everything they had even when doubts lingered like ancient ghosts — would eventually unite and deliver.
Most of all, more than anything ever around here, it was about what unites us as sports fans: the shared experience.
Where were you when the Red Sox overcame the Yankees with four consecutive exhilarating, exhausting victories after falling behind three games to none in the American League Championship Series?
Who were you with when the Red Sox swept the Cardinals in four, a World Series that somehow managed to be both anticlimactic and the realization of everything you’d ever wished for but never thought you’d experience with this franchise?
How did you watch? Whom did you call? Where did you laugh? When did you cry?
What did you do to mark the occasion at the moment of catharsis, at “stabbed by Foulke” and “Red Sox fans have longed to hear it” and “Can you believe it?”
Me, I scooped my snoozing 8-month-old daughter out of her crib and held her in my arms for the World Series’ final out, just to be able to tell her someday that I had.
Then I called my father. My season of indoctrination into Red Sox Nation was 1978, when I was 8, and Jim Ed, El Tiante, Eck, Pudge, and Butch — especially Butch, third baseman Butch Hobson, who played baseball with the maniacal spirit of a special-teams gunner — became not just larger than life, but the focus of my life. You might have heard about the ending to that season, which was not the one my unscathed 8-year-old mind had anticipated.
When Yaz’s popup settled into weaselly Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles’s glove for the final out of Game 163, I turned to my dad next to me on our old plaid couch and asked him one of the earliest of the many moronic questions this future sportswriter would ask in his lifetime.
“How do they feel?” I said.
“Like [expletive],” said Dad, in a voice that told me he was somewhat less surprised than I was that the breaks did not go the Red Sox’ way.
The conversation was somewhat different on Oct. 27, 2004, though his language, and mine, was just as colorful. I don’t recall all of the conversation, but I do recall something we immediately agreed upon.
“It was all worth it,” he said. “All of it.”
My dad died in April, after a meandering illness suddenly sped up on him. In his last days, on every one of them, he would ask how the Red Sox were doing, even in winter. I don’t think he ever forgot a detail about October 2004.
My dad, who brought home multiple newspapers every day when I was a kid and was pretty sure Messrs. Gammons and Ryan were writing directly to him, is a reason I am here at the Globe, pecking out my nonsense directly to you.
So too are the 2004 Red Sox, in a way. When I came to the Globe in December 2003, it was for a copy editing and page layout gig. No writing, which was swell right up until the next October. The Red Sox went out and won the World Series, something I waited my entire life to experience, and wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t have an outlet to write about it.
So I started a blog. I would get home from my night shift on the sports copy desk at 3:30-ish a.m., keep an eye on my daughter, and write until my wife got up in the morning.
Listen to “The Curse Breakers”
This special podcast miniseries revisits the 2004 Red Sox, a team of misfits and underdogs known as the “Idiots” — who defied the odds to break the curse that had loomed over Fenway Park for 86 years. With insights from Dan Shaughnessy, Stan Grossfeld, Terry Francona, Johnny Damon, and Kevin Millar, go behind the scenes of one of the greatest sports stories ever told.
Listen to “The Curse Breakers” below or on Apple, Spotify, or Amazon.
After I’d been doing it for about a year, the sports editor called me into his office one day.
“So,” he said. “I hear you’ve got a blog.”
Keep in mind, “blog” was about as popular a term as “Craigslist” in print newsrooms in those days.
I said it was true, and it was just an outlet to write about baseball.
“You can keep it,” he said. “Just as long as you’re not ripping Shaughnessy on there or anything.”
When Boston.com expanded in late 2008, the guy with the little baseball blog was moved over to writing. No one has run me out of town yet.
Because I wasn’t a reporter in ‘04, I could afford to be a little more of a fan. Like you, I had my little superstitions, and my big ones, and maybe some dumb ones too.
I was working on the desk the night the Red Sox remained breathing with David Ortiz’s walk-off extra-inning home run in Game 4. Upon arriving back in my neighborhood at the usual miserable hour, a neighbor’s house with a massive Yankees flag above the front door caught my eye.
Fueled by too many Mountain Dews, an inkling of hope, and staggering immaturity for an adult, I rolled down the window of my Toyota and blasted “Tessie” by the Dropkick Murphys while driving slowly by at approximately 3:27 a.m.
When the Red Sox won Game 5, too, on an Ortiz walkoff single in extras, well, it would have been bad luck not to do it again, right? And again, after Game 6, because it was working. I can’t recall if I did it again after Game 7. But I do remember that the Yankees flag was gone the next day, never to be seen again.
Yahoo behavior? Oh yes, absolutely. But that’s how we had to be. The Red Sox made us this way. We had no choice.
It does not require a milestone anniversary such as this one to bring this team happily to mind. So many of the players are still prominent, either in the media or around Fenway. And their greatest feats are never far from our thoughts. It still astounds me, in the most joyous kind of way, that Ortiz, Big Papi, came through in all of the ways, over and over again, that so many true greats before him could not. He is far from the best player in Red Sox history. But he is the best thing to ever happen to the Red Sox.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about smaller details, too. How Alan Embree is perhaps the most unheralded clutch member of that team. Or how there are very few people on earth other than Pokey Reese whom I would want in charge of fielding the ground ball to vanquish the Yankees.
And I think we’ve all been thinking about time’s effects, and how life’s heartbreaks have found them. Their lives have changed, as ours have.
Tim Wakefield, the quintessential Red Sox player in all the right ways, died last October, and David McCarty this past April. The many reminiscences as the anniversary of winning the 2004 World Series approaches have reminded us of much — the assorted timeless highlights from that glorious, redemptive October 20 years ago, of course. But also of how strong the bond remains among those who were One of the 25, and how deeply those who are no longer here are missed.
I didn’t get to write about the 2004 Red Sox when they won. It’s been a privilege to write about them in all the years since, especially today. The gratitude for what they did for Boston, for what they did for us, will last until my final memory.
Now if you don’t mind, I think I might just cue up “Tessie.” And maybe go for a drive.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com