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Sports Q: What’s the loudest you’ve ever heard a ballpark or arena?
Share your ultimate "you had to be there" moment.
Welcome to Boston.com’s Sports Q, our daily conversation, initiated by you and moderated by Chad Finn, about a compelling topic in Boston sports. Here’s how it works: You submit questions to Chad through Twitter, Facebook, and email. He’ll pick one each weekday to answer, then we’ll take the discussion to the comments. Chad will stop by several times per day to navigate. But you drive the conversation.
What’s the loudest you’ve ever heard a ballpark or arena?
This question is an offshoot of one Bill James asked on Twitter this morning:
My answer to this was Shane Victorino with the 2013 Red Sox. I knew he was an accomplished player – he was a three-time Gold Glove winner with the Phillies, was a stalwart on the 2008 World Series championship team, and received Most Valuable Player votes in 2009 and ’11 – but by the time he got to the Red Sox he was 32 years old and seemed to be declining. Instead, he put together an outstanding all-around season despite missing 40 games, playing a masterful right field, hitting .294 with an .801 OPS, 15 homers and 21 steals, and seemingly doing something every day to help the Red Sox win.
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James got a lot of other outstanding answers to his question from Boston fans, among them Mike Lowell and Adrian Beltre (and even a vote for Dennis Seidenberg, a rock-solid defenseman on the Bruins’ ’11 Cup winner).
But thinking of Victorino made me think of something else: The loudest moments I’ve ever heard at a sporting event. I think Fenway Park after Victorino’s grand slam in the seventh inning of the clinching Game 6 of the ’13 ALCS against the Tigers is the loudest I’ve heard anything anywhere in life … and the beautiful coda to it all was the crowd of 38,000-plus singing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” in unison.
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Other times the roar of the crowd was startling and prolonged to the point that I’ll never forget hearing it live: David Ortiz’s grand slam in Game 2 of that same series; Trot Nixon’s walkoff homer off A’s pitcher Rich Harden in Game 3 of the 2003 ALDS; and Patrice Bergeron’s winning goal in OT (“Bergeron! Bergeron! Bergeron!”) in Game 7 against the Leafs in the first round of the ’13 Stanley Cup playoffs.
But what does everyone else think? What was the loudest you’ve ever heard a ballpark or arena? I’ll hear you in the comments.
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