{"id":501,"date":"2004-02-19T13:33:47","date_gmt":"2004-02-19T18:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=501"},"modified":"2015-11-07T07:55:50","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T12:55:50","slug":"the-we-of-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=501","title":{"rendered":"The “We” of Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bambino’s Curse has a great post about the “we” and the “us” of baseball fan-dom<\/a>. A commenter had asked: “We? Our? I don’t understand the use of personal pronouns on any of these posts. Are any of you members of the Red Sox or the Yankees?”<\/p>\n

He answers this question thoroughly and perfectly. Fans do feel that they “own” their respective teams. For all kinds of different reasons.<\/p>\n

For me, being a Red Sox fan is part of the culture I grew up in, the same thing as being Irish, being Catholic, and coming from a Boston family. I still can remember my first jaunts to Fenway Park, as a kid, with my uncles, my cousins. My memory of 1976 and Carlton Fisk’s home run are still vividly emblazoned in my mind. I jump up and down and cheer when they win. I sink into sadness when they lose.<\/p>\n

Like ALL fans who really love the game.<\/p>\n

Yankee fans don’t have a monopoly on loving their team.<\/p>\n

But the post I point to says it perfectly:<\/p>\n

So when I consider the Boston Red Sox, I’m not only conjuring up objective facts of the team, the wins and losses, the errors, the fantastic plays, the pine tar on Trot Nixon’s batting helmet \u0085 I’m also twitching upon the thread of who I am, the trips to Fenway with my dad, the muddy corduroy pants of 6th grade recess when my friend Andy Audet reenacted Doyle’s slide in Game 6 of the ’75 World Series\u0085 Seeing the “B” logo on a cap invokes the sound of my friend John’s soft, Maine accent reenacting a game over the phone \u0085 seeing the green expanse of Fenway on TV brings me back to a lazy summer Saturday afternoon when my dad brought home our first color set and how we couldn’t wait to watch the Sox in color, with Curt Gowdy’s voice like Gabriel carrying the word of God \u0085<\/p>\n

These are some of the things that are the I and the We and the Us and the Ours of the Boston Red Sox. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“twitching on the thread of who I am”. Very nice.<\/p>\n

Good work. Especially the bit about the “muddy corduroy pants at 6th grade recess”. I think I had the same pants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bambino’s Curse has a great post about the “we” and the “us” of baseball fan-dom. A commenter had asked: “We? Our? I don’t understand the use of personal pronouns on any of these posts. Are any of you members … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[2401,25],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109848,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/109848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}