Up 3-0, 86 Years

Sox up 3-0 – if they blow this they will be the only team in MLB history to have collapsed worse than the 2004 Yankees. And the Sox aren’t just up 3 games to none: they have never been behind in the three games. They have won with the bat, the mound (Schilling and Pedro: ass-kicking machines), not the glove (8 errors in the first two games), and the immense confidence of a team that has now won 7 playoff games in a row against the other two of the three best teams in baseball.

Right now they look unbeatable, so if they somehow blew it, the force of the blow would leave a steaming crater in the Fenway earth that would be toxic to life for centuries to come – it would truly be the work of a Curse, or of quantum mechanics;

As a young man I watched the Red Sox lose to the Cardinals in seven games in 1967. I was a middle-aged unemployed writer in 1975 when they lost to Cincinnati in the most beautiful World Series ever played. In 1978 I raced home from work to see Bucky Dent’s home run disappear over the Fenway wall and make the Yankees division champions, ending Boston’s season.

So by 1986, when the Red Sox faced the Mets in the World Series, I had long since learned the lesson: In the end the Red Sox would lose.

My gloominess got me banished from watching at my girlfriend’s house. So it was that I was alone in my house on the night of Oct. 25, 1986, when I switched on the television to find Boston ahead in the 10th inning of Game 6 and one strike from victory.

And I succumbed and said the magic fatal words.

“I’m about to see the Red Sox win the World Series!” I exclaimed to my cat. I felt almost dizzy.

That instant of belief, of course, was what the universe was waiting for. It was as if a circuit suddenly closed and a signal had flashed instantaneously across space-time and into Shea Stadium. Within moments, a wild pitch had let in the tying run and Bill Buckner, the first baseman, let a ground ball through his legs, scoring the game winner. Two nights later the Red Sox lost the seventh and deciding game. Again.

What does this have to do with science? This is the science section, remember? Well, that is where the “quantum” part comes in.

About a century ago scientists began to realize that beneath the too, too solid veneer of what had passed for reality for 2,000 years there was some pretty funny and fuzzy business going on. Its central silliness is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which sets limits on what you can know about a subatomic particle. Knowing an electron’s velocity blurs its position, and vice versa.

….Before I uttered those magic words in my living room that night in 1986, the Red Sox existed in a limbo of neither winning nor losing.

But it’s easy to imagine that in baseball, where a quarter of an inch or a hundredth of a second can be the difference between a home run and a grounder to first, the Heisenbergian touch can have a profound effect, and my words – just the thought – were enough to collapse the wave function and the Red Sox. The branch of the universe in which the Red Sox are winners split away into some other parallel space, as near as an irrevocable breath, as unreachable as a black hole.

….I’d like to believe that I’ve served my time away from the games and that if the Red Sox can throw off the Yankee curse, maybe I can grow up to live without quantum anxiety, and so can my own daughter. Now that Boston is ahead, maybe I’ll start watching the Series.

If the Sox fall apart, you’ll know why. [NY Times]

Freak. Dipshit Sox fan.

Normally I dislike the Sox almost as much as I dislike the Yankees, and if the Sox win — even more especially if they sweep — THEY will be the winners, the team to beat, they will become insufferable and I will resent their skeevy asses all next year.

But for now I’m rooting for the sweep – as a fan of the game there’s nothing like a team firing on all cylinders, playing like it was meant to be, making it look easy, especially when they’ve been waiting for 86 years.