Underdirtdogs

I woke up this morning, inhaled deeply, and took stock of my life. All caught up on Dawson's Creek, hippest show on TV? Check. Awesome New Radicals single occupying the first spot on my latest mix tape? Oh yes. Tickets to see The Phantom Menace at midnight in a couple weeks? How dare you suggest I wasn't first in line, sir. How dare you.

I grabbed the latest print edition of my favorite newspaper and made a beeline for the sports section, flipping hurriedly to the baseball box scores. Ah yes, here we are, Yankees - Red Sox. Another ass drubbing, natch. 4 game sweep? You betcha. But wait - who is this manning first base? This isn't Jose Offerman, the AMAZING prodigal talent we replaced Mo Vaughn with. Pedroia? Youkilis? Where is Jeff Frye? Darren Bragg? MY WORLD IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

Ok, enough of that. It's not 1999, but it certainly seems like it these days for Sox fans. I know I'm not going to get a lot of sympathy here, nor do I really deserve it; 2 World Series championships in 4 years during the greatest stretch in Boston sports history strangely hasn't seemed to endear us to outsiders. I get it, I really do. But what a shock to the system to be pummeled back to earth so swiftly: an 8-14 record since the All Star break will do that, especially when the last 4 losses, all in a row, came to the hated Yankees, a team of villains that we had apparently solved already this year. Adam Kilgore at the Globe has compiled a succinct list of Sox related maladies and travesties that I would be hard pressed to top, or read all the way through again without tearing up. It's felt like "the old days" again recently - the ultimate underdogs, scraping and scrapping for every run, and failing to do so for 31 innings. Thirty one. Think about that for awhile. That's a run for every Baskin Robbins flavor. Futility, thy name is Boston's BA with RISP. And that's a shitty name. Much too wordy.

Friday night's game, which we lost in epic fashion, taking a full 15 innings to be ultimately disemboweled by a 2 run dinger hit by, of all people, Alex Rodriguez, was the kind of game that used to be the norm. The kind of gut wrenching, ball twisting, brow furrowing game that sent us home from bars numb and angry and confused, wondering how we would ever care again, how we could come back the next day or the next week or the next year when the result would just be the same. (And it was, more or less.) It was the kind of game you look back on in October and say to yourself, "That's where it unraveled."

So here we are, battling the Rays and Rangers for the wild card spot. If you told me either of those teams would be relevant to a playoff race 10 years ago, I would have laughed in your face and slowly wheeled you back to the psychiatric institution I must have been volunteering at. But it is what it is. Sports is cyclical, no? And in a way, it's comforting to know that I still have it in me to wail and gnash my teeth and moan that the sky is falling after a relatively minor losing streak in the middle of summer, in a decade where my always competitive baseball team has already won 2 big banners.

At least I still care. Sometimes that's the only thing we underdogs can hang on to.