Long-suffering Red Sox fans can use strike to advantage

by Beth Teitell
Thursday, August 22, 2002

I don't know if you saw the front-page headline in Saturday's Herald: ``Greed 1,'' it read, ``Fans 0.''

The story reported the players' decision to set an Aug. 30 strike date, and an accompanying editorial warned that players and owners are on a ``dangerous path.''

I'm no baseball expert, but I do know a thing or two about taking advantage of a lucky break when it's offered - and then getting the heck outta there - and it seems to me that maybe a strike wouldn't be so bad.

Sure, some fans might get so angry they'd never return, but after all the Red Sox nation has been through these past 80 odd years, wouldn't it be nice to take a breather from losing?

Wouldn't it feel good, if just for one year, to skip the dashed hopes of fall, the snatching of defeat from victory?

It would be delicious, no?, to remove the Bambino's power to curse us. Sorry Babe, but your little hocus-pocus is pointless now - we're not playing that game anymore!

``It's kind of like breaking up with someone before they get a chance to dump you,'' one commentator observed.

Well, that's what I thought, too, but then again, as someone who learns when home games are being played by checking the skies above Fenway for blimps, maybe I'm not as tuned into the fan psyche as I am to the scorned lover's.

So I called Dr. Harvey Dulberg, a sports psychologist, and he insisted that the ``die-hard fan still entertains hopes this team will turn it around.''

``Real Red Sox fans,'' he said, ``don't want a strike.''

True, but people in the grip of a delusion might not know what's good for them. Perhaps by editorializing against a cessation in play, as my own newspaper has, we're actually enabling the very fans we are trying to help.

As a bumper sticker would put it: ``Friends don't let friends root for the Red Sox.''

``Shouldn't we do an intervention?'' I asked Dulberg, ``And force a strike or a lockout, even if the two sides try to come together.''

The good doctor didn't see my point, but instead went off half-cocked about how ``great'' it would be if the Sox actually won the World Series.

``This city would never know a greater high,'' he said. ``The whole image of the Red Sox would change.''

He had a point there, but what would we do then?

As every woman knows, you've got to play to your strengths. If you've got good legs, you wear short skirts, even into your 80s. If you've got a bust, you buy your shirts tight. If hair's your thing, you keep it long and sexy.

Which is to say that if you're a Red Sox fan, your thing is ``long-suffering,'' and you go with that.

``What would people complain about if we actually won the World Series?'' I asked Dulberg.

Meanwhile, the strike deadline is just a little over a week away, which gives us time to get within striking distance of a playoff berth.

If they call a halt to the action on Aug. 30, when we're just a few games behind New York say, or in line for a wild card slot, we'll be all set: We can spend the next year griping about how we were robbed!

And for a Sox fan, what greater joy is there than that?