WEEKDAY MATINEE AT FENWAY PARK

The last time I attended a weekday matinee at a ballpark was long ago and far away: April 29, 1983 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, to be exact. I was a grad student at Notre Dame at the time and drove up from South Bend with a friend to meet my brother who was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago at the time. I don’t recall much about the game: mostly I remember just that the day was miserably cold and rainy and that the hometown Cubs were an embarrassment in a 4-3 loss to the Dodgers and that the smattering of fans who weathered the game let them know it. Hardly the equivalent of that wonderful scene at Wrigley in Ferris Bueller's Day Off . . .

But I remember the date so precisely because it has achieved infamy thanks to the profanity-laced tirade directed at the fans by Cubs manager Lee Elia in a post-game press conference. I have to admit that watching it on TV that night back in the South Bend, I was caught somewhere between a grimace and a grin with every bleep inserted into the rant. Because this is a family-oriented blog (well, my daughters occasionally read it), I have asterisked this representative excerpt from the transcript of Elia’s diatribe:

F*** those f***in’ fans who come out here and say they’re Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin’ every f***in’ thing you do. I’ll tell you one f***in’ thing, I hope we get f***in’ hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f***in’ people that show up every f***in’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f***in’ fans, they can kiss my f***in’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

They’re really, really behind you around here . . . my f***in’ ass. What the f*** am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f***in’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f***in’ nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherf***ers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f***in’ game. They oughta go out and get a f***in’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f***in’ living. Eighty-five percent of the f***in’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here.

Ouch! I suppose that, given our lofty academic aspirations, my brother and my friend and I could have taken Elia’s remarks personally: “the other fifteen percent,” indeed. Maybe it’s a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, but to this day I still just chuckle and nod my head and wonder if Elia was not far off the mark after all.

But what a difference 28 years can make! This afternoon, I attended the Red Sox-Royals matchup at Fenway with my friends and colleagues Len and Matt. Like the Cubbies, the hometown Sox lost 4-3 in a somewhat subdued performance (especially after they had drubbed the Royals the previous two nights). But it was a gloriously sunny day, and even though we were in the farthest seats possible from home plate—Row 40 in Section 37 of the bleachers—we enjoyed the novelty of a weekday afternoon at Fenway. Afterwards, we paid a visit to the Lansdowne Club across the street from the ballpark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw on the television screen above the bar Red Sox manager Terry Francona’s post-game press conference. I’m not the best lip-reader in the world, but I would swear that he didn’t use one word starting with an “f.”