In the summer of 1986, after (finally) graduating from college, I made my way to the Boston area, drawn by the promise of a rent-free existence at my girlfriend's father's house. I didn't live there long; in fact, we pulled up stakes and moved to Europe about a year and a half later.
It wasn’t that I particularly disliked Boston; in fact, I kind of fell in love with the place. But the plan had always been to make enough money to leave, and we stuck with the plan.
One of the details of my time in Boston that shines beautifully in my memory is the presence of baseball. Like most American boys, I grew up watching baseball, and my team was the New York Mets. They were a team that was born the year before I was. They were a remaking of the Giants, who had moved their franchise west to California, just as my father’s Dodgers had done less than ten years earlier. Like the Dodgers and the Giants before them, the Mets lived in the shadow of their crosstown rivals, the monolithic Yankees.
I have vague memories of the Mets’ championship season of 1969, when I was almost six years old. Four years later, in 1973, they got to the World Series again, this time losing to the Moustache Crew from Oakland. My recollections from that year are more vivid – Tom Seaver, a song my music teacher had us sing in chorus about the Mets, and a brawl during the playoffs between Pete Rose and Bud Harrelson that nearly caused my mother, recovering from an appendectomy to bust her stitches yelling at the TV screen in her room at Saint Agnes Hospital.
Most of my childhood, however, was spent rooting for a New York Mets squad that was pretty horrible. They had stars like Dave Kingman, Joel Youngblood, Willie Montanez, and John Stearns. These were all players I enjoyed watching, don’t get me wrong. But they didn’t string wins together very well, and heartbreak was an everyday thing.
Flash forward, back to my time in Boston. I spent that summer of 1986 going to a few games at Fenway Park, an absolutely magical place to watch live baseball. Compared to what I was used to in New York, with Shea and Yankee Stadiums, Fenway was tiny, and there really isn’t a bad seat in the house.
It became evident that the possibility my Mets might meet the Sox in the Series was very real. The playoffs were great on both sides, with incredible battles between Boston and the Angels, the Mets and the Houston Astros. I had ongoing trash talking bouts with one of my bosses, Jeff Rubin, at the Harvard Negotiation Project, an avid Sox fan. I was a ballsy kid; I even had the audacity to get on the office PA system and announce, “Attention Boston Red Sox fans: This is God speaking. The Mets will win the series. That is all.” I’m lucky they had enough of a sense of humor about that one not to fire me.
And then there was that famous moment – notorious in Red Sox Nation – when the Mets, one-out away from losing the series – began an unlikely comeback that culminated in a ground ball, hit fairly hard, but by no means a screamer, finding its way under Bill Buckner’s glove and into baseball history.
I was sitting in my girlfriend’s father’s living room at the time, and you could hear people screaming “NO!” outside. Then there was silence. I opened up the door and screamed out an equally powerful “YES!” that was met by the silence of an entire broken-hearted city.
I didn’t have the heart to lord the win over my office mates, who were pretty demolished. One of them, a transplant from out of state like myself, came up to me the morning before Game Seven, when the Mets decidedly won, and said, very seriously, “Hey, did you hear about Bill Buckner?”
“No, what?” I asked, concerned.
“He threw himself in front of a bus.”
“Oh my God, no,” I said.
“It’s okay, though,” she added. “It went right through his legs.”
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