A Week in Woods Hole
I'm back from five days spent in bucolic Woods Hole, on the southern tip of Cape Cod; I was doing some research at the Marine Biological Laboratories there. What a nice bunch of people! They allowed me to sit in on a class, showed me around the campus, and just generally welcomed me in every way they could. The way that a place of higher learning ought to be...
Woods Hole is a lovely town. It hosts two centers for marine biological study, the MBL and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (the acronym is pronounced "hooey," I'm told). Main Street has a few restaurants, a t-shirt shop, a market, a community center, and two coffee shops. I got used to getting my coffee and popover in the morning at Pie in the Sky; there are few greater pleasures than a summer morning in a seaport town, drinking coffee and reading the paper outside in the salt air.
There was just one problem: Woods Hole is part and parcel of Red Sox nation. And in this sense, a visit there felt like being a democrat in North Korea, like you're a lone martyr, fighting the good fight against some inbred totalitarian ideology. I saw a little girl wearing a handmade t-shirt that said on the front, "I root for two teams..." On the back, it continued, "...the Red Sox, and anyone playing the Yankees!" Poor love. I considered calling social services, but decided she was probably too far gone to be helped.
The t-shirt store had one popular item, a shirt that showed the Yankees logo being squeezed. The caption read "Chokees!", a reference to the 2004 playoff tragedy. I saw several lost souls wearing this very same item.
Huh.
I don't quite understand that line of attack. Because if the Yankees choked, then the Red Sox comeback wasn't really so glorious. It wasn't that they were heroic; it's that the Yankees choked.
Now, as a Yankees fan, I hate to give the Sox credit, but I don't think the Yankees choked at all. Every game between the two teams last season was a battle, and whoever won, it always seemed it could just as easily have gone the other way. So even when the Yankees were up 3-o in the championship series, no one in New York was counting the Sox out, that's for sure. The Sox won because—gulp—they were the better team last year, and they deserved it.
Also, because Kevin Brown is one of the world's crummiest pitchers.
Anyway, my point is, Sox fans can't have it both ways: They can't talk about how amazing their team was, and in the same breath delight in the Yankees' "choke."
Oh, and by the way? The Sox lost to the Twins, 12-0, last night.
