The Boston Red Sox scored a major victory last night when their 8pm game against the Yankees was drowned out by torrents of wind-driven rain.  Any game the Sox don’t play these days is counted as a victory.  The team lacks two outfielders, a credible short-stop, predictable starters and any hope at all from the bull-pen.

But failure on the field is not unknown to Red Sox Nation; recent World Series wins set off insane celebration just because everyone knew the Sox were woeful as a general proposition.  Why, now, has the slow start caused such angst among the faithful?  The folks with whom I share season seats have been emailing about this, and there is no shortage of theories.

First, when you expect a lot and don’t get it, you are angry.  For the first time, Sox fans have expectations.

Second, we pay the highest or second highest tariff in the Big Leagues.  At this price point, one can go to a Patriots game and see true brain trauma, so why waste the bucks on so tame a sport as baseball.

Third, there is the carpetbagger syndrome.  We are owned by non-Boston people, and they are not very sympathetic folks at that.  (Principal owner John Henry ties his yacht up at the Boston Harbor Hotel in the summer, and there is something about the winding staircase sweeping up the front of the salon that is, shall we say, lacking in New England frugality.)  Henry’s Boston-based mouthpiece sounds smarmy so the overall feeling is one of, well, invasion.

Just the other day, management invited all true fans to come to the ballpark (America’s most beloved ballpark, they call it; must be true, as it sells out even though half the seats are obstructed view and you take your private parts in your hands if you try to sit on a toilet after the first beer dumping – whoops, I mean the second inning).  Come on over free and have the run of the park.  Morning to night.  People flocked.  Of course, there was no ball game that day.  The idea of a free ballgame would cause management cardiac arrest.  You poor folk can walk the by-ways of Fenway to see how it might feel if you could afford a ticket; noblesse oblige I think the French call it.

Which brings us, fourth, to soccer.  Any true member of Sox Nation knows that soccer is that effete European low-scoring, high-boring, foreign thing that the rest of the world erroneously chooses to call a spectator sport to the detriment of the beautiful symmetry of baseball.  SO —  HOW MUCH did that non-Boston owner (the guy pronounces his Rs in his words, fagodzakes, what the hell is THAT all about) pay to buy a soccer team?  In Europe?  Do you have any idea how many starting pitchers we could have bought with that kind of money spent here in the US of A?  We couldda had Verlander in the bull-pen, facryinoutloud‼

There is still time for the Sox to turn it around.  This year I hear the Major Leagues have added another wild card team to post-season play (MLB is beginning to look like my kid’s Little League: every team gets a trophy, every player an award, there are no losers in the new Valhalla).  But, and this is the shocker, no one cares.  We are watching the Bruins, the Celts, the NFL draft, Nadal playing tennis, Tiger imploding for the umpteenth time (this is really too much punishment for just wandering off the reservation a few times, why take it out on his putts?)….

I hope this is not the end of Red Sox Nation; that powerful marketing combine that posts the number of days of consecutive sell-outs with the breathless fervor of reporting a real score in a real ballgame.  I hope to see the continuing traffic of visitors to Boston who just want to see Fenway Park and don’t care whether the Sox win that particularly game.  I hope Senator Scott Brown, who once urged a Sox move to Foxboro and now advertises the singular grace of a rehabbed Fenway, continues to get seated in one of the eight seats that has both no poles and a visual orientation onto the playing diamond.

So I have a few tickets for games that I cannot use.  Interested?  No scalping, I can give them to you for face value because, well, you’re a true member of the Nation.   … What, no takers?  Hey, these are SOX tickets, ya hear?  SOX SOX SOX, get em while you can, this won’t last forever.

Wait til May, you’ll see.  Then there is always next year….