My son broke the news to me and I’ll share it with you. But before I do, a few memories of eight decades of citizenship in Red Sox Nation.
I was puzzling over why the Sox couldn’t retain XanderBogaerts. What an exemplary human being he is. And Christian Vázquez traded off to the Astros just as he was becoming a rock behind the plate. The memory still smarting of Mookie Betts gone. Long ago ownership’s failing to profer a contract to perhaps the finest catcher ever, Carlton Fisk, born and bred in New Hampshire.
And stories of an owner resenting young black men trying out on his field, Fenway Park deep in abolition country, and refusing to sign Willie Mays or Jackie Robinson, marking the Sox as the very last team to sign a Black player. And the greatest ownership betrayal of all, selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 so the owner could finance a Broadway show, thus laying the foundation for the most successful baseball team in history and leaving the Red Sox with a drought of almost a century before winning another World Series.
My son enlightened me: “The owners have lost interest in baseball. It’s a move on to football, not NFL but World Cup. Pop, they’re getting ready to sell the Sox. They’ll make a killing with or without Xander. It’s a multi-billion-dollar asset and they’ll take the cash and do their version of a ‘Broadway production.’ It was fun while it lasted, but they’re in Liverpool, Qatar now. New England? Red Sox Nation? Host of the first presidential primary? All history, small potatoes. Hey, it’s a global scene now run by billionaires with no geographic loyalty. Pop, get used to it!”
Ronald Cheney
Francestown