After the World Cup ended, I folded my green Mexico jerseys and put them at the bottom of a drawer. I felt the way I do when I’m putting the Christmas decorations away for another year. The house hadn’t changed, but it suddenly felt less festive.
No more wondering if we had enough chips and dip. The TV was once again full of choice, which also felt like having nothing to watch. The Bear had just dropped its final season, but not even that bonus episode with Richie and Mikey’s back story, could compete with the emotional highs and lows I’d lived through for the first part of the summer.
World Cup football had consumed us, somehow compressing the emotional roller coaster of sports into 39 magical days. Every match mattered. Every goal felt like it might change history.
By the time Spain lifted the World Cup trophy, I thought I’d exhausted my annual allotment of sporting emotion.
Major League Baseball had other ideas.
A month earlier, I had given up on the Red Sox. I wasn’t alone. The baseball writers had begun drafting the obituary.
Dead in Dirty Water, my team was 29-42, in last place and fifteen-and-a-half games behind the damn Yankees.
I did what I’ve done before. Accepted that it wasn’t their year and stopped checking the scores. I stopped expecting anything from them.
I forgot about them until the morning after Spain took home the trophy.
Perusing my phone for something to care about, I checked the MLB app to find that while I had been cheering for Mexico, Cabo Verde, Egypt and any tiny country on the verge of World Cup immortality, the Boston Red Sox had been resuscitated.
One win became two. Then three. The team I’d left for dead was on a hot streak, winning 34 of its next 43 games. Suddenly, I was checking standings before I checked the weather, wondering who was next in the pitching rotation and becoming the kind of person who thinks twice before tossing a lucky T-shirt in the laundry hamper.
One evening, caught off guard by an old feeling, I said, out loud, “This feels like 2004.”
Tempting fate.
Maybe also rediscovering faith.
Which is probably as good a moment as any to explain how I ended up falling in love with American baseball and the Boston Red Sox.
Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the closest we came to baseball was rounders. On long summer evenings, all the children on our estate spilled onto the big field in front of our house. Boys and girls. Big and small. And – this part matters – Catholics and Protestants.
Our equipment was comprised of a tennis ball, a tennis racquet or a cricket bat – or a good stick if that was all we could find. For bases, we balled-up our sweaters on top of tidy little mounds of freshly cut grass. We probably invented half the rules as we went along.
It never occurred to us that, while we were arguing over whether somebody was out, adults who didn’t know us were arguing about the kind of world they wanted for us beyond the Dublin Road.
Much later, I realised how extraordinary those summer evenings were.
From deckchairs outside our house on Green Park Drive, my mother and father watched us – the barley field shimmering behind us and, beyond it, Lough Neagh. With a big orange sun slipping slowly into the lough, I suspect they noticed something we didn’t.
For an hour or two, their children were simply children. Playing. Carefree. Laughing.
That was enough.
We had no magical language to describe our game of rounders – no “fly ball” or “stealing home.” No “swing and a miss.” No peanuts. No Cracker Jack. No stirring renditions of “America the Beautiful.”
Still, when I discovered baseball, it felt familiar. I recognized the way it offered a place apart where, for a few hours at least, the outside world loosens its grip – the kind of place that Thomas Boswell described as a fenced-off place “where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.”
A perfect place.
Long before I understood any of baseball’s technicalities, this place had already lodged itself in a corner of my imagination, arriving at first in the music and movies that shaped my notion of America.
Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Bruce Springsteen’s ballplayer looking back on his “Glory Days.” John Fogerty on “Centerfield,” pleading, “Put me in, Coach.”
Roy Hobbs wielding Wonderboy in The Natural as though King Arthur himself had handed him Excalibur. We all know some version of the same story – the weary old ballplayer still chasing the dream he had imagined in the backyard as a little boy – that one perfect swing that changes everything.
And then came Field of Dreams. It was the first film I ever saw in an American movie theater. I walked in not even knowing it was about baseball.
By the third viewing, I knew the ghosts that wandered in Ray Kinsella’s cornfield every night almost as well as James Earl Jones knew that while America rolled by “like an army of steamrollers,” baseball marked the time.
I believed him, and I still do.
The first time I went to a baseball game in America was at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix. Our daughter wasn’t quite four, wearing a Diamondbacks jersey that was far too big for her. We bought hot dogs. Peanuts. Cotton candy. We clapped when everyone else clapped and stood up and stretched at the seventh-inning stretch. We sang “Take me out to the Ball Game,” and even appeared on the Jumbotron.
I still remember walking up to our seats. Forty thousand conversations somehow becoming a single sound. Then that first glimpse of ridiculously green grass. Then everyone stood for the singing of the national anthem. We did too.
I cried.
I’d been homesick for a place I’d never been.
The romance of it drew me in, but the game is what has kept me there. I still don’t fully understand the infield fly rule, but give me a chance and I’ll tell you all about the drama. I love it. Unspoken signals, the tension between between pitcher and batter, the runners edging off base, all of us holding our breath for someone to blink first. It’s not unlike do-or-die World Cup penalty kicks in a knock-out round or a fifth set tie-break at Wimbledon, except baseball asks you to wait just a little longer until the bottom of the ninth or later when you’re down to your last nerve.
I still couldn’t tell you with certainty why baseball captivates me.
Maybe it has something to do with believing that raw talent, hard work, and just enough luck can still put the American Dream within reach, just as they did for Babe Ruth, the son of a Baltimore saloonkeeper; Joe DiMaggio, the son of Sicilian immigrants; or Jackie Robinson, the grandson of a slave and the son of sharecroppers.
Or maybe it’s that, every spring, we convince ourselves this time will be different.
I know the particular heartache of a household believing that this time is absolutely our time to qualify. I’m a fan of European football and every four years, I disappear into the World Cup. I remember, as if it happened yesterday, the disappointment after the penalty decision against Switzerland in Belfast in 2017 that ended another World Cup dream for our wee country.
Sports fans have long memories.
Ask a Red Sox fan about Bucky Dent’s wall-scraping three-run homer in 1978 and they’ll tell you exactly where they were that afternoon. Dent describes it all these years later: “There’s not too many days that go by that I don’t run into somebody at the airport, the grocery store. Red Sox fans say you ruined my life; Yankees fans say you made my life.”
I’d heard that story before.
Roy Hobbs carried Wonderboy. Bucky Dent carried the dreams of the little boy who had stood in his backyard pretending to be Mickey Mantle.
As Dent would later say: “All those dreams as a kid, they came true.”
Heartbreak has remarkable powers of recall which helps explain why I’ve always felt at home among Red Sox fans and the GAA supporters of County Mayo. This summer, after 75 years of waiting, Mayo finally carried Sam Maguire home. Generations that had learned to expect heartbreak suddenly had to learn something new – how to celebrate.
Boston fans understand this, having learned after 86 years to expect the worst. Experience taught them to be cautious.
Then came 2004.
Then 2007.
Then 2013.
Then 2018.
Maybe that’s why saying those four words feels faintly superstitious, as if saying them aloud might somehow disturb the baseball gods.
It was a reminder that baseball goes off script and a team everyone had given up on catches fire.
Even Moneyball, perhaps the least sentimental baseball film ever made, eventually stops trying to explain baseball and leaves us instead with the only question that really matters: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
Every story I’d loved about baseball seemed to point in the same direction. Fenway Park.
John Updike once described it as “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”
Not just another ballpark – a place where even history seems reluctant to leave.
Officially opened on April 20, 1912, Fenway Park was built by Charles E. Logue, a young carpenter from Derry who crossed the Atlantic with ambition to spare. He could hardly have imagined that the ballpark he built would become one of America’s sporting cathedrals.
The opening should have been a celebration, but another engineering story would eclipse it.
Just four days after setting out on her maiden voyage, the Titanic, built at Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard, struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and slipped beneath the Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew with her.
Fenway Park opened its gates just a few days later.
I’ve never been able to separate those two stories.
Fenway’s Irish story didn’t end with Charles Logue. When the Red Sox weren’t playing, the ballpark became a gathering place for Boston’s Irish community. Éamon de Valera spoke there. The GAA came too. Long before I ever walked through its gates, Fenway already belonged, in some small way, to another island across the Atlantic.
The first time I visited was with a friend in the summer of 2008.
A Dubliner with a green card led the behind-the-scenes tour.
I remember the sun on the grass. The quirky symmetry. Someone climbing inside the Green Monster to change those enormous white numbers by hand. It felt as though somebody had built a ballpark in the middle of a neighbourhood and everyone had agreed it was a fabulous idea.
Sitting on top of that famous wall the day before a game against the Yankees, I looked out across the field and realised why almost nothing felt unfamiliar. I’d already been there in those songs, films, books, and conversations. I was just catching up with the real place.
And then I realised something else.
Fenway doesn’t really care where you’ve come from.
The people behind home plate. The people in the bleachers. The first-time visitor. The lifelong season-ticket holder from Boston. In the end, everyone signs up for the possibility of immortality. The heartbreak comes free.
There’s faith in it.
Faith. An interesting word in Boston.
The Fenway Faithful carried it through eighty-six years of curses, near misses, Bucky Dent, impossible losses and all the other heartbreaks that convinced generations of Red Sox fans to expect disappointment while showing up anyway.
Long before “Dirty Water” became the soundtrack to another Fenway victory, they already understood something I’ve only recently remembered.
Faith isn’t optimism. It’s showing up anyway.
After they swept the Dodgers, I ordered the new Fenway Green jersey. I love the color – even though there isn’t actually a Fenway Green. The head marketing guy at the Red Sox admitted it took two years trying to get the green just right, matching multiple swatches against the Green Monster. I love that when you look closely, “Fenway” is woven into the fabric. I love the tiny “1912” stitched inside the collar. I love the Number 34 on the back – for David Ortiz, the only player on the active roster for all three Red Sox World Series championships.
I’d ordered a history lesson.
As I write, for reasons known only to international shipping, my Fenway Green jersey is somewhere between New York and a little village in Mexico, after a detour through Belgium.
Taking the long way home.
Maybe that’s how we get there.
***
Yvonne Watterson grew up in Northern Ireland and spent much of her adult life in the United States before moving to Mexico. Yvonne is an essayist and longtime educator, and her work has appeared in The Irish Times and other publications. She writes about home, memory, place, and the things that keep pulling us back.
