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October 15, 2004
Back in Boston, 1,918 Reasons to Hope, Pessimistically
By PAM BELLUCK and KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Oct. 14 - Anyone but a Red Sox fan would think things were looking pretty grim right now.

Losing the first two games in the playoff series to - who else - the Yankees. Losing, at least for the time being, a star pitcher, Curt Schilling, to a hobbled right ankle.

And now, as the team prepares to play Game 3 on Friday in the hometown embrace of Fenway Park, the threat of a rainout has rattled the superstitious into thinking that the very atmosphere may just be rooting for New York.

But Red Sox fans are, well, Red Sox fans.

"It ain't over until the fat lady sings," said Jennifer Wheaton, 35, who was at the Fenway box office on Thursday chirpily picking up her tickets for Saturday night's game. "Boston always has to come from behind. We always end up being the underdog."

Ms. Wheaton, an event planner, has the whole thing scripted: "We win the next three games, we'll go to New York and really show them who's your daddy," she said.

Dennis Farrell, a Red Sox loyalist who lives in Queens, was approaching things with equal parts rationalization and Catholicism.

"The Yankees are built for Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox are built for Fenway Park," Mr. Farrell, 62, said. "I'm forcing myself to be optimistic."

And just in case, Mr. Farrell said, "I've got my rosary beads. I've got my green scapular. I've got all the religious signs."

Jim Semons is trying to stay positive, too. But it would be easier if his golden retriever would give him the go-ahead. Mr. Semons, 55, a pharmacist from Buxton, Me., is convinced that the dog, Copper, is a baseball soothsayer who can predict the outcome of each game. Mr. Semons puts a piece of biscuit in each hand and has Copper choose.

"Say I point to my right hand and say these are the Yankees and to my left hand and say these are the Red Sox, and he picks," said Mr. Semons, who alternates which hand corresponds to which team, and repeats the exercise five times, in case Copper's first pick was a fluke.

Mr. Semons, a model-train enthusiast, has been far away from his dog this week because he is attending a model-train show in York, Pa. But before he left, he asked Copper to pick the winner of Game 1, and the pooch picked the Yankees.

"I just don't feel too good about it," Mr. Semons said about the rest of the playoffs. "You can't seem to beat the Yankees."

But, he said, "you never know, stranger things have happened."

After 85 years of being vanquished, all too often by the boys from the Bronx, Red Sox fans practically own the copyright to comeback-kid clichés. But something is a little different this year. The 2004 Red Sox are so good that many fans have been lulled into believing that victory really is at hand.

"It's time," said Myles MacKinnon, 26, a country-club manager from Bridgewater, Mass., who met his girlfriend, Rachael Alpert, 23, at the Cask 'n' Flagon bar, directly across the street from Fenway Park's Green Monster, during last year's ill-fated Yankees-Red Sox playoff series.

"This team is built," Mr. MacKinnon said. "We made the changes in the off-season. The difference is better pitching. The hitting is ready, the bullpen is ready. I'm ready for it."

Trisha Saintelus, 40, who is the moderator of an Internet chat room run by the Red Sox announcer, Jerry Remy, said that this year, Red Sox fans were a little more confident, acting, perish the thought, "a little more like Yankees fans."

"We finally have a little bit of respect," Ms. Saintelus said. "They're not just a bunch of guys thrown together, and it works."

But the fact that fans have solid reasons for their optimism is "a double-edged sword that also makes it a little more frightening," said Glenn Stout, a baseball historian and co-author of "Red Sox Century."

"I think in their heart of hearts a lot of people weren't surprised they lost last year," Mr. Stout said. "I think if they don't win this year there'll be some genuine devastation because things seemed like they were lined up. If they find another way to lose in an excruciating fashion, that would make it exponentially worse."

And so, Red Sox loyalists cling to their superstitions and their suppositions.

Scott Merrill, 47, a financial manager from Nashua, N.H., was too nervous to watch the first two games, saying, "I can't watch the games in New York." But on Thursday morning he drove all the way to Fenway to pick up tickets for Saturday's game.

"Let's just say it's not over yet," Mr. Merrill said. "It's only two games. You can't overreact."

Peter Belmonte, 53, a lawyer from Melrose, Mass., developed a ritual last year when he noticed that whenever the Red Sox beat the Yankees, he was at his vacation house in Vermont. He tried to help things along by taking dirt from his Vermont home, packing it in a Ziploc bag and placing it under his lucky chair at his Melrose house. But alas, the sacred soil was not enough.

This year, Mr. Belmonte has been so jittery that he has left work early each game day, unable to concentrate. "It's not the losing," he said. "It's the way we were humiliated in the past. When you love baseball as much as we do in New England and you value it almost as a religion or an art form, you hate to see it desecrated."

But already some die-hard fans are shifting subtly back into the aura of the long-suffering loser.

"In my gut I just feel like we're going to blow it again," said Brett Rudy, 31, a marketing executive from Wakefield, Mass., worried that the predicted rain will mess up Friday night's game, and possibly throw off the series. He got so upset with the game on Tuesday night that he threw his dog's plastic squeaky toy across the room, breaking a curtain rod and infuriating his wife.

On Thursday, Mr. Rudy was trying to tell himself that the shock of winning could be too seismic. Maybe it is better to leave well enough alone.

"If they win there's nothing to talk about," Mr. Rudy said. "No one in this city would know what to do."

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