When You're Right, You're Right

(Note: I love Blogger. Okay, I'm lying. This should be posted above Whitney's last entry, not below it. You'd think that the fact that I wrote it 12 hours after he wrote his would ensure such placement, but you'd be wrong.)

I return to my blogchair full of righteous indignation, preparing now to unleash a vitriolic response to my the blasphemous screed unleashed below. Except I'm having a hard time working up the proper sense of wounded anger because, for the most part, I think he's pretty well right on.

I'd say that it's impossible for my emotionally-addled friend to adequately understand the immensely cathartic reward represented by Foulke to Mientkiewicz, and I'd be right, but his central thesis about the public nature of Sox fans' glee and rapid transition from plucky ever-striving underdog to something much less lovable was proven in full by Bill Simmons' most recent column in ESPN: The Magazine.

Simmons represents the problem writ large: it's the most visible members of Red Sox Nation that are making the rest of us look like assholes. God love the Farrelly Brothers, but Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore prancing around during the on-field World Series celebration was an abomination that gave an immediate kick-start to the backlash. The rush to commercialize the victory hasn't helped, as Whit notes below, nor has the media's ever-growing crescendo of hype around the Red Sox/Yankee rivalry.

But here's the thing: those named above - and below - don't truly represent the faceless masses of Red Sox Nation, those for whom October truly was a religious experience. They're dilettantes masquerading as long-sufferers; hell, Simmons cares more about the Celtics than the Sox, and now he's the Nation's voice? Um, yeah, thanks. The Win it For thread was not meant to rub anyone's nose in it, but to chronicle what the Sox meant and mean to generations of Sox fans. That it's become the public face of Soxfan sentiment doesn't rob it of its value - but I understand why its meaning to me doesn't translate to Whitney.

Real Sox fans don't want special treatment, we're tired of the endless hyping of the Yankee rivalry, and we understand that baseball's financial model smiles upon us. We're also smack in the middle of the greatest 6 months of our lives, so we'd ask just a bit of indulgence from our extra-National friends. That, and we'd like Ben Affleck to shut the fuck up.