Confessions of a Boston Expatriate

My friends are crazy. Two of them bought round trip plane tickets from Boston to Denver for this weekend, hoping to somehow get tickets to the World Series. I told them it was going to be hard, because the tickets were averaging close to $900 a piece on Stubhub.com. They booked the flights before they had any real hope of scoring tickets, and then for the next couple of days scoured internet sites looking for deals on World Series tickets. Then, yesterday morning, they struck gold - eBay had two tickets in the upper decks for a reasonable price, and my buddy was the top bidder. They were going to the Game 4 of the Fall Classic, which could turn out to be the clinching game for the Sox.

After they got the tix, I knew I had to act fast and I began searching out one solitary ticket for the same game on Craigslist. 45 minutes later I was pulling into a gas station off 470 to meet up with "Steve", who was lucky enough to get into the Rockies website a few times and buy a bunch of single tickets. I'm not going to tell you how much I paid, but I had the leverage of cash and the ability to buy immediately - which is something an arm-chair scalper likes very much. So long story short - the three of us are going to the World Series Game 4 on Sunday. I also lucked out and got a hard ticket (my buddies got "print-at-home" tickets that look like boarding passes), and I plan on mounting the stub with a picture from the game and keeping it on my wall.

After I moved out here I immediately took to the Rockies. Talk about your perennial underdogs - as of last year they were a team that had been to the playoffs exactly once in their 14-year history, a team that had finished the season above .500 only a handful of times, and a team that had never even been to a National League Championship. Also, if you had $4 in your pocket, you could go to a game any day of the week. Fenway used to be like that, before 2004. I remember shortly after I graduated from college, a couple of us were dropping off a buddy in the Back Bay on a summer evening, and one of my friends was like "Want to go to the Sox game tonight?" It was that easy. Well, it's still that easy at Coors Field. The Rockies are a team that any true fan of baseball can really get into.

So after I moved here, a lot of people began asking me who I

would root for if the Sox and Rox ever faced off in the World Series. This question was usually followed by laughter and a sarcastic "Yeah, Ok!", because there was no way that was ever going to happen. The Rox finished dead last in the division two years in a row, and the Sox were only making it to the Series every other decade - what were the odds that the two of them would both have excellent seasons at the same time? Well, now we're not laughing, it's late October and we're watching every pitch. I didn't know who I'd be rooting for during this Series. In my head, I reasoned that I should be rooting for my old home town team, the same team I had followed and screamed about for 25 years, the same team I had seen play at Fenway since I was 8 years old, when a bald sweaty fat dude in his mid-30's could buy a kid a soda without being investigated by Chris Hansen. (The guy bought me a soda because I had turned an unassisted triple-play in a little league game the night before.) But reason doesn't come into play when you're a fan, and when the Sox started teeing off on the Rockies - the team I had followed religiously for the past two years; the team that I watched from the stands at least 10 times over the past couple of summers; the team that helped Abby and I feel like we were true immersed citizens of Denver - that was when I cringed and realized that I didn't want the Rockies to lose. My mind told me I should want the Sox to win, but my heart is with the Rockies. I am a Rockies fan. Let the "Benedict Arnold" taunts begin.

So, what's it mean to go to the world series? There's a great article on mlb.com here, that explains it better than I ever could.