There was a real imprint of that series on his mind, because he feels very definitively that there was a before and after for New York, and that losing that series affected the New York Yankees in a way that it’s taken them literally 20 years to come back from. That’s what he really thinks. And certainly, they won in 2009, but I think they’ve been about a .500 playoff team since then. He really believed that the way the Yankees were before, something psychologically happened to them afterward.
I think he’s right, honestly. I was glad to see him because it’s a good reminder that for New York, this is a very traumatic memory, and for all of New England it’s like the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them.
It’s strange. Yankees fans came a little bit toward Red Sox fans in terms of their fatalistic approach. And the Red Sox fans took a bigger leap toward Yankees fans. The bitterness of feeling like they’re unlucky changed to the bitterness of them feeling like, why didn’t we win?
Now that we’re on the fan conversation, do you have a favorite moment from the ’04 postseason? There’s so many!
There’s one, it’s actually from Game 3, the one we lost. I was there and I stayed every pitch, every inning. And by the end there were like, I don’t know, less than a quarter of the fans still there. So everybody who was still there had come down toward the seating bowl. And there was a drunk guy from Quincy behind me, and he just kept yelling in the ninth inning, “Are you ready for the greatest comeback in history?” And everybody was like, “Dude, shut up.” Clearly he’s a genius. He knew. I remember that very distinctly.
I remember the year before, when we lost, my little brother was 10. We were all decked out in Red Sox gear, we were in Yankee Stadium, and they lose. My dad looked down at him and he was bawling his eyes out. My dad looked at him and said, “I can’t believe I did this to you.” He meant that he took him to New York, and he gave him something to love, and the Red Sox weren’t loving him back. The Red Sox never loved my dad back. Then a year later, we went to the same Game 7, same seats, and we won. In the chaos of the moment where all the Yankees fans are leaving and the Red Sox fans are rushing down, my brother and I jumped onto the field.
Whoa!
He’s 10, so nobody’s going to tackle him. You know? He ran the bases. It’s literally the first time I ever took a photo with a cell phone. I snapped the photo and he touched home and he said, “I can’t believe this.” It was like the exact opposite thing my dad had said. The actual picture, when you walk in my parents’ house, it’s the first picture. It’s like a series of baby photos, and then that photo. It’s like, the most prominent thing you’ll see.