All Soxed Up

If you’re sick of columns about the Red Sox... I don’t care. Give it up, because you can’t escape them. (This month in Cosmo: “Eight ways to make your man scream in ecstasy besides a series of historic comeback wins against the Yankees!”) As I sit here, with the Sox still soaked in World Series champagne, I feel like I need to smoke opium and watch a three-hour PBS special about the life of the cuttlefish. Anything to calm down.

Let me back up a bit: When the series against the Yankees started, I wasn’t in the best spot to watch the games. And I’m not talking about a seat at the end of the sectional that’s perpendicular to the TV, or the booths directly beneath the plasma screens at Sully O’Smitty’s Sports Bah. I’m talking China—Shanghai to be specific. I was in Shanghai for a story on how the Chinese are about to trade their bicycles for cars, thus plunging the world into a massive energy crisis. While all around me I saw evidence of the impending Dark Ages as a result of the Westernization of China, what I didn’t see was evidence of anywhere to watch the Sox-Yankees games, and that was even worse. Starbucks didn’t have TVs. Neither did McDonald’s. And the Hooters around the corner wasn’t slated to open for another two weeks. What the hell, Shanghai? If you’re going to co-opt a culture, do it all the way.

I bought a coffee at the aforementioned Starbucks and returned to my hotel in the futile hope that the game might be on TV there—after all, I did have ESPN in my room. There was only one problem: ESPN Asia is about as useful as a two-legged tripod. Even if they’d cut a deal with Fox to show the game, they’d certainly delay it to show something more important, like cricket or ping-pong or, as was the case one morning, bass fishing. I imagined a Chinese guy somewhere out in the countryside avidly tuning in to learn the intricacies of trolling near docks. “Ahh!” he’d say, while chowing down on some bird’s nest soup, “big fish hide near dock pilings! I’ll have to remember that if I ever find myself aboard a bass boat on Wisconsin’s Upper Chain Lake.” If there’s an upside to ESPN Asia’s baseball coverage, it’s that the Chinese were spared Tim “a walk’s as good as a home run” McCarver, whose powers of baseball insight would be rivaled by your average bass.

Thankfully, my hotel had broadband Internet access. Thus I paid $3 on MLB.com and got streaming video of Game 1 live from New York at the entirely inappropriate hour of 7:30 am. Sure, the popup video screen on my laptop was roughly three inches square, but dammit, I was watching baseball!

My efforts didn’t pay off quite the way I’d hoped, with the Sox dropping the first game despite a teaser comeback. OK, I told myself, it’s just one game. Not a big deal. The next day, I tuned in again, and again the Sox fell flat. I commiserated over e-mail, since I was the only patron in my improvised sports bar. “I know it’s the wrong culture,” my friend Wilson wrote, “but you might want to think about committing hari kari.” I needed a walk after that, so I wandered out to a restaurant and distracted myself by guessing what kinds of meat were in the pictures on the menu. I read an article in the Shanghai Daily about the hairy crab, a local autumn delicacy (Headline: “Grab a hairy crab!”) but in the back of my mind I was wondering how they’d react at customs when they asked if I had anything to declare, and I replied, “Yes. Derek Jeter is a penis.”

For Game 3, the good news is that I was back in the States. The bad news is that I was at a wedding on Shelter Island, off Long Island, which meant that I got to watch the worst postseason drubbing in history while surrounded by smug, gloating Yankees fans. I’d traveled a total of 32 hours via bus, plane, car and ferry only to watch the Yankees administer a beating so severe that the Supreme Court nearly stopped the game in the eighth inning for violating the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

You know how the rest of it turned out. The problem is, I’m a superstitious Red Sox fan, and if something works I’ve got to repeat it. Assuming the Sox and Yankees meet again in the postseason next year, I’ve got to figure out how to get back to China so we can start losing.