- Brian Jenkins
Opening Day of baseball season is exhilarating, especially in New England. No matter the weather, Red Sox fans cram into cozy Fenway Park, watch on television or listen on the radio, hoping it’s the beginning of another World Series championship season.
Anticipation begins to build on a mid-February day when the moving
van, loaded with equipment, leaves Fenway Park and heads south to Fort
Myers, Florida. That’s when we start to think about what lies ahead
for the Red Sox. Daily reports from spring training help us weather
the dreary month of March.
We wonder what this year’s Opening Day will bring. Will it be another
one for the history books, like the gutsy, complete-game pitching performance
by Luis Tiant and two homeruns by Carlton Fisk in April 1973, when
the Red Sox beat the New York Yankees 15-5? Will it rival when Mo Vaughn
hit a two-out, last-of-the-ninth-inning grand-slam home run to beat
Seattle in 1998, or after the World Series banner flag was raised in
2005, Tim Wakefield knuckle-balled the Yankees into submission?
Opening day is full of ritual. In the early hours, you can feel the
excitement around Fenway Park as the grandstand is draped with bunting.
Everything about the day is special, from the pregame entertainment
(Ray Charles played the piano by the Red Sox dugout in the rain in
2003), to surprise appearances by champions (Tedy Bruschi and Richard
Seymour of the Patriots and Bill Russell and Bobby Orr, Celtics and
Bruins greats, crossed the field to meet the World Series Champion
Red Sox in 2005). Even the first-ball throwers are special: members
of the 1946 Red Sox American League Champions had the honor last year.
After almost two months of balmy Florida sunshine, players are not
deterred by the usually chilly and sometimes snowy April in Boston,
nor are the fans. Instead, a warmth pervades the ballpark and excitement
rises to a crescendo when the first pitch is thrown. In that moment,
last year is forgotten, the score is 0-0, and a new season begins.
Forty years ago, 8,324 fans braved a cold Fenway Park as Johnny Mathis
sang the national anthem, Governor John Volpe threw out the first ball,
and the Red Sox opened the 1967 season with a 5-4 win over Chicago.
The Sox were 100-to-one underdogs that year to win the American League
pennant, after seven straight losing seasons. Their brash young manager
Dick Williams, said, “We’ll win more ball games than we’ll lose.” The
team went on to win the “Impossible Dream” pennant and take the favored
St. Louis Cardinals to seven games in the World Series.
That thrill-filled season initiated a tremendous rebirth of fan interest,
and thrust the Red Sox back into the forefront as one of baseball’s
elite teams. Ever since 1967 we have allowed ourselves, especially
on Opening Day, to hope that this is another championship year. Ever
since that fateful season, we can legitimately say, “This could be
our year again.”
