Triumph Over Travesty, Boston Sports Fans Too Tough to Crumble

Fenway Park plays a big role in the Patriot’s Day festivities in Boston, as the team plays early enough for fans to make their way out early enough to head over to the Boston Marathon. (Image Credit: David Butler II-USA TODAY Sports)

The third Monday is April is a big day in the city of Boston. It’s Patriot’s Day, a civic holiday here in the state of Massachusetts (as well as in Maine) that commemorates the battles at Lexington and Concord – the start of our American Revolution. School is closed, as are more offices and businesses. The Boston Marathon is held annually on this date. The Boston Red Sox have played at home every year since 1959, scheduled for an 11:05 AM EST start since 1968 to allow fans time to make their way over to the Marathon’s finish in time to cheer on friends, family, and thousands of others that they don’t know. The Boston Bruins even had a game scheduled for that night, to cap things off.

It’s a remarkable day for sports fans, as Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci describes:

"At one moment on Patriot’s Day you can find 23,000 runners making their way through Kenmore Square and 500,000 spectators on the streets of Boston while the Red Sox play baseball in front of 39,000 fans, soon after men on horseback in the role of Paul Revere and William Dawes shouted warnings of British encroachment. Restaurants and bars fill with merriment, food and drink."

Yesterday was as unique a Patriot’s Day as they come.

Leading 2-1 entering the 9th inning against their division rival Tampa Bay Rays, the Sox turned to Andrew Bailey in an effort to close out the game. Joel Hanrahan, the team’s new closer, has struggled and was nursing a sore hamstring. Bailey allowed a leadoff single to Desmond Jennings, who promptly stole second base. Ben Zobrist lined a pitch to left field that Jackie Bradley Jr. couldn’t quite catch, allowing Desmond to tie the game. Bailey did bounce back, striking out two of the next three batters to send the game to the bottom of the inning.

Following a Dustin Pedroia walk, Mike Napoli stepped to the plate. Napoli, the team’s big offensive addition this past winter, hasn’t done much at the plate to begin his Red Sox career, hitting just .220/.235/.420 with a pair of home runs. Napoli crushed a ball high off the Green Monster in left field. With Pedroia on first base – an underrated base runner who scored on the play – the game was over. It was Napoli’s first big hit as a Red Sox.

By now we’re all aware of the events that transpired during the 117th running of the Boston Marathon. Without delving into details – as they’ve been discussed repeatedly and covered by plenty, including our excellent team at fansided.com – it was a tragic and shocking series of events. 176 people were injured. Three were killed.

Thousands of other runners were diverted down parallel streets, altering a finish to a race they’d trained all year for. Many use the Boston Marathon as a focus for fundraising efforts – including player’s wives (Curt Schilling’s, Tim Wakefield’s, and others) and former local stars (New England Patriots Joe Andruzzi) to countless of other organizations and individuals. Runners travel from across the globe to the Boston area just to run this event. Normally those stories would be the highlight of our local news on Patriot’s Day, but yesterday none of this mattered. The Bruins cancelled their game. The Boston Celtics, not scheduled to play until tonight, did the same.

The city had been attacked in the midst of one of our biggest sports days and the entire Boston sports world instantly stood together. It’s just how things are here. Fan bases are often looked upon as representative of the people they represent. The Boston fan base might get knocked down when you kick them, but they’ll get right back up again.

Sports are a fabric of this city. Sports will help overcome. Members of the Red Sox were boarding the team buses, set to take them to Logan Airport for their flight to Cleveland, when everything transpired. The team will play three games against the Indians and former manager Terry Francona before returning home on Friday, their first game following yesterday’s events. Fenway and the Kenmore Square area will be packed on Friday night when the team hosts the Kansas City Royals.

Everyone here has their story, as The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy wrote this morning. Our own Lew Freedman has ties to the Boston Marathon. Lew ran it once, as a freshman in college, and he’s covered it professionally more times than he could count, for multiple publications.

Patriot’s Day holds a unique place for me. Generally speaking I tend to leave a lot of personal things out of my writing. There’s little need to bring up details when there is no relevancy to the discussion/news at hand. A year ago my wife and I attended the Sox game on Patriot’s Day, the morning after we had gotten married. We elected not go to this year, considering there’d been another addition to our family, but still watched some of the game from home. I’d also spent some time in the past working at the Marathon. I’d spent the week preceding the event working at the expo that leads up to the race, where thousands of runners, organizers, and volunteers would pour through the Boston Convention Center. I’ve met and interacted with hundreds of these runners who were likely participating in this year’s race. It was tough sitting home, watching as details unfolded about the day’s events. I’d field phone calls, emails, Tweets, and texts wanting to be sure that I was ok and learning that those I know are safe as well.

In just a few short hours the Red Sox will take the field against the Cleveland Indians. It’s the first sporting event for a “hometown” team that the people of Boston will be able to watch. It will be a first step for many in the climb back from yesterday’s events. It will be a welcomed distraction. Just when the Sox seem to be counted out in the city – between the collapse of 2011, the year of Valentine in 2012, and the MLB-record sellout streak finally coming to an end – the team will be the opening for Boston sports fans to get back up.

The Red Sox are just as vital a part of the sports tradition of this city as the Marathon is. These fans are just simply too tough to keep down.