The Silent Majority

In a previous post I talked about how annoyed I get when people try to tell you how things work at a place they haven't been to in a decade. For example, it drives me crazy when people tell you where you should go on your vacation and it turns out half of their "suggestions" for that area closed in 2007. Still, that is not nearly as aggravating to me as when people make grand, sweeping conclusions about a people or place they are no where near and have never spent any great amount of time in. I'm talking, of course, about the national media and their generalizations of Boston sports fans concerning the 2011 Boston Red Sox.

When last night's loss to the Rays dropped the Red Sox to 2-9 (the worse record in baseball), I knew what was coming. ESPN has continued to act as though the pre-2004, the-sky-is-falling mentality which used to be a staple for Red Sox fans still exists today, when the reality is two World Series wins in the past seven years have mellowed us considerably. But, finding something like that out would require research and getting off their asses to ask normal people what they thought, while working off the old stereotypes is just so much easier. Therefore the "Panic in Red Sox Nation" headlines on SportsCenter this morning were not only expected, but I actually would have been shocked had they not been on there.

The reason I get so angry with stuff like this is because I feel like it does nothing but empower the lunatics. 98% of the baseball fans in this city are well aware that the season in extremely long and what happens the first three weeks doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. The problem is that, much like political discussions, the lunatic fringe that make up that last 2% get all the attention because they are the loudest. They are not any more passionate about the team than other die-hards, they just have the time to sit on hold for two hours simply to hear themselves on WEEI or write horribly spelled, 1,000 word rants on message boards and as such are seen as the voice of Red Sox Nation, when they really only represent the extremists. (This is also why I stopped listening to local sports talk stations and going on message boards years ago.)

Are the 98% of us happy that the Red Sox have gotten off to such a slow start? Of course not. But we're not "panicking". With 151 games left in the season, the majority of Sox fans remain optimistic that Crawford will start hitting and the pitching will round into form. It's only the crazies that are already flipping out now. The rest of us are calm, restrained and able to see the big picture... at least until the Celtics and Bruins are out of the playoffs and we have nothing else to curb our sports cravings. (However, if the Sox hit the quarter pole at 15-25 there are going to be riots in the streets. At that point SportsCenter can run all the graphics they want.) But until then, I would appreciate not being judged by our worse characters.