In Search of a Pennant Race

The "dog days" of the baseball season are over. Those sultry summer, Texas league-type afternoons when leads look so secure and exciting finishes so far away. A pennant race is something that only happens in tacky Sunday matinee films.

The 1978 regular season has three days left. Three days for the other 24 teams to go through the motions, and, just for fun, check and see how the Red Sox and Yankees are faring in the only war around.

But if scoreboard watching and buying "The Yankees Suck" T-shirts were all that a pennant race involved, these would indeed be times for tension, times for excitement. Somehow they are not. For the Red Sox fan, these are dog days of the mind.

Nobody knows exactly how to feel about the Red Sox. Sure all the numbers point to a pennant race, but is it a race or just an odyssey which ends with Boston eternally one game back? Do you boo George Scott because he can't deliver in a certain situation, or are you just doing something out of habit? Do you blame Manager Don Zimmer legitimately, or just because you know nothing about the way the new front office has handled things?

I walked through the too-cold-for-autumn streets of Kenmore Square last night and wondered myself whether what goes on now is so much pro-Red Sox as it is anti-Yankees. Bill Bowen, who sells "Yankees Suck" T-shirts said, "They're in first place right now, they've got to suck."

That's bizarre, for offhand I can recall the 1972 season, in which the Detroit Tigers defeated the Red Sox on the final night for the division crown, a title the Sox might have won had their season not been shortened by the player's strike of that spring. Nobody seemed embarassed then, and besides, we all had Eddie Kasko to kick around.

Things were easy back then, a little more laid back. We could all laugh that a team with the likes of Bob Burda and Gary Wagner was making a legitimate shot at first place. We can't do that now. We took the Red Sox seriously all year and never had a chance to laugh at them. Not once. Only the Yankees (14 games back in July, ha ha.).

Boston has pennant fever all right, but it's a disease of which baseball addiction is not a symptom.

It was cold and dark in Boston last night when the Sox played the Tigers, and the people came in droves as usual. But they were all preoccupied, pensive, still unbelieving that it is not yet the time to toast the likes of Rice, Yastrzemski, Eckersley, and Stanley.

Even the vendors, whose concessions are only a front for their oracles on the game, couldn't concentrate on the race and the title, the ultimate concession at hand.

"These people aren't dumb, they know there's a race going on," said Herbie the Hot Dog vendor, who's been sage comic relief to middle-class fans for the past five years. "It's like a good old-fashion golf match where Nicklaus and Mahaffey putt out for the championship on the 72nd green. It could go either way."

That was all he said about baseball, or the Red Sox. And I had to question Herbie's conviction as he launched into his familiar monologue:

"Nobody can beat my meat."

"You don't know what you're eating if you get 'em inside."

"Sodium nitrate will not kill you. It will take away your pimples and upgrade your sex life."

Herbie the Hot Dog Vendor was rolling, trying to make a sale or get a laugh from the passers-by. It was cold, it was late in the season. The Red Sox were in second place. Nobody laughed. Nobody was hungry.