Everybody remembers the bloody sock.
Even people who don't follow baseball remember the bloody sock, the most enduring image from the most improbable comeback in baseball history, last October, when the Boston Red Sox overtook the New York Yankees and put an end to 86 years of misery by capturing the 2004 World Series.
Few people, however, know about the man behind the bloody sock. Few know what befell him after the Sox won. While the bloody sock was preserved, hand-delivered to the Hall of Fame, mounted and placed under special light-shielding glass in a humidity-controlled room, the man behind the bloody sock was casually thrown away.
Maybe it's gone unnoticed because it defies belief. During the last eight months, while Sox players have become the toast of the nation--writing bestselling books and recording pop songs, appearing on talk shows and reality shows, starring in commercials and films--the quiet hero behind their victory, the man without whom their victory would have been impossible, the man behind that bloody sock, has been spurned, banished, forgotten.
Worst of all, no one will tell him why.
No, that's not quite true. The team told him. It's just that he can't make sense of the answer.
His story would be a classic baseball fable, a kind of Ring Lardner yarn about the occasional cruelty of the national pastime and the amnesia that afflicts fans and owners--except that fables tend to have morals, and it's hard for the man behind the bloody sock to find any moral in what's happened to him.
So instead of a fable, maybe it's a mystery.
Does anyone care? Does it matter that some poor guy in Boston saved a baseball team, then found himself thrown away by the team he saved? Does it matter that a professional sports team was guilty of being disloyal, in an era when disloyalty on the part of teams, players and fans has become an everyday fact?
Yes, it matters if you believe that the Boston Red Sox were supposed to be different, that Boston is one of the most beloved franchises in all of American sport: On the eve of baseball's annual convention, Tuesday's 76th All-Star Game in Detroit, Sox players dominate the fan balloting. It matters because Boston's long struggle to break the chains of its "curse" and reach the Promised Land is American cultural history as much as baseball lore. It matters because the Sox were said to be cursed in the first place because the last time they won a championship, in 1918, they threw away the man who helped them do it--Babe Ruth.
