Don't Mess with the Sox

Written by John S. Gardner on Tuesday January 19, 2010

For all their faults, the Kennedys knew the folkways of Boston – and the Red Sox starting pitchers. They won elections. Coakley lost.

[Mayor] Fitzgerald, meanwhile, basked in the reflected glow of his favorite team, elated at all the attention the Red Sox' winning ways had afforded him.  Back in 1904, he'd come close to purchasing the club, but had been headed off, most notably, by Ban Johnson, who was enough of a political operator himself to recognize one who was far more skilled at the job than he.  That hadn't sullied Fitzgerald's loyalties, though, either to his team or to the sport.  Baseball could solve a lot of ills, he believed, a philosophy especially helpful to him because his eldest daughter, Rose, had begun seeing a lad named Joseph P. Kennedy, a raffish, ambitious young financier whose lone redeeming quality, to Honey Fitz, was that he'd been a star baseball player at Harvard.

-- Mike Vaccaro, The First Fall Classic, p. 42

Mayor John F. Fitzgerald (“Honey Fitz”) was the first American-born Irish Catholic Mayor of Boston, and the grandfather of President Kennedy.  The political smarts in the family started with him, and his election represented the triumph of the Irish in Boston, nearly 60 years after the great immigration, over the dominant Yankee elite.  Among his other accomplishments, Honey Fitz supported the building of a new baseball stadium – Fenway Park.

So here’s Martha Coakley, making fun of Scott Brown:

Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.

'As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?' she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.

And here’s Red Sox great Curt Schilling, in his blog, reacting to the story:

Finally, has she forgotten who she’s talking to? What state she’s wanting to represent in the Senate? It’s Massachusetts. You do not make sneering insults about Fenway Park. What’s she going to do next, insult the Red Sox? That’d really just be the cherry on top of a delightful campaign. Fenway Park and the Red Sox are damned near sacred to Massachusetts residents, Bostonians in particular. Really, I’m starting to think that she just doesn’t want to get elected or something. Because anyone with half a modicum of sense knows that you do not go into Boston and mess with Fenway Park.

Two days later, she does just that, calling Schilling “another Yankee fan.”

Boston, heckuva town.  For all their faults, the Kennedys knew the folkways – and the starting pitchers.  They won.  Coakley lost.

That’s politics – and though it is no longer the “Kennedy seat,” somewhere, Honey Fitz may actually be singing “Sweet Adeline” tonight.  At a minimum, he would have admired Scott Brown’s incredible campaign.

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