I have the best boss ever.
Today, I, two co-workers, one coworker’s girlfriend, Forrest and Karolina, and Quinn and Keila were able to sit in the front row of Right Field Box 90 and watch a very exciting ball game… all because my boss couldn’t use the tickets. Great seats, great game, great weather… his loss, our gain!
It turns out this was Quinn and Keila’s first time at Fenway. At one point, Quinn remarked to her, “You know how all the tourists in Puerto Rico [her home] sound like idiots to you because they don’t know where anything is or what’s going on? That’s what we sound like to Rhode right now.” Yeah, that was true. But I was highly amused when he tried to explain to her that a grand slam was when a homerun was hit over the Green Monster.
At the other end of our group, Forrest may have been the only person in the stadium who appreciated the fact that I brought a Homer Hanky. (It’s in my baseball bag, which also generally includes my glove, a poncho, and my scorebook.) In return, he showed off his lucky red socks… the Red Sox have only lost one game that he’s ever attended while wearing those socks. And that game was against the Twins, so we figure they’re lucky.
The game itself was an excellent one with the lead see-sawing a bit at the beginning before settling into a tie from the top of the 6th to the bottom of the 8th. Then Papi almost hit his first homerun of the season… but settled for a double. He scored on a follow-up double by Jason Bay to put the Sox up 4-3, where the score remained going into the 9th. Then came Papelbon accompanied by the Dropkick Murphy’s “Shipping Up To Boston” (kind of like this). This resulted in my favorite quote of the night, courtesy of Keila: “Wow, people get so excited. I mean, I guess it could be worse — it could be golf.”
And I did say that Papelbon came in in the 9th… so you can fill in the rest pretty easily. The Rays snuck in a runner on third with no outs, but Papelbon responded with three consecutive strikeouts to end the game and send us out with “Dirty Water” serenading us (something like this, only it was almost midnight).