The Good Ol" Bad Ol' Days

Charles Pierce reminisces about the shitty Red Sox of his youth, and his time with his grandpa listening to the games:

t's weeks like this that I miss my grandfather, and he's been dead since 1965. Unfiltered Camels and quart-bottles of Narragansett Lager finally got him one afternoon in the parking lot of the sign-painting company he owned in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. (There's an arena on that spot now. His old shop was right about where the visitor's locker room was.) Old Charlie Gibbons was the guy who taught me how to watch baseball, specifically Red Sox baseball, specifically bad Red Sox baseball. He had seen so very much of it.
His life as a fan had started promisingly enough. He and his father rode the train from Worcester into Boston for a couple of games during the 1918 World Series between the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. What could possibly go wrong from there, what with that Ruth kid standing them on their heads the way he could? So he spent the next 47 years watching this team and, by the time he died, they were so terrible that they would finish the season 62-100.
I was his regular Sunday companion for the last five of those years. Well, me and the quart of 'Gansett and the cigarettes, anyway. He would sit in a bilious green leather recliner — one of the very first La-Z-Boys, if I recall correctly — and I would sit in a round armchair and we would watch an exercise in utter public futility. This wasn't the hyped-up "Curse of the Bambino" nonsense. He never mentioned 1946, or 1949. Johnny Pesky and Enos Slaughter never came up, though he'd lived through those moments, too. This was summer after summer of damned near hilarious incompetence. One day, in fact, I learned a new word. Frank Malzone butchered a ground ball at third base, and my grandfather erupted in a gerund that was heretofore unfamiliar to me, but that seemed important enough to my grandmother that she hustled me out of the house and into the backyard. Old girl had surprising lateral movement, I'll give her that.

Now that is what baseball is all about.  The whole thing is entertaining, almost as entertaining as watching the Red Sox suck ass. It reminds me of the terrible post-1981 Reds and the Bengals from 1991-2004.  Or the Cubs from 1908 until the present.  Or the Pirates from 1993 until the present.  Sometimes misery is more entertaining than success.