Good morning!
It’s not often a World Series comes to town, so I hopped in the car and drove to Boston on Tuesday for a walk around the old ball yard. Not surprisingly, one of the first locals I saw was Northampton’s Mike Noonan standing under the awning of the Boston Beer Works.
He was with his wife’s son, Brian Walsh, who’d flown up from the Carolinas to be at the game. “No relation to any of the politicians,” he joked, pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights from inside his jacket.
On Noonan’s first date with Walsh’s mother Sylvia, he told his bride-to-be, “You can’t walk the leadoff hitter.”
Now that’s someone who can lay it out there for a woman to take or leave.
“I’ve been here since noon,” he said. “I was all stressed until after they beat the Yankees. Now I’m ecstatic.”
Whenever he’s celebrating — or mourning — it involves the Red Sox. Last year, we bumped into each other at McGuirk Stadium. He kept checking his smart phone so he could post the precise moment the Red Sox clinched the AL East on Facebook. “If I don’t, my friends will think something’s happened to me,” he said.
During an afternoon game two years ago, I bumped into him under the bleachers. He’d brought 20 of his Hamp high school friends to a game. “Class of ’70,” he said, “first three rows in back of the bullpen.”
The 66-year-old Noonan works security at UMass hockey games and per diem at the probate courthouse. It feeds his season ticket habit, which was up to over a dozen full-season strips.
He’s not a scalper. He sells them to friends for five bucks over face value, and he relies on those friends to sell them to other friends.
“I’ve been making deals for 36 years,” he laughed.
The reward for Chris and Deb Pettengill’s efforts were seats to Tuesday’s game. “I’ve helped Mike since Legion baseball,” said Chris, referring to when he played and Noonan managed Northampton Post 28.
Their bleacher tickets cost $136 apiece, and they couldn’t have been happier if they’d won a trip to the Bahamas.
On the corner, Jake Howard was hawking bootleg programs of the Yawkey Way Report for $10. “It’s the World Series,” he reasoned. “Prices go up. And it comes with a free lanyard or rain poncho.”
After he posed for a photo, I crossed Brookline Avenue and turned the corner onto Lansdowne Street and heard organ music wafting down on fans lined up at the box office outside Gate E.
The game was a sellout, but owner John Henry can always find space to fit a few more paying customers into the building. According to the box score, the paid attendance was 38,454, which was 961 more people than seats.
Half the Boston Police Department was there, wearing yellow reflective vests, standing beside special ops motorcycles and blue paddy wagons. I spotted a tall guy wearing a Virginia Cavaliers jacket, smoking a cigarette that he ditched in a puddle and wondered if he was one of the department’s undercover cops.
The throng was rambunctious and noisy but peaceable. They knew their team was unstoppable and the Los Angeles Dodgers would be the last domino to fall on an historic championship season. Heck, the Dodgers had played just three games in under 60-degree weather all season. They’d slow up quicker than a salamander caught in the frost.
A Dodgers fan named Dan Gant was wearing an LA team jersey with manager Dave Roberts’ name inscribed on the back. He was smiling, perhaps awestruck, walking through the crowd holding his smartphone over his head recording the spectacle.
“My buddy’s from Boston,” said Gant, referring to Alan Madison. “He called and said he was coming to the game. He said, ‘Let’s see if I can get you a ticket and onto a plane.’ He flipped the bill for the whole thing.”
The two longtime friends met when they worked together at a Tuscon hospital. Now, Madison lives with his family in Charlestown. “I only moved here a year ago, my wife’s from here, and I knew I had to become a Red Sox fan if I was going to be in the family.”
Out of curiosity I did a Google search on Madison and found he’d moved to Boston to be the chief executive officer of an oral heath care network called DentaQuest. He has a black belt in karate, and his wife is a four-time Boston Marathon finisher.
A middle-aged man wearing a Red Sox jacket was holding a pizza box.
“Where’d you get the pizza?” I asked him.
“You want it? Take it,” he said.
When I hesitated he said, “Best pizza in Boston.”
And so I took it and stood near the House of Blues, watched the crowd and ate cold pizza from Regina Pizzeria. A few feet from me, two vendors sold grinders made by Artie’s Famous Sausage. One pushed the onions and peppers and the other worked the crowd. He looked like a prize fighter or Goodfellas stand-in, barrel-chested with slicked black hair and a booming voice. “Step Right Up! Sausage Here! Hot Sausage! Chicken! Steak! Hot Dogs! Step right up!”
A college kid with his hat on backward walked up and ordered a sausage grinder. “Naked,” he said, shoving his hand in his pocket for the cash. “My second time here. Unbelievable.”
A disheveled townie took the barker aside and whispered, “… but I thought I’d come to you first.” The vendor peeled off several bills and handed them to him.
Afterward, I introduced myself, we shook hands and I asked him their names. “I’m Joe. He’s Anthony.”
“Uh, can I have your last names?” I asked.
He winked and smiled and said, “We don’t need to know that” and his grip about popped my fingers off.
Shortly before 7 p.m. I overheard a friend say to his buddy, “It’s gonna rain really soon and really hard.”
The weather app showed a yellow boomerang headed straight for the ballpark. I considered taking cover inside the Ipswich Street Garage, but opted for a bus stop shelter where two women were smoking cigarettes and a short skinny kid in tattered jeans parroted his fellow scalpers. “Tickets. Tickets. Who’s got tickets.”
Lightning flashed over the Prudential Building where the floors were lit to say “Go Sox.” Who knew Tom Werner owned the Pru?
Thunder usurped the noise from the idling buses and trucks but not the sound of an angry cop yelling at two scalpers who were leaning against a black SUV. “Guys!” he barked. “Get off the police car!”
“Sorry,” one of them mumbled, and they scurried over the wet pavement and into the darkness.
When the rain stopped a convoy of Mercedes luxury vans pulled up in front of the players’ entrance. A chauffeur said to the others, “All right. We’re gonna get everybody out and go to the Cask N’ Flagon.”
They weren’t VIPS, simply fans getting the VIP experience. They sauntered through the gate and nobody bothered them. For a moment I thought about mingling in with them. What a caper that would have been, but the opportunity was lost the moment I hesitated.
A friend from the old days used to sneak into games wearing a Coca-Cola shirt. “A Coke shirt gets you in anywhere,” he said.
The street was lined with network production trucks, news vans and drenched TV reporters reporting from under makeshift tents. I glanced through a basement window and into the bowels of the old ballpark and saw the auxiliary press corps, folks from the weekly newspapers and rinkydink.coms.
The din grew louder near Yawkey Way (now Jersey Street) and continued past the $60 parking lots and upscale businesses — the Bostonian Barber Shop, Craft Beer Cellar, Yardhouse and Wahlburgers. My hangout from the 1970s, Copperfield’s, was now Fenway Johnnies. Gone yuppie, I thought.
I wound up back where I started. “How’s business?” I asked Jake.
“Lousy,” he said. “Weird.”
I walked up the stairs from Yawkey Station, crossed Commonwealth Avenue and started back toward my car in Cambridge. A few yards ahead of me, a trim fellow was carrying a bagpipe. He had the plaid kilt but instead of the traditional highlander shirt he wore a Josh Beckett jersey with No. 19 stitched on the back. He was waiting at a crosswalk when I introduced myself. He said his name was Greg Colpitts. “I play in the park,” he said. “I liked Josh Beckett when I was in high school, and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
“Okay,” I said, “Good luck.”
In the car I listened to Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday on the Dodgers radio network. Why couldn’t the great Vin Scully have waited two more seasons until he retired? Back home I watched Eduardo Nunez hit his three-run blast for an 8-4 lead and knew that Mike Noonan was living the dream.