Terriers hang on to make it to the Big Dance

May 2011

 

The players and their coach didn’t know it yet, but this was to be the last win of the Terriers’ eleven-game winning streak. They would win the America East Championship 56-54 despite trailing the Stony Brook Seawolves by double digits for the first half of the game, after going on a 17-3 scoring run in the second. The win would earn them a spot in the NCAA Tournament as a 16-seed where they would meet the one-seed Kansas Jayhawks.

Even with all of this riding on an eleventh win they played it in front of a sparse crowd at Boston University’s Agganis Arena, a venue usually reserved for men’s ice hockey sell-out games.

Though playing at Agganis becomes a more common occurrence for BU Men’s Basketball every year, the majority of the team’s home games are played at “The Roof,” in a high-school-sized gym that magnifies the cheers of a fan section that cannot fill up a set of bleachers without the added padding of the school band.

Hockey is king at this school. The men’s team offers students the opportunity to root for a team that has the chance to compete for a national championship every year, against legitimate rivals in a prestigious division. This opposed to a basketball team competing in a division with almost no name recognition, playing teams from schools that fans aren’t usually familiar with.

On occasion, Jack Parker, one of the two winningest active coaches in college hockey (the other, fittingly enough being Jerry York, the coach of the much despised Boston College Eagles), who also serves as BU’s Executive Director of Athletics can be seen sitting close to the sideline of a basketball game, enjoying a Diet Coke and paying more attention to his phone than what’s happening on the court.

The players, for the most part, seem unconcerned with, or at least used to, the lack of attention from their fellow students.

“It is what it is. I think on the whole Boston is a pro sports town. So it’s not difficult, it just is what it is,” Senior and scoring leader John Holland said.

For second-year head coach Pat Chambers, however, the transition from his position as assistant head coach at Villanova, a perennial competitor in the Big East, to BU was as difficult as it was expected. But changing the fan culture that surrounds basketball here is one of his mandates.

“In the beginning I didn’t quite understand. I thought going to college…this is part of the reason you go to college is to root for your teams whether it be basketball, hockey, soccer,” he said.

“One reason they brought me in is to change that and I’m willing to give it my all and see what happens. I think if you win and our guys are out on campus and getting to know people I think people will come out win or lose.”

According to Holland, players who were here two years ago, when Dennis Wolff was fired, noticed an immediate change as soon as Chambers came in.

“It’s a lot more upbeat and fast-paced and a more enthusiastic atmosphere. When I first came here as a freshman it was kind of a dull atmosphere,” Junior Jeff Pelage said. “He knows that he does certain things well and he knows there are things he doesn’t do well and he’s trying to change the things he doesn’t do well.”

Some of Chambers’ strengths are his accessibility and being someone who is not afraid to go up to a student and personally ask him or her to come to a game. He believes that winning is the first step in attracting more fans.

But this season that was a struggle from the beginning. Juniors Matt Griffin, Patrick Hazel and Darryl Partin were all set to play after sitting out for a year in accordance with NCAA transfer rules. There were also six freshmen who had to adjust to college ball and just one senior in Holland to help guide them. To make matters worse Pelage was injured in one of the first scrimmages of the year.

“It took a little longer for them to get their legs underneath them and get back into game shape,” Chambers said of Griffin, Hazel and Partin. “It’s different playing in practice than in games. There’s more speed and intensity.”

“You have guys who haven’t played for two years and freshmen who are coming right out of high school, and it just takes some time for everyone to get it together and start playing,” Holland said.

The Terriers spent too much of their season losing to the likes of Bucknell, LaSalle and Quinnipiac, all teams that were within their reach, in games that they lost by no more than three points.

The low points for Chambers and Holland both came in January. For Chambers it was finding out that he would lose Junior Jake O’Brien, the team’s leading rebounder, for the remainder of the season to a foot injury he’d sustained on a New Year’s Eve loss to UMass.

Losing to UMBC 71-67 on January 17 was the nadir for Holland, the frustration of which contributed to his game-high 24 points in the team’s mid-February 85-53 drubbing of the Retrievers.

“We lost to a lot of teams that we were supposed to win against and at some point somebody’s gotta get angry about that,” Pelage said.

According to Holland, everyone on the team had become comfortable with their role by the time they went on the eleven-game win streak that took them to Tulsa, where they attempted to become the first 16-seed to ever beat a one-seed in NCAA Tournament history. According to Holland and Pelage, not a single player on the team bought into the idea of being the underdog.

“We went in there thinking of ourselves as basketball players and this was just another basketball game and we were gonna play our best game,” Pelage said. “I was anxious at first, especially playing on such a big stage but after a little while you realize these are just basketball players like us.”

Holland believes that the team will be fine without him next year and that the players who learned to step up this season will do so again in his absence. Both he and Pelage believe that the Tournament appearance will bring about more interest from the fans, especially after the way they performed on the national stage.

The Terriers hung with the Jayhawks for most of the game as Holland posted 19 points. Though they lost 72-53, they kept the game close for 30 minutes and with 9:32 left, the Terriers trailed by only six points. Though the players take no consolation out of the loss, they are excited for next year and believe that they will make it to the NCAA Tournament again.

As far as Holland and Chambers are concerned, slow start or not, there was no doubt that they would not only make it into the Tournament for the first time since 2002 this year, but that they would play their hearts out once there.

“I was proud of my team but I expected it,” Chambers said.

Sox find success against the A’s after shuffling bating order

April 21, 2011

 

Since winning their first series of the season against the Yankees in the second week of April, the Red Sox have won half of their games, taking four out of eight and winning their second series against the Toronto Blue Jays. Yesterday they won their first road game of the season, striking another small feat off of a list of expectations that was drastically whittled down after the excruciatingly slow start to their season.

The Red Sox took control of yesterday’s game with three homeruns and fantastic relief pitching after former Red Sox player, Coco Crisp opened up scoring for the Oakland Athletics with a homerun of his own in the first inning.

Two of Boston’s homers were hit on pitches thrown by Gio Gonzalez, a left-handed pitcher who this season has pitched 23 strikeouts in 25 innings and given up only five runs on 20 hits.

The Red Sox continued to see production from Jed Lowrie, who hit a single and a two-run homer in the game. He has some of the highest numbers on the team as far as offense, with a .462 batting average for the season, as well as a .488 on-base percentage.

“I’m just continuing to put my head down and prepare. The more you think about it, the more you’re just going to put pressure on every at-bat,” he told the Boston Globe. “I’m just going to prepare like I have every day and know the results that I’ve gotten thus far is because of that preparation.’’

Though he has yet to live up to the lofty expectations of him, Carl Crawford has shown some improvement and yesterday had his best batting average since playing Tampa Bay on April 12. He also earned his third RBI of the season, singling and sending Kevin Youkilis in for the team’s first score of the game in the second inning.

The Red Sox found success shuffling their batting order, moving Lowrie behind Youkilis, who hit Boston’s first homerun of the game, and putting Marco Scutaro, who hit two singles yesterday, back into the order after sitting him out for the past four games.

Despite giving up that first homerun to Crisp, Clay Buccholz pitched a solid game before finding himself with the bases loaded with just one out after Ryan Sweeney made it to third base on a ground out after doubling and Buccholz walked Landon Powell and Conor Jackson.

“That’s why, as far as last year, I think that’s why [my performance] was so good,” Buchholz told ESPN Boston. “I had a lot of guys on base last year and seemed to find a way to get out of it, limiting the damage. It’s definitely a big thing. First pitch of the game, home run, it can go south really quickly there.”

Daniel Bard came in to finish the inning and promptly struck out Cliff Pennington, before Coco Crisp hit a pop out to end the sixth. He quickly took care of the A’s in the seventh inning, facing four batters for three outs and giving up only a single.

“That was the game right there. You guys have heard me talk about it time and time again that the game can be won in the sixth or seventh. For me, that was it. He came in and stopped it,” Terry Francona told the Boston Globe.

“I think he’s done that four times in my career, come in with the bases loaded and less than two outs,” Buchholz told ESPN Boston of Bard’s performance.

Bobby Jenks took over in the eighth and had given up a run, two singles and a walk with two outs before closer Jonathan Papelbon came into the game and struck out David DeJesus to end the inning. In the ninth he gave up a run to Hideki Matsui and put Mark Ellis in scoring position with only one out, but pitched two pop outs to end the game.

The win came after the Red Sox were shut out yesterday, giving up their seventh road game.

Red Sox continue struggles after first series win

April 16, 2011

 

At this point it’s safe to say that Red Sox fans would sacrifice some of Boston’s precious little spring weather this year for a few more rainouts. The Red Sox now seem to be struggling with the panic that their fans have already completely given into with a lot of last night’s post-game talk revolving around how to focus on keeping negative thoughts at bay.

In a week that started off so positively with a series win against the Yankees, what followed was a drubbing from the only team in the AL East that seemed to start the season as pathetically as the Sox in an eventual series loss to the Rays. Now the team has entered its last series at home until the end of the month with a 6-7 loss in a game that started out spectacularly with homeruns from Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis.

“It’s not going to mean anything tomorrow because we lost, but, always, we’ve got to give ourselves a chance. We’re looking for positives,” Terry Francona told ESPN Boston last night.

There was almost nothing positive about reliever Bobby Jenks’ seventh inning performance, which stole the show from a less than mediocre Clay Buccholz in the worst possible way after he allowed four runs from the middle of the Toronto batting order, managing only to retire Corey Patterson.

Jayson Nix scored on a Jose Bautista single, followed by a single from Adam Lind that sent Yunel Escobar home. Bautista stole home from second base on a pitch that also allowed Lind to steal third. The team’s final run of the game came from Lind on a single from Aaron Hill.

“We’re there now. We’re in a tough position. To come back right now, it’s going to take all year long,’’ reliever Jenks told the Boston Globe.

In the third inning it seemed as the team was ready to begin a comeback with this game when Pedroia hit a homerun to put the Red Sox on the board. Youkilis followed with a two run homer that brought the home crowd to its feet.

But the fans at Fenway only had one inning to enjoy the 3-0 lead when Corey Patterson hit a 2 RBI triple after Buccholz walked Juan Rivera and Jayson Nix.

“Five walks, man. I was always told let them get hits and beat you. When you give them free passes, I feel like I should have been pinned with this loss,’’ Buccholz told the Boston Globe. “Eliminate two of those walks, that’s two runs they don’t score and we win the game.’’

The Red Sox fought back at the bottom of the seventh, with the Blue Jays holding a 7-3 lead after reliever Felix Doubrount mercifully ended their inning, with an RBI single from Jed Lowrie and a 2 RBI double from Marco Scutaro. But the effort fell short and Blue Jays closer Jon Rauch ended the game quickly in the ninth by retiring the top three in Boston’s batting order.

While Sox fans can seemingly still count on most of the team’s batting order, they have yet to see much production from their much-reported on offseason acquisitions. Adrian Gonzalez, who just signed a contract extension and scored once last night off of Youkilis’ homerun still has yet to hand in the kind of performances that experts counted on when they projected this team going to the World Series

Even more disconcerting was that once again Carl Crawford failed to have any impact on the game whatsoever, going 0 for 5.

“You definitely try to keep the negative thoughts out of your head and try to stay positive because you know you have four more at-bats to go,” Crawford told ESPN Boston after the game.

The “positives” might be the most frustrating part of all of this. It’s only a short matter of time before promising 3-0 leads begin to mean nothing and fans begin to expect the inevitable meltdowns. Every new loss for the 2-10 Red Sox makes you wonder when the players themselves will begin to give into that kind of attitude. 

Red Sox revert to losing ways against Yankees

April 10, 2011

 

It was big news on Friday when the Red Sox finally broke their losing streak, beating the Yankees in front of a home crowd at Fenway and giving fans hope that the team might manage to claw its way out of a dismal start to the 2011 season.

Then yesterday happened and the Yankees bulldozed the Red Sox on their way to a 9-4 victory that saw them hitting four homeruns, two of which came from Russell Martin, who left the Dodgers last year with hip and knee injuries. The Red Sox had the opportunity to sign Martin in the offseason, an anecdote that was made much of following the game.

“The Red Sox, I think they were a little iffy with the injuries that I had and they weren’t too sure,” Martin told ESPN of his decision to sign with the Yankees.

“I saw him as a very productive player,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi told ESPN. “I wasn’t saying he was going to hit 30 homers and 120 RBIs, but I thought he’d be a productive player in our lineup, because he could do so many things.”

Meanwhile, shifting Carl Crawford to the leadoff spot in the Red Sox batting order for this series failed in getting any production out of him, which is only one among many concerns over an offense that has hit only five homeruns so far this season. Just one out of the five came from Adrian Gonzalez who was signed specifically for his powerful hitting and record-setting hits by a left-hander to opposite field (ESPN).

The Yankees, on the other hand, needed almost no help from star players Derek Jeter, Mark Teixiera and Alex Rodriguez to rack up their nine runs. Considering how the Red Sox have been pitching, that thought is enough to earn the players more of those sleepless nights that Dustin Pedroia spoke of.

Losing a pitching battle to the Yankees sets off yet another alarm bell for a team living with the cacophony of panicking fans and sports reporters. All throughout the offseason experts raised concerns over the Yankees’ pitching while the Red Sox seemed to be sitting pretty with the likes of Jon Lester, Daniel Bard, Clay Buchholz and Josh Beckett.

And in the first game of this series, when Phil Hughes faltered and John Lackey pitched into the sixth inning for a win, those offseason analyses of each team seemed to ring mercifully true for a team that had thus far failed to meet every other prediction for their season.

But yesterday Buchholz made it through only the fourth inning by which point he had already given up five of the Yankees’ eventual nine runs.

“We’re walking some people and there’s a lot of deep counts. We’re getting some early exits [from starters] and we’re asking a lot of our bullpen, especially early in the season,” Terry Francona told ESPN.

Throughout the ensuing panic of the 0-6 start, players assured fans that they felt frustrated too, that they were taking these losses home with them and losing sleep over them. Francona and Theo Epstein repeatedly told reporters that it was a matter of keeping calm, getting the team into gear and simply playing their way out of this rut.

With newspaper columnists and radio shock jocks feeding a panic that has become a daily topic on Sports Center, there are those who are repeating the mantra that there are 162 games in a season, that six or seven or eight games don’t decide the fate of a team.

But in a sport that relies so heavily on statistics to tell the story of a player, a team or a season, it has to count for something that no team in the American League has ever made it to the playoffs after going 0-6.

And while eight games may not mean much among 162, if in the course of those games the Red Sox still haven’t figured out how to address the team’s many problem areas, then more and more of the season passes by with the team still trying to find a way, as Epstein has been saying, to pitch better, to hit better, to win.

Red Sox drop first regular season game to Rangers

April 2, 2011

 

The sun was shining in Arlington, fans at Rangers Ballpark were donning t-shirts, shorts and sunglasses, Terry Francona was sporting a tan that women in Boston still have to pay for and by the ninth inning of yesterday’s game the Red Sox needed every one of these symbols of spring to remind themselves that there are 161 more games to play and prove themselves in.

With most of the batting order handing in solid performances and helping to eradicate memories of a underachieving offense last season, the Red Sox struggled unexpectedly in pitching during a 9-5 loss that has fans and talking heads already reevaluating some the hype that has been built up around the team.

Much of that hype surrounded Jon Lester and Adrian Gonzalez, two of the most talked about Red Sox players over the course of spring training. Lester had been ranked as a top-5 pitcher in the MLB and Gonzalez was acquired in a highly touted off-season trade in order to boost the team’s offense.

Lester is notorious for faltering in April each season and Gonzalez was still recovering from a shoulder injury as spring training went underway. Yesterday, playing last year’s ALCS Champions, a mantle that the Red Sox are favored to inherit this season, the two couldn’t have been more discordant, with Lester failing to live up to that hype at the same time that Gonzalez was measuring up to it.

Lester did not record a single strikeout for the second time in his career and allowed three home runs in the first four innings. The Rangers’ first score for the 2011 season was a homerun hit by Ian Kinsler in the team’s first at-bat, which brought a crowd that included George W. Bush to its feet and was followed by a homerun from Nelson Cruz in the second inning.

“For whatever reason we couldn’t get many swings and misses today. For the most part, we got a lot of weak-hit ground balls and weak-hit fly balls, with the exception of the home runs,” Lester told ESPN Boston.

In addition to the poor showing from Lester, Red Sox pitcher Daniel Bard, also considered an ace in the hole for the team, handed in a performance that could most generously be described as mediocre.

With the score tied at 5-5 in the eighth inning, after Bard walked Mike Napoli and pitched a base hit to Yorvit Torrealba, pinch-hitter David Murphy hit a double out into left field and sent Napoli and Torrealba home to give the Rangers a 7-5 lead.

“I made exactly the pitch I wanted to make. We were going sinker down and away. It was on the knees, outer black, he just barely got the bat to it, and three inches to the left it’s a foul ball and we’re having a different conversation,” Bard told ESPN Boston of the pitch to Murphy.

The high point of the game was a debut by Gonzalez that lived up to the high expectations for what he can bring to the team’s offense. With the bases loaded in the third inning, two strikes and two outs, Gonzalez swung for a base hit that allowed Jacoby Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia to score, giving the Read Sox a 4-2 lead. In the first inning he sent Kevin Youkilis in for score that gave the team a 2-0 lead.

Fans can also find solace in the fact that their beloved Big Papi, David Ortiz, hit a homerun to tie the game at the top of the eighth inning in the middle of a scoring drought that had lasted four innings. Up until that point he hadn’t managed to do much, having batted out twice and stiking out once in his previous at-bats.

Despite this and a great showing by Ellsbury who earned the first run of the season and two doubles for the Red Sox, the team’s offense failed to build on Ortiz’s tying run and the Rangers put the game even further out of reach with runs from Elvis Andrus and Josh Hamilton for a 9-5 lead at the bottom of the eighth inning.

There was a volley of scoring through the fourth inning with the Red Sox never trailing until the Rangers took a 5-4 lead when catcher Mike Napoli hit a homerun with Adrian Beltre on second base and Nelson Cruz on first.

The New Empire

March 2011

 

The signs are all there.

The $160 million dollar payroll.

Buying Carl Crawford from a Rays team that couldn’t afford to keep him.

The pressure that comes with being favored to win the World Series.

It’s getting more and more difficult to think of the Red Sox as a scrappy underdog. Could it be that the Red Sox are matching the Yankees for all their high-spending, superstar-buying ways?

When the Red Sox lose to a team like the Rays or the Orioles this year will the fans hurt more knowing that their team was the brute felled by a plucky underdog that it used to resemble?

Will it feel the same to beat the Yankees knowing that it isn’t David defeating Goliath, but two evenly matched teams with a possible upper hand for the Red Sox?

Essentially, was Buck Showalter, in a pretty transparent attempt to light a fire under his own team, actually getting at the heart of something?

“You got Carl Crawford ‘cause you paid more than anyone else, and that’s what makes you smarter? That’s why I like whipping their butt. It’s great, knowing those guys with the $205 million payroll are saying, ‘How the hell are they beating us?’” Showalter told Men’s Journal, questioning how smart Theo Epstein would be without his generous payroll.

It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that Epstein is a great general manager and that the Red Sox have done a bang-up job of bring prospects up from their farm system. Either way, with money or without, I think he’d be a good general manager. But I also think a lot of GMs in baseball today would be looking just as good if they had $160 million at their disposal.

When Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman remarked at the beginning of spring training that his team would be the underdog of the AL East, Terry Francona scoffed and reminded everyone of the Yankees’ $200 million payroll. And while it’s all too much money for me to even dream about, in baseball the difference between $200 million and $160 million is only the difference between the team with the number one highest payroll and the team that comes in second.

But try dropping to below $60 million like the Rays have had to. Or trying to break a 13 year losing streak by bringing in some new blood as the Orioles have done with half of the Red Sox payroll.

Soon enough our best-loved players will be making snide Mark Teixeira-esque comments about how they’re glad that everyone hates them, that it makes them play with a chip on their shoulder. As if the purpose of playing was to prove the world wrong instead of to reward the fans who had faith from the beginning.

But as difficult as it has become to remember the Red Sox as the scrappy underdog, it’s getting just difficult to keep thinking of Boston as a meat and potatoes town full of downtrodden but ever faithful fans.

This is a big college town. A lot of kids come from other cities and adopt Boston teams as if owning a copy of The Boondock Saints and listening to Dropkick Murphys gives them insight into the woes of growing up in Southie or rooting for a cursed baseball team.

I’ve always felt that a Yankees hat is one of the most obnoxious articles of clothing that a person can wear. Not even because it bears the logo of a rival team, but because people who have no affiliation with that team or city are often seen wearing it. As a sports fan, I find it depressing to see a team logo reduced to a fashion statement. That’s why I get irrationally angry when I see pink football jerseys.

But the next time you’re out of town or happen to change the channel to MTV spring break coverage, you’ll see more and more people sporting Red Sox caps, often schemed to a new sets of colors. Most of these people don’t even care about baseball as a sport, let alone a particular team.

I have no doubt that most Red Sox fans alive today will never forget the years of agony just because of six years of success, but there is a new crop of fans that will have only heard about it in stories. Being a fan is really about being there when the going gets tough. If adversity builds character then what kind of characteristics will define the next generation of fans? And more importantly what happens when the most diehard fans are completely priced out of seats at games? When playing at Fenway Park is no longer an unnerving, mettle-testing experience for players from opposing teams?

No news is good news

March 2011

 

Whenever my mother asks me what’s new and I say nothing, she always replies, “Well no news is good news.”

The same could be said for Red Sox spring training this year and while that maxim applies to the lives of people and sports teams, exactly the opposite is true for the local reporters who had to milk the Josh Beckett getting hit in the head with a baseball story for all it was worth.

Contrast this to the meaty stories that baseball beat reporters for other teams are getting to sink their teeth into and even Red Sox fans who are wishing for stories a little more substantial than which players are lending their names to charity wines have to hope that their team’s spring training continues to produce this deficit of news.

For example, the distractions that the Mets are facing right now, what with the role Bernie Madoff was discovered to have had in the teams business operations. In case that weren’t enough, NYPD showed up at the team’s base during spring training on Wednesday, according to ESPN, in order to question players and coaches about the former clubhouse manager Charlie Samuels’ rumored gambling problem and allegations that he pilfered and sold Mets game equipment for profit.

The Texas Rangers, who lost Cliff Lee to the Phillies following a season that took the team to a World Series, are reported to be losing their managing general partner and CEO Chuck Greenberg, after he clashed with team president Nolan Ryan over how to run the team.

Then there’s Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers, who, after making headlines by getting arrested for drunk driving in February, is headed for rehab and has a March 16 arraignment date. To complicate matters further, ESPN recently reported on Cabrera’s allegedly belligerent behavior towards a restaurant manager the night of his arrest. The manager told police that Cabrera threatened to kill him.

The Red Sox produced their share of headlines last season due to injuries that had fans rushing to their local paper or website of choice to find out what the exact nature of an injury was and how long a player would be out. Now the trickle news coming out of spring training is the exact opposite on the health front.

In the last week the Boston Herald printed stories with headlines like “Pedroia’s foot injury a thing of the past,” “Now healthy Jacoby Ellsbury climbs into peak form” and “Gonzalez closes in on game action.” And the Boston Globe reported that “Simulated success has Beckett back on track” and “Lester gives a view to a thrill.”

Even the hiccup of Beckett’s concussion was followed by him playing better than he had before a baseball beamed his head, the night before which he had played an up and down two innings against the Twins.

Not to sound like a Phillies fan, but all of this good news almost makes you wonder when the streak of good luck has to break. Nothing is ever as perfect as it seems and I would rather see the injuries happen now while there’s still time for recovery or for any kinks in team chemistry to work themselves out.

Brian Cashman painted an accurate portrait of the rivalry when he said that the Red Sox would be the hunted this season and his own team the hunters. And while it’s always nice to be the team to beat, it also means that every team is gunning for you. In an AL East that’s leveling out a little and a Yankees team that’s just one or two acquisitions from being completely dominant, the top is a dangerous place to be.

Of course it could be that all of this stability and good news for the Red Sox is coming at the expense of the two Boston teams gearing up for the playoffs right now. Danny Ainge’s inexplicable trade of Kendrick Perkins clearly upset a lot of his own players and considering the team’s recent play, which could be described as mediocre at best, the newest Celtics haven’t done much to appease a fan-base with mixed emotions on the trade.

The B’s who have struggled all season at home, have thankfully departed Boston for four games on the road, where their record holds up much better. But this of course follows Chara’s check of Max Pacioretty in a game that the Bruins dropped to the Habs and though the NHL did not suspend Chara, Montreal authorities are going to be investigating the incident.

But we’re still talking about two teams that are headed for the playoffs and Boston sports fans will just have to hope that the current circumstances of the Red Sox remain at a status quo and those of the Celtics and Bruins start looking up again.

And there you have it: not even enough Red Sox news for an entire column about the Red Sox.

 

Salvador

December 2010

 

Walking to class recently I passed by people handing out flyers for a documentary about the massacre that took place at the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador during the civil war. It made me think of the day that I spent there five years ago. I got to stand in the spots where the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered. I looked through the albums filled with pictures of bodies bloodied beyond recognition that were taken by the priests’ colleagues as proof of what their own government had done.

I read about an asylum-seeking Salvadoran family in the Baltimore Sun that is in danger of being deported back to El Salvador where it’s members face an almost certain death at the hand of the gangs who operate uninhibited in that country. It made me think of the mothers of sons I had met on my two trips to El Salvador who worried that in a country with a machismo culture and high unemployment gangs were an all too attractive alternative to languishing in shantytowns.

In a comparatively trivial incident where I have to confess (with embarrassment) to watching “Burn Notice,” there was an episode in which one of the characters told a war story about his experience being a US operative in Salvador during the civil war. It made me think about how successive US presidents in the 1970s and 1980s thoughtlessly donated weapons to a government that used them indiscriminately against their own people.

Five years ago when I was preparing to go to El Salvador for the first time, I had only formulated very vague images of what I might expect, based on what others who had already been told me. I knew not to eat any fruit off of the trees and that driving through San Salvador I would see men with guns standing on street corners and that while the trip to the mountain hamlet of Ignacio Ellacuría would be one of the best experiences of my life, the trip to the city orphanage would be one of the worst (though that warning in no way prepared me for the hollow hopeless feeling I felt or the tears that I cried holding a months old baby that had been put up for adoption).

“The first thing you think when you step off of plane coming home is ‘these lights don’t need to be on,’” my friend Becky told me about the return home.

She was a senior who had gone to El Salvador her junior year and would be going back again. The teacher who ran the program had a policy of taking along four juniors with ten or so seniors on our school’s annual service trip to El Salvador. It made it a little less stressful carting 15 teenage girls through a third world country if a few of them had already been there and could give the new girls advice on what to expect. I was one of the juniors who went in 2006 and who would be lucky enough to be guaranteed a spot on the trip my senior year.

After only a week in Ignacio Ellacuría I had begun to enjoy the simplicity of life that accompanies stark poverty. To this day I haven’t experienced anything as satisfying as eating spicy chicken off the bone and drinking orange soda from sticky glass bottles at a little shack on the bank of the Rio Sumpúl after a day of playing games and having swimming contests in the river with 20 village children. Or anything as relaxing as lying in a hammock, exhausted from playing soccer in the unforgiving heat, under a tin roof while it finally rained outside and chickens and a mutt or two seeking someplace dry wandered among the cots in our temporary home. Or anything as sweet as the house of a young couple and their days-old baby with its back yard filled with newborn puppies and fuzzy little chicks. In coming back home we were coming back to sickeningly privileged lives and opportunities that turned the world into our back yards.

My school, Notre Dame Prep, was named for the Virgin Mother and accordingly everything we did and every prayer service we held was dedicated to her or invoked her motherly compassion. Sometimes the mother-worship there bordered on regression, pushing the idea that the most fulfilling life goal for any woman is being a full time mom. But mostly it was re-affirming and intended to teach us about the unwavering and inherent strength of women. There was no better example of this than what we found in El Salvador. Our Salvadoran mothers cooked for us, made sure we put on our suntan lotion, played games with us and relived for us the most tragic experiences of their lives.

My favorite was a woman named Esperanza who I stuck with for much of my second trip to El Salvador and who at one point took care of me when I was sick. Both years we spent one day at the Rio Sumpúl which was a 45-minute drive from the village. We and half of the village would stand in the back of a flatbed truck and ride the unpaved mountain road down to the river where we would play games with the little kids and older boys who would use the excuse of tackling us in the water to touch our butts. Esperanza came with us my senior year and put all of us by being the liveliest and most inexhaustible person there. She made us laugh, taught us new games and playfully smacked the boys who swam up behind us and harassed us. But the whole time we were there, a small part of me couldn’t stop thinking about another time she had been at the Rio Sumpúl.

The year before was when I first heard her story. Sometime during the Salvadoran civil war the newly settled village had gotten word that soldiers were on their way. Everyone was familiar with the stories of bombings and massacres of women and children and so the villagers fled towards the Honduran border, towards the Rio Sumpúl. Among the fleeing was Esperanza with her infant daughter, Amilcar, strapped to her back and soldiers not far behind. She and the others reached the river at a particularly deep bend and she had to swim across, fighting the current and to keep her daughter’s head above water. By the time she reached the opposite bank she realized that she had lost her baby somewhere along her journey across the river. The first thing she saw when she turned around, preparing to jump back in after her child, was soldiers throwing babies and small children up in the air and catching them on their bayonets. She began running up the bank, along the direction of the current, frantic and hysterical. All she could hear were the screams of fellow villagers being tortured and brutally murdered and the cries of babies, any of whom could have been her own daughter. At the blurred edges of her vision she saw a small village boy running towards her holding something. Amidst the chaos he had spotted Amilcar in the water and fished her out.

Esperanza would make it across the Honduran border with her daughter to a refugee camp. But after a year there, she left, only half-willingly, to accompany a group of rebels back into El Salvador in order to cook for them. She left her daughter and newborn son with a woman she had become close to. When she returned to camp months later, the woman had left with her husband for America, taking Esperanza’s children with her. Without any way of knowing where in the US they went or any method for tracking them down, she never saw her two oldest children again. When she told us her story she was still trying to find them.

We met a woman, another Esperanza, who told us about hearing the gun shot that killed her daughter, about how she hears it every single night in nightmares, about how she relived the excruciating pain of her daughter’s murder every time she heard a gun shot during the war, of which there were many.

Before much of the most intense fighting of the civil war had broken out, before the brutality that the government was capable of was common knowledge, a group of soldiers had come to Ignacio Ellacuría demanding food and shelter, both of which were already limited in the impoverished village. They stayed for an uneventful three months, spending most of their time in the mountains unsuccessfully hunting guerillas. One day they left, suddenly and with out any explanation or warning. The next morning bombs rained down on the village and the mountains around it. They were mostly meant for the rebels hiding in the deep forests, but one hit a house in the center of Ignacio Ellacuría. The soldiers came back to survey the damage they had done and when they arrived at the house they saw that they had killed a man, his young son and two other children. They blocked the villagers who were now rushing towards the wreckage. But they could not keep a woman named Rosa away once she had seen her son lying in the rubble. She told us that when she reached him he was still alive, still warm and trying to move as she held him. He died in her arms and afterward she was not able to bury him herself because she had to be taken to a hospital in nearby Chalatenango for her own wounds. After she told us the story she looked back at the house, only half of which still stands, and said that she didn’t like coming there because she was always afraid she would see her son lying there, about to die.

What was so unforgettable about El Salvador and what makes it an experienced unmatched by any other was that I was witnessing humanity stripped down by some of the most primitive and brutal conditions imaginable and finding that the majority of people were still good.

There were the women who lived every day of their hard lives with a humor that made the stories of losing their children, being abandoned by their husbands, going hungry and living in constant fear of death at the hands of their own government, even more shocking.

There were the charming acts of chivalry by some of the boys in the village who had come to be very protective of us. One day at the Rio Sumpúl I lost one of the flip-flops I was wearing to protect my feet from sharp rocks. The current wasn’t very strong that day and it had only floated two or three feet away from me, but before I could reach out and pick it up, a seven year old named Gercón was heroically belly flopping towards it. He later brought me a collection of what he considered to be the most beautiful rocks from the bottom of the river and taught me how to properly skip some of the smaller ones.

In a more serious incident that reminded us of what happens in a macho culture where men can rarely find jobs and support their families, a village man, unemployed and always drunk, grabbed at one of my friends. Before any of us could say or do anything a 16 year old boy who had wandered over just a few minutes before ran over, grabbed the man’s machete out of its sheath at his waist and wielded it threateningly until the he retreated down the path leading to his home.

There was Herman, our bus driver, who carried around a machete and a flashlight so that he could protect us wherever he went. On the bus he had a pictures of his family, one being a portrait of his two granddaughters, hanging from the rearview mirror. Before we left the country we took a group picture with one of the girl’s Polaroid cameras, attached it to a piece of yarn and presented it to him. He placed the picture of his 15 new granddaughters, as he told us we now were, in that place of honor, next to the others of his family.

There are a million little stories that to think about make me smile or laugh or cry or become outraged over and countless other people who captured my heart and who make up what I consider to be my own second family. It’s hard to think about some of them, especially the sweet little boys who will grow up to find their options for making a living limited the military or gangs. It’s difficult for me to imagine how some of the kids have grown or whether the women, downtrodden as they are, have kept their wonderful senses of humor. There is a part of me that is convinced I will see all of them again, as unlikely as it is, because even after four years it is still too painful to imagine spending the rest of my life separated from part of my family.

Boston vs. Le Corbusier

November 2010

 

Famed architect and urban planner, Le Corbusier, must have cringed at the idea of Boston, counterintuitive as it is from his vision of space in the perfect city. However, Cambridge is the location of the only Le Corbusier building in the United States, a country within which a majority of cities, with the notable exception of Boston, adopted the high-rises of his Radiant City with gusto.

In urban planning and architecture space and placement have the potential to affect people more than the buildings or materials themselves. A swing set allows people to move around their spatial surroundings in a different way. Missing bricks in a brick wall give privacy without full separation from humanity. Mixed use and mixed architecture comfortably reflect people’s notions of themselves as unique. Low to the ground, street-facing buildings give people a sense of security.

The Carpenter Center at Harvard is uncompromising, a brash contrast to the rest of the campus buildings. It is an unapologetic work of art that cares more about aesthetic, emotion and discovery than convenience. This is a building that is difficult to describe in one sentence or paragraph. It is designed to be a kind of maze that keeps people moving throughout, happening upon works of art along the way.

In a poem written prior to the building the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier jotted down some of his vision for the building.

“A touristic route perhaps in a spiral if we make the building go up,” he wrote in 1960.

As an arts building, the Carpenter Center was designed to let in lots of natural light. In turn, at night, the building floods its surroundings with artificial light through its curved bays, symbolizing the arts as some kind of beacon.

Harvard embarked on the building of the Carpenter Center in order to emphasize the importance of educating artists. Le Corbusier was given the commission because he would create a building that would distinguish itself from the staid geometric brick buildings of the Harvard yard.

This building took on all of the elements deemed important by Le Corbusier. Raising the building allows it to appear to have spring up from the ground, without the separation from nature by sidewalk borders. In contrast the rest of the campus buildings put green space in its place, manipulating it into rectangular sections that reflect the buildings

An s-shaped ramp designed to bring students through to the center of the building, lifts visitors up over the green space below.  The actual architecture incorporates its surrounding by mimicking the landscape with columns, and yet brutally rejects it with a concrete exterior and unadorned rectangular windows.

Distorted glass use in parts of the building adds to the need to explore the building. With spirals and five floors and redistributable walls.

Le Corbusier, whose ideas for urban planning would one day be rejected by Jane Jacobs as one of the ultimate sins against the inhabitants of cities, had little time for the architectural flourishes that embellish so many old buildings in Boston. He had little time for triple-deckers that allow people to stay low to the ground and maintain some sense of community.

He spurred with his imagining of the Radiant City, the building of high-rise public housing with unrealistically raised highways, railroads and airports and on the ground green space doomed to be sterile and abandoned.

Yet for the most part Boston seems to have conformed to Le Corbusier’s vision only with an indiscriminate obsession with parks (the Rose Kennedy Greenway having turned out to be an odd vacuum of empty green space that has done little to integrate the North End into the city). But it has always laid claim to messy, un-grid-like street patterns, mixed-use (the holy grail of modern urban planning thanks to Jacobs) neighborhoods and small intimate blocks.

While Le Corbusier’s building at Harvard succeeds in its mission of making a statement about art, functioning as a studio and drawing people in, his application of these general principles towards cities has been proved to be a failure.

With houses and small-scale buildings the architect could be provocative and warm. With cities his ideas were sterile and bordered on fascist, leaving residents to languish in the sky, in a vacuum of sound, without the integration of publicly shared space with multiple uses. And while with a building like the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier could make a building rise beautifully, if forcefully, from its surrounding environment. With his high rises he makes green spaces inaccessible by lifting people up and away from them.

With this building, built towards the end of his life, Le Corbusier was attempting to establish his principles in the United States. The perfect location to carry out this mission picked him. Harvard, an institution of American education, one whose red-brick buildings, which attracted the red-blooded American-male leaders of tomorrow, were straightforward manifestations of Americana and the functionalism of education. To the efficient, crisp American campus, Le Corbusier brought the philosophical, romantic and very European notion of the student and the function of art in society.

In the end, however, Boston with its hodgepodge of architectural styles absorbed the building rather than conform to the principles it represents.

Twin Cities

September 2010

 

Baltimore isn’t too cold in January. It’s not too cold to stand in front of the two room “rec center” of a city housing project saying goodbye to the little kids you just spent two hours playing board games and doing crafts with. It’s not too cold out on the corner of that same housing project for guys who may or may not be drug dealers to stand and stare at the 15 teenaged girls, wearing what would appear to be maids’ uniforms, hugging those little kids. And it’s not too cold to stand outside for three hours screaming so loudly with 71,007 other people that the noise can be heard across the city.

In January 2007 I was a senior at a suburban Baltimore Catholic girls school and our return from Christmas break marked the beginning of Gym Meet practice.  Monday through Thursday we donned our royal blue pleated polyester maternity jumpers, which we had to wear as gym uniforms, to sing, dance, march and aerobicize. Being the top tradition at a school that would go bankrupt if the use of that word required payment, Gym Meet dominated. Come March 4 and 5, when each grade would compete against each other for the coveted Silver Cup, hysterical meltdowns met the announcement of the winning class. For now though, a few of us who didn’t mind the hype, hated the practices and couldn’t identify with the hysterics waited for our January trip to Douglass Homes.

Once a month a group of us and our service teacher, a goofy Ben Affleck look alike who every girl had a crush on until she got to know him, took our blue and white short bus to this East Baltimore housing project to spend time with whatever neighborhood kids had gotten word that we would be coming. For two hours in a small room with prison windows we would draw, play superheroes and Duck Duck Goose, turn a game of Simon Says into the Cha Cha Slide and snack on chips and cookies. Every month I would play with a five-year old named Maurice, who had a giant grin, wore glasses that always sat lopsided on his head and wanted to be just like his big brother. On this visit he and I played football with a paper cube we had made during craft-time.

From the suburbs to the inner city all anyone really talked about was football. The Ravens had gone 13-3 that season and won the AFC North. We would be hosting a second round playoff game against the Indianapolis Colts. This game would be our chance to prove that we no longer cared about the team that left town in Mayflower trucks in the middle of the night. That we had gotten over the fact that Super Bowl trophies, which had been won for our city, now resided in Indianapolis. The Ravens with their gritty defense and perennial underdog status suited our city with its charming, scrappy inhabitants. In preparation for the big game every streetlight downtown had a purple cover placed over it. Baltimore Sun columnists and radio DJs rallied the fans into a frenzy of anticipation for vindication. Despite all of the comparisons of Peyton Manning to our patron saint John Unitas, we were confident that our Ravens were the rightful heirs to the legacy of Johnny U’s Colts.

For once stories about something other than widespread drug use and the high murder rate filled the pages of The Sun. At school, Gym Meet had been replaced as the topic of the day. It seemed like every one of us had a parent who had grown up living next door to a Colt back in the halcyon days of football players who played for a pittance and the love of the game. Despite the privileged upbringings, with the requisite prep educations, lax bros and white powder weekends, everyone identified with their families’ working class backgrounds. Not only did it seem like everyone’s parents knew an old Colt, but everyone’s grandfathers had worked at Beth Steel, the closing of which had left a gaping hole in Baltimore’s economy.

This was the first time since the 2001 Super Bowl that the city had felt united. The Orioles were a lost cause and it was and still is common knowledge that the spot in Hell next to Robert Irsay was reserved for Peter Angelos. And while Baltimore is the world capital of Lacrosse, it’s a sport that’s always been inaccessible to city kids who can’t afford the equipment. Besides, Baltimore is a football town. It’s a city that settled for and supported a Canadian Football League team when the NFL snubbed us in its expansion. It’s a city where the Colts marching band never disbanded, even after the football team left town. They stayed put, played in city parades and eventually became the Marching Ravens.

I went to that January 13 playoff game. Our tailgate began at 9 am in Otterbein, a neighborhood by the stadium. I had spent the night before at my dad’s Federal Hill townhouse and the next morning he had to walk my sister and I to the nearby tailgate. The five-minute walk took us from one of the richest neighborhoods in the city to its unofficial meth capital. We had special permission from a local swim-club owner to use their pavilion and grille for our tailgates. The whole place had been decorated with old Colts memorabilia in addition to all the Ravens gear that was always there. People brought signs that said “BEAT INDY” and “19 Will Always Be Greater Than 18.” All day everyone told stories about the Colts and Memorial Stadium, about Orioles Magic and the time when the Washington Wizards were still the Baltimore Bullets. The founder of the tailgate did his traditional pep talk and on this Sunday the “R-A-V-E-N-S RAVENS!” chant sounded a little husky with emotion. The cheering started with our weekly chant and never died down, not as we walked to the stadium, not as the Ravens trailed for the entire game, not until there were 23 seconds left in the fourth quarter and the Colts had kicked a field goal to win.

There were no touchdowns scored by either team. The Colts had never led by more than six points until that last field goal. Maybe that’s why even though the Ravens were playing without any heart, as though they were oblivious to how much this game mattered, the fans kept believing and kept cheering. We practically pleaded with the team to care as much as we did. It would have been one thing to lose a game where the players had left everything on the field. But they had never even shown up to play in the first place. At the post-game conference quarterback Steve McNair, already dressed up to go out on the town, was dismissive and vague with reporters. The stadium emptied in almost complete silence. We packed up our tailgate where only one person spoke and it was to a picture of Johnny U that we had set up on one of the picnic tables. Later I found out that one of my uncles had actually taken his jersey off while he was watching the game, an act that for him was something close to blasphemy. It took a total break down of faith. One of my cousins cried, and it was only the second time in his adult life.

After that game it was back to drugs, gangs and murders on the pages of The Sun. I was back to complaining about school and Gym Meet practice while an entire city of children was being deprived of a meaningful education or a safe haven from the violence. It would be another month before the kids from Douglass Homes could go back to the rec center, which stayed locked between our visits. Baltimore was back to being two unequal, coexisting cities. We were all back in the now stronger grip of a crippling nostalgia. We had broken through it for a little while, actually believing that present-day Baltimore was something we could believe in, just like the city slogan asked us to. But in our hearts we knew all along that the only Baltimore that could ever mean anything to us was the one from the old Beth Steel days, pre-race riots and pre-heroin. Coincidentally those were the days when a Mayflower truck could pass through Baltimore without being vandalized.