King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Red Sox implosion: Not as much fun as a Yankees breakdown would be. But it's a lot of fun.

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Aug. 31, 2006 | Of all the delightful surprises of the 2006 baseball season so far, none has given more pleasure to this corner than the burning down, falling over and sinking into the swamp of the Boston Red Sox.

The Bostons woke up Thursday morning seven and a half games from the nearest playoff spot with 29 to play. They are a pile of crumbs.

The Detroit Tigers have been nice. The emergence of a killer rookie class in both leagues, the surprising competence of the Florida Marlins and Cincinnati Reds, the traditional second-half surge by the Oakland A's, the monster year by Travis Hafner, the New York Mets running away with the National League with a rotation of Trachsel and Maine and pray for rain.

Well, not quite, but I like how that sounds.

Fine, fine, fine. Like it all just fine.

But the Red Sox losing five straight to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Kansas City Royals, then following that with two six-game losing streaks, the first including that five-act meltdown against the New York Yankees, the second still going as this is written -- and if I type fast enough the losing streak will still only be six when I finish: It's not a Yankees swan dive but we'll take it around here as the next best thing, the fall of the Evil Empire Mini-Me.

This is fun because, aside from watching your own team win and luxuriating in the schadenfreude of witnessing a Yankees loss, nothing is more fun than watching the Red Sox disintegrate.

If you're not a Red Sox fan, that is. And most of us are not. That might come as a surprise to you if you've ever sat in the stands at a Boston road game west of the Mississippi, but we're not.

Enjoying the Red Sox's failures because nobody roots for Goliath is a new thing. It was only two years ago when the Sox were the ultimate underdogs, losers for decades on end, the stuff of high literature and low schmaltz, Curse of the Babe 1918 Mad Dash Jewel of a Ballpark Dent Buckner inkadinkadoo.

Rooting for the Yankees has been like rooting for Microsoft, or before that for U.S. Steel, since two decades before Red Smith characterized it that way in the '50s. The Red Sox were easy to root for in 2004. They were a fun team, high scoring and with a flair for the dramatic, and they came across as a fun bunch of guys. The Idiots, Big Papi, Johnny Damon's hair.

And gosh, who wouldn't want to root for the various flinty centenarian New Englanders the TV people kept finding to finally see their beloved Sawks win a World Series for the first time since they were teenagers and the best hitter on the team was a pitcher?

And, bonus, the Sox got to the World Series in the first place with a historically improbable comeback over the Yankees. Loved those guys.

Next page: There's a mystique to being a Red Sox fan. A really annoying mystique