I love the Red Sox this time of year. Not because they are a legit team who has won 2 series lately and who are again a legit contender. I love them because for 1,546 years they weren't. The Red Sox are the team that always broke my heart. They got to the stage and the cosmic comedy began. I was 11 in 1975 during the Pudge Fisk waving the arms home run thing, Luis Tiant actually getting key hits and running his fat little Cuban body around the bases as comfortably as Sarah Palin answers foreign policy questions, and Bernie Carbo mashed a monster walk-off homerun. And then we lost. I was 3 in the 1967 dream team year, which again, we lost. I was 22 when Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson's names became indellibly etched upon my soul.
Bucky freaking Dent.
October 16th, 2003 started out as a typical day - I awoke early and had my wife drive me to the doctor, where I enjoyed the please of having a small Isreali perform a vascectomy upon me in what appeared to be his supply closet. While attempting to focus on anything other than what was actually happening to me, during one of his trips north of my waist, I asked Dr. Fun to look at a weird little lump on my neck that didn't hurt at all, but was weird. He did. He suggested it was nothing at all but gave me a card of someone I should call "just to be safe". Fate, my friends, is a powerful thing. Dr. Fun had just come back after beating cancer. I didn't know that.
That evening, I sat on a bag of frozen peas in blissful ignorance as the Red Sox were 6 innings into finally beating the dreaded NY Yankees in a playoff series. It was 4-2 after 7 and Pedro Martinez was done for the night, and the series was over - we win. The bullpen formula was automatic - the Yankees didn't have a single run against our pen all series. The Sox added a 5th run in the top of the 8th. It was over, baby. Then fate and it's awful sense of humor intervened. Grady Little did the unimaginable - he sent Pedro back out for the 8th. As dumb as that was, it was ok - we had a three run lead. Then two. Then one. Did he take him out then? Nope. Sat there like a cosmic "deer in the headlights" and did nothing. Zip. Tie game. You know what happens next right? It was destiny. Bottom of the 11th - Aaron freaking Boone. Game over. Yankees win game 7. I get cancer.
The point? The Red Sox have one of the largest global fan bases because misery is bizarrely attractive. I can't explain it. It's why we are in IT. We accept that we are destined to fail. We are weird. We like this stuff.
Like many projects we undertake in IT, Red Sox fans knew we would fail. We knew, but we still did it. It is some kind of sickness.
On a positive note, the team Red Sox nation grew up with ripping our hearts out year after year somehow dissapeared. The conversion from joke to superpower was subtle - started with the "clowns" that were fantastic, but we all thought for sure it was just dumb luck. Then they did it again - with different folks. Now they are in position to do it yet again - with kids.
IT can get through all this. It will take kids. The next generation doesn't know about not being able to do backup or scale systems or all the other things we've gotten so used to not being able to make work inside organizations who have no faith in us and who aren't really interested in doing the right things. Dustin Pedroia is 3 feet tall and way to young to know he was supposed to fail. Why? Because his boss is just as young. The next generation isn't as hung up on what was or why it wasn't - and that's our hope.
The next 10 years of commercial IT will end looking absolutely nothing like it began. We are that close to being cool again people, hang in there.
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