We Believe

This chapter examines the diasporic quality of Red Sox Nation and the effects of winning two World Series on its (formerly “angst-ridden”) citizenry. For Boston Red Sox fans, the definition of home has always been blurry. Red Sox fans have always been part of a diasporic New England community more imagined than real, but maintaining a strong identity. Even in its most parochial eras, the Red Sox have reached far beyond Fenway Park, rendering “Boston” as home for people in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, parts of Connecticut, and the rest of Massachusetts. In the 2004 championship season, the Red Sox surpassed the New York Yankees as Major League Baseball's most profitable road attraction. This chapter considers how the creation of Red Sox Nation turned the team into a national phenomenon, “enjoying a community that is rooted to whatever space it occupies at any given moment.”

Galileo, Gauss, and the Green Monster

Using ideas of Galileo and Gauss but avoiding calculus, students create a model that predicts whether a fly ball will clear the famous left-field wall at Fenway Park.

See Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

Three studies demonstrated that collective identity and identity threat shape representations of the physical world. In Study 1, New York Yankees fans estimated Fenway Park, the stadium of a threatening out-group (but not Camden Yards, the stadium of a neutral out-group) to be closer than did non-Yankees fans. In Study 2, the authors manipulated identity threat among people affiliated (or not) with New York University (NYU). When Columbia University was portrayed as threatening to NYU, NYU affiliates estimated Columbia as closer than did non-affiliates, compared with when Columbia was nonthreatening. In Study 3, Americans who perceived more symbolic threats from Mexican immigration estimated Mexico City as closer. Collective identification with the in-group moderated effects of threat on distance estimations. These studies suggest that social categorization, collective identification, and identity threat work in concert to shape the representations of the physical world.

The Long Way Home

A Friday in July . . . Boston is a tangle of cranes and earthmovers, half-built flyovers and half-dug trenches and a huge steel snake slithering along the narrowest of paths through the chaos—Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, weaving its way through the city’s $15 billion highway construction project known as the Big Dig and heading westward toward Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago. We’ve said our last goodbyes to the family, hauled our backpacks into our two-person sleeping compartment, and finally, after weeks of ever-more frantic preparation, begun to feel the rhythm of the world rumbling slowly by beneath us, the rhythm of our lives for the next six months. The train picks up headway as it groans past the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox and the spiritual center of New England, the dense triple-decker blocks of the inner suburbs and the verdant lawns and oak groves of the outer suburbs. James and I sit across from each other, grinning slightly, both a little intoxicated by a cocktail of excitement, relief, and anxiety. Family, friends, work, school, daily antagonisms, and well-worn rituals are all receding physically if not yet mentally. Over the horizon ahead loom Alaska, the Pacific, Japan, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal, and 25,000 miles or so of who knows what else. But it’s no big deal, we tell ourselves. We’re heading home, just taking the long way. Just past dawn, west of Cleveland, we’re running two and a half hours late. Our sleeping car attendant, Fred, tells us that we lost time overnight to track repairs, slow-loading mail shipments, and freight trains. Once you start to lose a little time on this run, he says, you quickly end up losing a lot, because the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their trains have priority. If an Amtrak train slips off schedule, it starts the kind of chain reaction of delays that have earned this train the nickname the Late Shore Limited. I ask Fred if we’re going to make our connection in Chicago. “Not if we keep stopping like this,” he says.