the Bambino" nonsense. He never mentioned 1946, or 1949. Johnny Pesky and Enos Slaughter never came up, though he'd lived through those moments, too. This was summer after summer of damned near hilarious incompetence. One day, in fact, I learned a new word. Frank Malzone butchered a ground ball at third base, and my grandfather erupted in a gerund that was heretofore unfamiliar to me, but that seemed important enough to my grandmother that she hustled me out of the house and into the backyard. Old girl had surprising lateral movement, I'll give her that. The worst season was the last one. Not that 62-100 isn't self-explanatory, but the Sox finished a full 40 games out of first place, and it wasn't even the Yankees who won it that year. They had already begun the slide that one day would make them cheap enough for George Steinbrenner to buy. No, the Sox finished 40 lengths behind the freaking Twins, who'd only been in Minnesota for five years. What was worse was that the Sox couldn't even win at home, in the ballpark that they'd tailored for right-handed Australopithecine sluggers since God was a boy. Instead, at Fenway, the team was a dismal 34-47. My grandfather and I were used to it by then, though. The Red Sox had been dismally noncompetitive for almost my entire life. That had certainly been the case for the several summers in which we'd watched the games together. So, we found our pleasures where we