Night of the living Red Sox fans

In the recent Drew Barrymore-Jimmy Fallon comedy Fever Pitch (inexplicably retitled The Perfect Catch here), Drew’s character has a friend who warns her about the schoolteacher (Fallon) she’s started dating. He’s 30 and never been married, which sets off certain alarm bells. "I’m telling you, there’s a reason this Ben guy’s still single," she cautions.

Cut to Ben’s Boston apartment. It’s wall-to-wall with Red Sox memorabilia: banners and pennants and signed autographs of players, Red Sox towels and socks, and even a great big Green Monster poster covering one wall. It’s like the shrine of a stalker or serial killer.

And that’s how most people look at Red Sox fans, if they bother to get close enough to look at them. It’s not just that they could be serial killers or stalkers; it’s worse. It’s like people fear getting infected by their peculiar, incurable disease.

The sinister side to being a Red Sox fan gets even more palpable when September rolls around. That means the World Series is just eight weeks away, and the games start to get more and more crucial. That’s when Red Sox fans start to grow fangs, howl at the moon, and walk around like zombies in a George Romero movie.

As if to underscore the horror movie connection, Bobby Farrelly, who directed Fever Pitch (from a soccer novel by Nick Hornby), has Stephen King throw out the opening day game ball at Boston’s Fenway Park. No wonder King never runs out of nightmares: he’s a Red Sox fan himself.

Then there’s the Curse. You know, the Curse of the Bambino, which has supposedly plagued Bostonians since 1918 when the team’s manager sold their best slugger, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees, thus ensuring that the team never saw another World Series pennant until… well, last year. No wonder Bostonians tiptoe around Fenway this time of year like terrified villagers in an old Dracula movie.

Leave it to the Farrelly Brothers (who made There’s Something About Mary, speaking of stalkers) to draw a pretty good bead on Red Sox fans. The Farrellys hail from Providence, Rhode Island, which means the Sox are as close to a home team as they ever had. So a lot of the details of this movie are right, including the soundtrack (lots of Boston musical heroes like the J. Geils Band and Jonathan Richman featured).

And the characters, modeled on Hornby’s book, have a bit more depth than the ones you’d find in, say, an Adam Sandler or Kate Hudson comedy. Fallon, a kind of low-watt Mike Myers, plays Ben as someone who needs to hide his Sox obsession because it gets in the way of his relationships. It doesn’t help when she sees him being interviewed on TV, hanging out at the Sox spring training camp in Florida. Asked where the Boston team ranks in his life, he answers: "I’d say Red Sox, sex… and breathing."

An exaggeration, perhaps, but Ben is onto something here. The Red Sox somehow get into the blood. They get under the skin. They enter the soul. They are like New Englanders’ own personal dengue outbreak. I remember being taken to my first Sox game at age seven by my dad. I wasn’t instantly hooked. I’ll never be as rabid a fan as Ben or his pals, who degrade themselves by dancing in front of him for a free pair of season tickets. But the seed was planted. The locus was presented. Fenway Park will always have a strange pull over me, like the moon over the tides.

"Red Sox fans are the most pathetic creatures on earth," the narrator of Fever Pitch says early on. I, personally, don’t even begin paying attention to the team’s standing until late September. Why suffer needlessly before that?

With the Yankees mathematically leading by one game in the American League East as of this weekend, it could all be over for the Sox by early next week. Or maybe not.

Anyway, there’s something to be said for believing in your home team, believing deep down in your bones. It gives every year a sense of closure and a cyclical certainty. For Red Sox fans, it used to be the certainty that it would all go into the shitter by late September. Now, after last year’s amazing comeback, who knows? It could be something else, something better.

"Maybe I like to be 11 years old again," Ben says, explaining why he still follows the Sox into adulthood. "I like being part of something that’s bigger than me. It’s good for your soul to invest in something you can’t control."

His girlfriend thinks this is "romantic." She doesn’t tell him (out loud) that it’s a doomed, fatalistic point of view.

Anyway, it’s make-or-break time for the Sox again. They pulled it off last year, but nobody in Boston would bet the house on them doing it again. We’re realists, even if we’re perpetually deluded. Soon the moon will be full again, and the fangs will come out. Bostonians will start itching and scratching, gnashing their teeth, and the villagers will begin lighting those torches once again.

But, hey. At least Boston is a city colorful enough to actually believe in its own curse.