It Sox to be you

Say what you will about the Boston Red Sox, they have become the Mike Myers, Jason and Freddie Kruegers of the late-October pennant season.

Even for baseball fans in the Philippines (do I hear the sound of crickets?), the prospect of the American World Series in late October is considerably less important than, say, the Ateneo-La Salle rivalry around the same season.

Sure, fans here grow fangs and spit and drool, the way Boston fans struck by lycanthropy in the dying days of October do; sure, they love their teams to a fault, imbuing almost mythical status to their struggles and the “animo” pushing them along.

It’s just that Boston Red Sox fans are not driven by any noble animo. They’re just like zombies, drawn irresistibly to the cursed playing grounds the way George Romero’s walking dead were drawn to shopping malls in Dawn of the Dead. This is a state I have written about before — in October 2005, in fact (“Night of the Living Red Sox fans”) — because it’s a condition that never really goes away.

Of course, I don’t get excited during the early baseball season. I play it cool, keep my condition on the hush-hush. I ignore the trash talk coming from both Yankee and Red Sox bullpens. Talk is cheap, after all.

But then, the Sox have a way of coming back from the grave à la Romero’s dead, and just like those slasher film freaks who manage to creep back to life, sequel after sequel after sequel. (Come to think of it, Jason did wear that stupid hockey mask in Friday the 13th. Maybe he was a deranged NHL fan.)

The difference now is that we Red Sox fans no longer feel like we’re suffering from a curse: our team is on a killing spree. It’s an axe murderer. It’s a demon from hell. And the Colorado Rockies look to be the next likeliest victim.

If the team’s near-mythical comeback in the AL championship series against the Cleveland Indians is any indication, Boston is no longer the lonely wolf baying at the moon, mumbling about curses and garlic. It’s a CGI-enhanced killing machine, and Colorado looks like Bambi.

The Sox came back from one of those agonizing deficits — down three games to one in the series — and cracked some serious bats at Fenway last Sunday (not least the five runs from Dustin Pedroia), pounding down the Indians with a lethal 11-2 win.

It’s only in real-life that we root for the monsters on the TV screen. The Red Sox have become those monsters.

People say our team has changed. The Sox are no longer the humble (and humbled) bunch of misfits who lurked in the shadows of infamy, like Kafka’s cockroach. They no longer scuttle along ocean floors, like Eliot’s Prufrock. They are like something out of Sin City: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

But the truth is, the Red Sox can never really be the “bad guys.”

They’re always good for a laugh, after all. The personality of the team will forever be its bonding agent, the thing that makes simple Boston fans root for them, even when they trash our dreams. Told by Indians first baseman Ryan Garko that “the champagne tastes just as good on the road as it does at home” (as the Cleveland team boastfully headed to Fenway to “finish off” the series), Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis later responded, after the Fenway reversal, “The champagne tastes good at home!”

It would sound cocky, if it weren’t so artlessly goofy.

That’s the Red Sox.

They used to be the poor, doomed victims of the curse: the ones who couldn’t help collapsing come late October. The ones who shrugged at the moon and cursed their fate. Now they’re the heavy favorites. They’re the Transformers. They’re Ridley Scott’s Alien, popping out of Cleveland’s chest and heading west to claim more victims. They’re every corny movie monster that keeps hanging on after the survivors have chopped its head off, driven a wooden stake through, and sent it down into the depths of hell.

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.

And they’re back.