Hypocrite Nation

I stopped in Newbury Comics last week to buy some used CDs. Had never been there before. The place is not what I expected. It’s almost like a mini-Target. They’ve got everything in there. Well, not everything, but it’s a pop-culture heaven.

In Boston, of course, pop culture includes Sox-loving – or Yankee-hating. The two are one and the same. So there, among a selection of T-shirts, was one with what appeared to be the Yankees’ baseball-and-top-hat logo. Only instead of the script “Yankees,” the word on the logo was “Juicers.”

I’ve seen this shirt on Sox fans around town, and others like it. I’ve also listened to Sox fans call the Yankees’ championships a fraud, heard them chant “STEROIDS” during Alex Rodriguez’s at bats at Fenway, and read screeds from a blogger calling himself “Typical Boston Fan” about T-shirts that proclaim the new Yankee Stadium as the “House that Juice Built.”

I snickered at the unbelievable naivety and hypocrisy of the Red S*x fans. Let’s be honest here. Anyone who thinks that their teams were clean just because their stars’ names didn’t appear in the Mitchell Report, which was compiled by a member of the RED SOX BOARD OF DIRECTORS and mainly based on two sources – both in New York – was kidding themselves.

Granted, Sox fans never let inconvenient things such as facts or common sense interfere with their irrational hatred of the Yankees. (Irrational hatred? Aren’t Sox fans allowed to hate their rival? Sure, but they go way too far. More on that later.) But there was nothing a Yankee fan, especially one like me, living in Boston, could do or say about it. There was no proof.

Then in May, Manny Ramirez was reported to have tested positive for a banned substance, one that is used to mask steroid use. The veneer started to come off the Red Sox and their lovable, “wonderful-for-baseball” storybook championship of 2004 and their follow-up of 2007.

Still, the chants at Fenway continued, as Peter Abraham noted in his excellent Yankee blog (that thing has been invaluable to me in a year when I can only watch the Yankees a few times a month). “It must be ‘Oblivious Hypocrites Night’ here at Fenway,” he wrote.

Now, we know just how right Abraham was in his description of Red Sox Nation. As of yesterday, the other half of the greatest 3-4 hitting combo I have seen in my lifetime – maybe the best one since Mantle and Maris – has been shown to be nothing but a steroid creation. David Ortiz is a steroid cheat.

That’s right. Lovable Big Papi. And I’m not condescending by calling him that. I always liked him. He was pleasant and classy. I thought. But something was always not right. How a guy went from a pedestrian first baseman to one of the most feared clutch sluggers in the game in a span of a few months of the 2003 season smelled awfully fishy. To anyone.

Anyone with common sense, that is.

Now it can be said. 2004 WAS A FRAUD. 2007 WAS A FRAUD. The Red Sox were not the saviors you thought they were, Red Sox Nation.

But you acted as if the Red Sox were the only clean angels in a sea of dirty devils, and you, with your irrational hatred of New York held the dirty tests of A-Rod, Clemens and Sheffield high over your heads in a show of unwarranted bravado.

Now, you get what you deserve.

This is not a day to celebrate. As a Yankee fan, the proving of Boston’s titles as tainted does not erase the taint on the ones the Yankees won in the previous decade – though our 1996 title looks pretty clean! Only a loser builds himself up by tearing down others. I experienced joy beyond my wildest dreams from 1996 right on up through Aaron Boone’s home run, easily the happiest moment of my sports-fan life. And it makes me sad that these moments were not as pure as I thought they were.

But Red Sox fans, not content just to enjoy their new-found success – or everything else that is great about being a sports fan in this city, and there’s a lot – decided instead to tear away at the Yankees’ dynasty, ignoring the likelihood that their own was just as fraudulent.

How tasty it is, then, that the Red Sox and “Big Steroid” get to play at Yankee Stadium starting next Thursday.

I want to hear it loud and clear, Yankee fans. “STER-OIDS. STER-OIDS. STER-OIDS.” I want to hear it every time Ortiz comes to the plate. Not because I’m angry at him. Not because the Yankees are clean. They’re not. Not as long as Rodriguez is on the team.

But because it’s time for Sox fans to be reminded, over and over, in loud voices, what oblivious hypocrites they are. And Peter Abraham and others will yell that the Yankee fans are showing themselves to be "no better than anyone else" or are hypocrites. Fine. Let Ortiz -- and by extension Red Sox Nation -- have it.

Or maybe, just whip out an old chant. One that is a perfectly valid reminder of the last time the Boston Red Sox legitimately won a World Series. 1918.