The Internet: best thing ever

If you remember, it was the location that had left me intrigued. Well, the mystery has been solved. Mystery Blog Reader is no longer just a stat in SiteMeter: she's a fellow Brit - not quite living in my home town, but not a million miles away either - who is a fan of the game of baseball, generally, and of the Boston Red Sox, specifically (chalk up another member of Red Sox Nation: International Chapter).

Jo - for that is the MBR's name - had this to say about how she came to the Sox:

I am a devoted Red Sox fan and became a card-carrying, if marooned, supporter during the 2003 post-season. I happened to be watching archived clips of various games, just to catch any baseball that I could, and downloaded highlights of a Red Sox game. A few minutes into the clip I spotted the likes of Millar and Damon scampering about the Fenway turf like rabid lunatics. They were just big kids; albeit with long hair and goatee beards. And as I watched them I ‘got’ it – the Red Sox thing, you know? I became a nutter. It certainly seemed to me that these guys were playing (as that oft-quoted line in Field of Dreams goes): ‘…for food money…’ for ‘…the thrill of the grass…’ I saw that they wanted success too, of course, I saw that these were professional sportsmen, but that at the same time I was thinking: ‘they look like guys that I could have a beer with.’ And I hope I can get lucky enough to meet a few of them some day (even if by then we are all ghosts) and split a few suds. But I knew in my bones that they were the team for me. I was hooked, then and there. The game of baseball for me is bigger than any one team but I think I love baseball twice as much because I’m a Red Sox fan.

I love the line: "I 'got' it." For those of us not born into a Red Sox context, there is always a moment like that, a realisation that this is our team. It isn't always possible to back it up with a lot of detailed reasons why - it just is. But the beauty of that is that there's no hesitation or second-guessing later on, it's a "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health" deal. And, as Jo says, we end up loving the game of baseball all the more for it.