Hopelessly devoted

There's something almost illicit about a mid-week day game - even for a working guy on a well-earned vacation it felt a lot like playing hookey from school. But given the crowd at Fenway yesterday for Game 1, I have to assume that there were a lot of people who actually were playing hookey.

When I looked around the ballpark during the game, I had to keep reminding myself that this was a game that had been hurriedly slotted into the schedule just the previous night. 18 hours later, on a regular workday in Boston, the park was more than 3/4 full. And for the most part these were not people who were taking advantage of no-shows who'd sold their tickets to scalpers the previous evening - these were the same people who'd already made a fruitless trip to the park on Wednesday and who had re-organised their lives at the drop of a hat to come back for more. I know this for a fact because everyone that I approached heading down Lansdowne already had a ticket. Scalpers were offering seats at face value and upgrades for cash, and I literally couldn't give away the spare ticket I had. For me, that has to be the most bizarre experience of this week: to have expended so much time and energy on getting tickets to the game, and then not be able to give them away. Wow...

*Serious tip of the cap to the Fenway faithful.*