Red Sox continue to ‘B Strong’
Marathon bombing victims were never far from players’ thoughts
BOSTON Walking back to his Fenway Park office after the traditional Patriots Day morning Red Sox game, Charles Steinberg saw the reports on TV that there had been explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line. He saw video of the damage on Boylston Street. He heard the police say that a fire at the John F. Kennedy Library might be related. And he thought to himself, “We’re next.”
“That added to the dread,” said Steinberg, an executive vice-president with the Red Sox. “Because your thought then is that if this is a sequence of attacks on iconic Boston locales, Fenway Park could easily be next.”
Steinberg and his assistants soon planned for the team’s return from Cleveland, where it went directly from the Monday morning game. The result was an emotional ceremony that stretched into a season-long tribute to honour the victims, doctors and nurses, police and other first responders.
With a “B Strong” logo on the Green Monster, one on their uniforms and another shaved into the Fenway grass, the Red Sox advanced to the World Series on Saturday night for the third time in 10 years. Inside the Red Sox clubhouse, the tribute goes on.
Shane Victorino, whose grand slam clinched the AL championship series against Detroit, wore a “B Strong” shirt that read, “In support of all victims.” Enlarged copies of Jonny Gomes’ “Boston Strong” Sports Illustrated cover are all around. Above Mike Napoli’s locker is a patch from the Boston police, who helped apprehend suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after a daylong, citywide lockdown.
“What I can tell you is that I don’t know that one can be more proud of how the players have acted, reacted to the people who have been affected,” Steinberg said. “They took the initiative, shunning the help that we might typically give them.”
Even before they returned from the three-day road trip, the Red Sox sent their best wishes back to Boston, posing in the visitors’ clubhouse with a “B Strong” banner; a Red Sox jersey reading “Boston Strong” with the city’s 617 area code hung in the dugout for that game. And then, when the team returned from Cleveland, the franchise that defined baseball selfishness decades ago with the expression “25 players, 25 cabs” split into five groups of five and visited the five local hospitals where the bombing victims were being treated.
“These guys were able to throw a city on its backs — follow us, we’re going to help out any way possible,” Gomes said. “I’m just so fortunate that I’m in a position where I have a profession that I can do that to people. But at the same time, you’ve got to remember the four people that aren’t able to come to a game again and their families and their legends they left behind. We know that in the back of our head there’s four angels up above pulling for us.”