Saved by the Boys of Summer: Baseball to the Rescue, Again

Jeff Robbins on Jul 28, 2026

At my age, I shouldn't care so much whether the Boston Red Sox win or lose, let alone permit my daily mood to rise or fall accordingly.

It's only a game. It's supposed to be a pastime (according to AI, something that "helps make the hours pass pleasantly when you are not working"), not an obsession. There are 162 games a year and letting your emotional state hinge on whether your favorite team scores more runs than the other team is obviously senseless.

And yet.

Generations of Americans have been swept up by the game. Children never forget their first trip to the ballpark or memories of playing catch with their father, or the ball players they elevated to heroes, or observing their elders go ballistic over a dropped ball. My friend Paul remembers being five years old and watching his father rip the radio out of the wall after the Red Sox grounded into a rally-killing double play.

That was in 1958. For New Englanders, that kind of passion hasn't abated much, even if people are watching games on cell phones.

It's been ever thus. "Six months out of every year, I may as well be made of stone," laments the long-suffering wife of a die-hard Washington Senators fan in the 1955 Broadway musical "Damn Yankees", while her long-suffering husband sings "Those damn Yankees, why can't we beat 'em?"

Speaking of the Yankees, years ago I was comparing notes about baseball obsession with Floyd Abrams, the great First Amendment scholar/advocate, who has argued numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on erudite points of constitutional law. Abrams, an overcharged Yankees fan, told me that any neurosis I had about the Red Sox paled before his about the Yankees.

"I doubt it," I said.

"Trust me," he said, and related that every night, when he watched the Yankees games on television, he had to leave the room while the opposing team was at bat.

"You win," I said.

Anyone who has ever dropped their kid off to begin their freshman year at college remembers the surge of emotion that the experience triggers: the sad wonder about the time that has flown by, the brooding about the things not done together, the re-discovery of the bedroom, hermetically sealed since age 13, suddenly open to reveal a space, once a pigsty, now deserted.

As in every other New England family, my son and I bonded intensely over the Red Sox. The weekend after we dropped him off at college, while I was still in a post-drop-off funk, the Sox and their archrival Yankees played a three-game series. The Sox won the first game, the Bad Guys the second. In the final game, nationally televised, the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the ninth inning.

I did not throw furniture. I did not rip the television out of the wall. But it's possible that some of the pent-up emotion over the previous week's college drop-off seeped out, just a bit.

Perhaps trying to comfort, our teenage daughter attempted to reason with me. "Why does it matter?" she asked. "It's just a piece of wood and a ball.

This wasn't helpful.

Exactly at that moment, a text arrived from my son, looking after his old man, albeit from a distance. "Don't do it," the text said simply. "You have so much to live for."

Given the state of the world, there was particular reason to look forward to the Red Sox season this year: part diversion, part reason for hope.

The team did not oblige for the first half of the season. They did not hit. They did not pitch. They did not field. Consequently, they did not win.

Then a miracle happened. Call it a sign from God. The team won 15 games in a row. They are back in contention -- for now.

My son and daughter-in-law have been staying with us for a few weeks. The old ritual has returned: sitting together to watch our beloved team and sweat every pitch.

Point is: you have got to hand it to the Boys of Summer. Somehow or other, however bad things are, they give you reason to hope.

And to remember.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.