Soon I will take my son and a friend and his son to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. We'll sit near the Green Monster, eat hot dogs, sing "Sweet Caroline," and perform the rituals of fandom. But afterward, I'll feel guilty. The Red Sox, once the obsession of my youth, no longer hold the same meaning for me—and they barely register for my children.
One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is transmission: passing down beliefs, practices, and traditions in a world shaped by streaming, scrolling, and artificial intelligence. My wife and I have managed reasonably well with religion, literature, history, and classic films. But sports fandom? There, I am the weak link, the Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer watching his kids grow up without the faith.
I became a Red Sox fan in 1986, at age six, as the team marched toward a pennant. It was a maternal inheritance from my New England mother, a tradition my father—a native Angeleno and Dodgers fan—had adopted. Late on October 25, my parents woke me from bed after the seventh inning, promising to show me the Red Sox's first championship in 68 years. Three hits, a wild pitch, and a Bill Buckner error later, the game was lost, and my destiny was sealed.
Baseball ran through my childhood like a river: box scores in the morning paper, television games on Friday nights, radio broadcasts in my bedroom, and statistics piled upon statistics. Roger Angell essay collections lined my shelves. I could list every World Series winner and narrate games I'd never seen—Bucky Dent's homer, Carlton Fisk's wave. Other fandoms followed naturally: the dreadful Patriots, the rising UConn Huskies. It didn't matter that I wasn't an athlete or that some friends mocked jock culture. My teams connected me to American culture and history, helped forge social bonds, and offered a unique sphere of drama and poetry.
But now, that connection has eroded. My kids don't share the obsession. And I realize that in passing along the things we love, sometimes we fail. The religion of baseball, for me, has faded. But maybe that's okay—as long as we keep showing up to the ballpark, eating the franks, and singing along, even if the faith is gone.