"Who's Your Daddy?"

The late Bart Giamatti had it right when he said of baseball:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

No one knows this better than Red Sox fans.

I first learned it as an eleven-year-old during the "Impossible Dream" pennant race of 1967. I stubbornly—indeed, naively—followed my team's storybook drive from their ninth-place finish in 1966 to the nail-biting four team race that wasn't decided until the final day of the season when the Red Sox became the American League Champions. I recorded every Carl Yastrzemski home run on one sneaker that summer and every Jim Lonborg win on the other. I sat faithfully by my radio even when the Sox were down 8-0, believing they might still rally and win, as indeed they did.

But then came the World Series against the Cardinals and when it came down to game seven, I watched in stunned disbelief as my hero, Jim Lonborg, pitching on two days rest, finally proved to be mortal and my team lost and taught me what an older generation of Red Sox fans already knew: Baseball will break your heart.

Red Sox fans learn this lesson time and time again. There's the heartbreak of 1975 when—despite Carlton Fisk's dramatic game winning home run in the twelfth inning of game six of the World Series (still considered one of the best ballgames in major league history)—the Red Sox choked and lost game seven to the Cincinnati Reds. And there's 1986 when four times the Red Sox were one strike from winning the World Series, only to self-destruct, forever immortalizing the names Bob Stanley and Bill Buckner, and eventually losing the Series again, this time to the New York Mets. One could go on and on, but it's depressing and it's all too often replayed in postseason summaries anyway. (However, if you insist upon recalling each year of heartbreak it is well documented at www.soxsuck.com.)

You would expect that by moving to the West Coast and raising Giants fans I could free my sons of The Curse and the annual disappointment of cheering for the Red Sox. Not so. It is their birthright, after all, and so they know all about the decades of disappointment that follow the Red Sox. Last year, we picked four teams to root for in the post-season, and watched as they got picked off one by one. This year when the Giants folded and fell one game shy of making the post-season, we had only the Red Sox to cheer for.

Kevin gets it. He wisely expressed his hope that the Yankees would lose to the Twins so the Red Sox wouldn't have to play them again this year. Pretty intuitive from a seven-year-old who hasn't known the October frustration of growing up in New England.

But the ACLS is underway. The boys are fully engaged. They ask in private whether Eric, a soccer teammate, is really a Yankees fan. And they were irate, as I knew they would be, when they had to listen to the mocking jeers of "Who's your Daddy?" issued as taunts to Pedro Martinez. They would like payback, but they are anything but cocky. During one inning, Kevin literally stuck his head behind a sofa cushion when the Yankees had the bases loaded and told me to let him know when he could look again.

The way things usually go, that may not be until next April.