Tues. Oct. 30

 And in the end ... the love you make is equal to the love you take. The Beatles sang that - last bit on their last studio album. And I guess that's the case this year with our beloved Red Sox and we who comprise the Nation. We just won the World Series, dammit! Was there pandemonium on the field, like there was in 1967 when they won the American League pennant? Of course not, they won in Colorado ... Was there pandemonium in Kenmore Square? Looks like it, from what we see on the telly, and even though we live just a couple of miles away, we didn't join the throng. Here's what's up this year, as posted on www.redsox.com : "As was the case in 2004, a "Rolling Rally" will welcome Boston's conquering heroes as the city celebrates the World Series-champion Red Sox. The City of Boston announced Monday that the rally will begin Tuesday at noon at Fenway Park. And similar to 2004, players, coaches, staff and executives will board "Duck Boats" that will wind their way through Boston, ending near City Hall. Boston Mayor Tom Menino said in a statement that closer Jonathan Papelbon will be performing his "Riverdance" many times along the route. Unlike three years ago, however, the boats will not go into the Charles River because of concerns for the safety of Red Sox players and officials. More than one million fans lined the streets in a steady rain in 2004 for the team's first title in 86 years. Sunny skies are expected for Tuesday.

As a little bonus here, hit the "read more" button and you'll get a version of a piece I wrote on the Sox, pre-season, dealing with Bill Nowlin's book about the '67 Sox.

 October 1, 1967. Bill Nowlin, a 22-year-old college student who’d spent the summer bumming around Europe on $2 a day, is at Fenway Park, crouched behind the low wall separating the players from the fans. Two outs, top of the ninth. The Red Sox are about to clinch a tie for first place by defeating the Twins. They’re on the verge of what will be known as “The Impossible Dream,” beating 100-1 odds to win the American League pennant. Jim Lonborg throws, Rich Rollins hits a pop-up to shortstop. Rico Petrocelli backpedals, squeezes the ball and within moments radio announcer Ned Martin is exclaiming, “There’s pandemonium on the field!”
    Nowlin was one of the first people to vault over the wall, rush the mound and thump Lonborg on the back. “My seats were in the grandstands, way high up,” Nowlin says. “I moved around so I was between the screen and the third base dugout. They weren’t thinking this mob would go out on the field. When I got out to the mound, I clapped Lonborg on the back and said something inane like ‘good job.’”
      I was there, too, in the right field grandstands. I was 11, and before I hit the field with another wave of fans, I checked with my parents. They gave their assent – this was a joyous celebration, no riot - and off I went. It was the happiest moment of my young life. (Keep in mind: The Red Sox, nicknamed “The Cardiac Kids,” hadn’t won the pennant just yet – the Angels needed to beat the Tigers in the second game of their double-header - but it felt like it. The Angels won  8-5.)
     When Nowlin and I meet up nearly 40 years later, at a pizzeria near Fenway, we swap stories. We both had gathered bits of turf and sand from the field for souvenirs. We’d both lost them over time.
    But Nowlin has spent a lot of time going back over 1967. He is a co-editor of, and contributing writer to, “The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox.” (Re-edited parts will run throughout the season in Red Sox programs.) Lonborg penned one of the book’s forewords. Of the celebration, he wrote it was “really a special thing and, yes, it got a little scary, but some of Boston’s finest came and helped me. What happened after that came could never happen again.” (See sidebar.)
     Nowlin’s exhaustive “Impossible Dream” is published by the book arm of the Burlington-based company he co-owns, Rounder Records. That’s how most Bostonians – at least music fans – know him: As one of the three co-founding Rounders, the folks who championed folk and blues artists back in 1970 and went on to build New England’s largest independent label.
     Over the past decade, however, Nowlin’s alter ego has been “Red Sox writer.” He’s written or edited 15 books about the Sox or its players.  He has three more in the works. Only one, he says, has sold more than 10,000 copies. He does expect the 1967 book to be his best seller. But this writing is not done for the money, and it’s not done for the casual fan. It’s written for the kind of fan Bill Nowlin is: Someone who salivates over the stories and stats of Red Sox past or present. If a player is traded from Boston or leaves due to free agency, Nowlin loses interest. “Nomar was a real favorite,” says Nowlin, “the new Ted Williams, the smiling guy from California, crushed by the Boston media and the attention. He’s a nice guy and I wish him well but I don’t follow him anymore.” He knows that, in sportswriter Leigh Montville’s phrase, being a fan means you’re “rooting for laundry,” the players that happen to wear the uniform.
     Nowlin grew up in Lexington and, as a kid, would spend less than $1, taking mass transit in to see the Sox, and sit in the bleachers. He saw his hero Ted Williams during his final years. He was there for the doldrums of the early-mid ‘60s. What made ’67 so sweet for all of us – the fans who grew up with a lousy team – was the remarkable surge and the turnaround in attitude, both town and team. It was a year when one player, Carl Yastrzemski, had a near-perfect season, winning the Triple Crown. Bit players chipped in. Regular role players rose above expectations. A perfect baseball storm.  It changed the game forever in Boston. It was the beginning of Red Sox Nation. Peter Gammons articulates these thoughts expertly in a 1992 essay republished in Nowlin’s book.
     Nowlin secured box seat season tickets in 1989. At 62, he admits his marriage broke up a few years ago in part because, he says, the priorities he and his wife had weren’t in sync. For him, Rounder and the Red Sox were battling for first place. His wife and his love of mystery novels rounded out the Top Four. He has one son, nearly 16, uninterested in baseball.
     “Is this really what I want to do with what remains of my life?” asks Nowlin, who taught political science for 12 years at what is now UMass-Lowell during Rounder’s early period. “Is this is a phase or is there something more serious I can do?”
     He doesn’t exactly answer the question, but says, “I’d like to jump into Red Sox history in a comprehensive way. I like telling stories. Organize. There doesn’t exist a complete set of box score for every game. It would be a big effort, but I’d enjoy it.” How deep is the Red Sox well? “I think it’s kind of endless,” he says.

   Catchers, of course, have the best view of the field. We rang two of the Sox catchers in ’67, Mike Ryan and Russ Gibson. (The others, Elston Howard and Bob Tillman, are deceased.)   
     “It was magical and it seems a million years ago,” says Ryan, who came from Haverhill. “I was lucky enough to make the majors, to be with my hometown team. It happened so fast. I really didn’t realize what happened. We were so busy, we never had time to worry. Nervous? Hell no, just go out and play.”
      Ryan remembers the season’s worst moment, too. His roommate and friend, Tony Conigliaro, was hit in the face on Aug. 18 by a Jack Hamilton fastball. It knocked him out for the rest of the year, and ultimately, derailed his career.
     “I might be wearing a different ring if he’d been in that lineup at the end,” says Ryan. “He was that type of player, a World Series kind of player. Tools, he had it all.” Conigliaro went through several comeback attempts before retiring. In 1982, he reportedly had just been offered the Red Sox TV color man job when he suffered a heart attack on the way to the airport, severely damaging his brain. “I saw him once a week at his mother’s house, in rehab,” says Ryan. “He was just there, you couldn’t tell if he knew you were there are not.” Conigliaro died in 1990.
      Gibson, who hailed from Fall River, says, “My claim to fame is we put the people in the park and they haven’t left since. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but you tell people about ‘67 and they say I wasn’t born.” Best memories? “The first game I ever played was in Yankee Stadium with Billy Rohr (and the rookie’s one-hitter). … Yaz had the greatest year anybody will ever have. Guys will hit more home runs and drive in more, but there was never more on the line.”
     Baseball never mattered so much to me as it did then. The world was less cluttered and complicated; my concerns were narrower. Those Red Sox were just the guys wearing the laundry, but I felt like it was my laundry, too.