Dale Arnold and Michael Holley run what, in my mind, is the best sports talk radio show in the country.
There are others on the station who are great too, but these two have the consistently best show going in my humble opinion. So, it was hard to ignore their question posed to listeners the other week concerning the popularity of the Patriots vs. Red Sox. Being kept on hold for an hour while painting the house on a tall ladder is a no-go in the Survivors Handbook, so I will do my call-in on the subject to you instead.
The two sports-talk jocks mused over the latest television ratings statistics for the last day of the Sox season, the infamous meltdown in the playoffs on That Sunday, when we took the double-dip defeats to the Angels at Fenway and the Broncos in Denver.
Holley quoted the ratings for the Pats' game; they were twice as high in this viewing market as they were for the Red Sox! And that was a regular season Pats game (less important, usually) trouncing a Sox playoff game (more important, usually) in the ratings.
He went on to point out that those numbers were typical of the match-up in ratings and popularity for the two teams. Then began the discussion with Dale and the callers, and the consensus was the Pats were more popular in New England than the Red Sox.
They threw out all sorts of reasons — such as the baseball games were aired too late for kids and they'd been leaving their younger audience behind for decades; that the game of baseball was too slow for modern attention spans, that football was just a better, more exciting game. The 162-game baseball schedule vs. the 16 football games was another reason, they said. Also, Tom Brady, the matinee idol, was also brought up — that he brings in a huge casual, female TV viewing component the Sox lack.
Not sure about that one, but I couldn't have agreed with them less. I thought these two usually all-knowing experts missed the bus completely in their analysis — and Gloucester is the perfect illustration as to why.
First, the most basic electronic reality is that football is on broadcast network TV, and the Sox are on cable. Even here in sports-crazy Fishtown, not everyone has NESN. I don't - just basic cable. So I can't watch the Sox, but the Pats are always available for every game. So, of course, I and quite a few others that thrive on the Sox won't be counted in the various tallies.
Does that mean we're not fans? Not at all — and that's the point. So many people I know in Gloucester live and die by the Sox. Hearing the scores makes or breaks my day. In the morning, scanning the crawl type at the bottom of the news show screen for the scores will produce that morning lift that will perk you up through the day, or that deflating sigh that says no matter how good the day might be, something feels amiss.
My sense is that it's just not the same with the Patriots. Even to the hardcore fan, a loss is agonizing but it's more of an annoyance, or makes you shoulda/coulda/woulda angry. But it doesn't make you doubt the existential core of living — yea, even the meaning of life itself — the way the Red Sox do.
For one thing, there is no evil force quite like the Yankees in Patriot nation. Sure, Payton Manning is kind of the evil black knight, but he's just too darn folksy and heckuva nice guy to really hate for long. If he was on our team, he'd be one of us. And then there are those bragadocious New York Giants who deflated our Super Bowl blimp a few years back, but they are just too classless to merit hate for long. And their cross-town counterparts, the Jets, are often just too inept to rate on the existent-o-meter.
No, the Sox/Yanks are like a Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker trilogy. The 86-year jinx was epic in its dimensions — like a Holy Grail. It transcended sports.
My 81-year-old neighbor is a lifelong Sox devotee. She lives and breathes, lives and dies baseball, game by game. She represents Red Sox Nation. The Patriots do not interest her in the same way. It's nice if they win, but not the end of the world.
She is typical of Gloucester fans. They live the Sox, they cheer the Pats. I don't think it's even close. Witness yourself how much Sox gear — hats, t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc. — you see year-round on the street compared to Patriots stuff.
TV ratings only speak to a relatively small segment of the population. Even the biggest shows score 10-20 million viewers out of 265 million in the country. My neighbor is part of that other 245 million, our local percentage of which is far and away more Soxie than Patsy.
I, like you, make plans to be in front of the box for every Pats game and not every Sox game. But when you talk football to most "real world" people, like my mother or my choir director, it really seems they just don't follow it that much.
They do know this, however, when the Red Sox win, they feel good all day. When the Patriots win, that's nice too, but it's not going to ruin their digestion all morning or make them feel inadequate, powerless or like a tragically flawed Shakespearean hero.
I believe this analysis runs throughout New England. Like Gloucester, they love and follow their Patriots ¬— especially when they win but they live and die by their Red Sox.
Televisions ratings do not tell the whole story. So keep rooting, living and dying for your teams as only New England fans can do and oh yeah, get out there on that ballfield of life and vote in this election, so there'll be somewhere left to root from, that still resembles Red Sox Gloucester.
Gloucester resident Gordon Baird is co-founder of Billboard's Musician Magazine and the West End Theater, and is producer of the "Gloucester Chicken Shack" TV show.
