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52 GAMES: RED SOX OPENING DAY

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Jackson feature

The Red Sox occupy a place in Boston unlike any other team in any other sport in any other country. For six months every year the Red Sox tie up the city’s mind as fully as their fans tie up the roads and rails.

I wanted to go somewhere a bit off the beaten track for the Red Sox’s first game of the season Thursday. So I picked Allston’s Bus Stop Pub on Western Avenue… and I freaking loved it.

I notice about a dozen or so people as I grab a seat at Bus Stop’s large and beautiful wooden bar. Jack Clifford, a Bus Stop Pub bartender for 32 years, says a combination of newer, bigger sports bar and more zero-tolerance policies in the workplace have diminished the regular day-game crowd.

“Years ago, we’d of had 75 people already here, ripped and ready for the game,” Clifford says.

Maybe, but there’s an undeniable charm to the people who’ve hung around. Irish immigrants, Vietnam veterans, contractors, developers – everyone happily sits side-by-side, at least until someone gets up to greet the next old friend who drops in.

Everyone knows each other by first name. They all freely buy each other (and me) extra rounds.

Bust Stop Pub may be my version of Valhalla. How better to spend eternity than at a bar where everyone’s friends, knocking back beers and watching the Sox?

I pay modest attention to the Opening Day festivities at Detroit’s Comerica Park. I haven’t had much use for the Tigers since Hank Greenberg left (1946). The older guys at the bar enjoy seeing Tiger great Al Kaline show up, reminiscing about watching him and Dwight Evans rocket throws from right field back in the old days.

My attention really starts to wane once the announcer introduces all the Red Sox. And I mean all of them. The massage therapist, the strength and conditioning coach – every person vaguely affiliated with the team gets a nod.

Unless he’s getting into a fight with Manny Ramirez, I never need to know who the team’s traveling secretary is. I just don’t care.

The game itself is a pretty good one. The Tigers send reigning MVP Justin Verlander to the mound. Not just the Cy Young – the MVP, which a pitcher hadn’t won in two decades before Verlander did it.

April baseball is always harder on hitters than pitcher, and Verlander makes it even tougher. He holds Boston to just three base runners in eight shutout innings, striking out seven. His fastball scorches past hitters, his curveball breaks so hard they just turn away shaking.

Even the guys at the bar can’t say a mean thing about Verlander’s performance.

“Like Michelangelo, watching him work,” a man nearby mutters.

Of course, they don’t hold the other Tigers in the same respect. Take the newly acquired Prince Fielder.

“When he goes to the fast food place, it’s always the eight-piece, not the five-piece,” says Mike Lew, a construction designer from Brookline.

He’s probably right: Fielder is very, very fat. When he comes to the plate, I always pray for a triple, because nothing’s quite as fun as watching Fielder “run.”

As funny as Fielder can be, teammate Delmon Young is anything but. He must have a background in tomahawk-tossing, because he’s scary-accurate when throwing a bat:

As for the Red Sox, I give Jon Lester credit. He hangs with Verlander for about 100 pitches, matching scoreless innings. He finally falters in the seventh and allows a run, but the Sox will need lots of starts like this to wipe away the stink of last year. And hopefully by now fans have realized crappy starting pitching killed that team, not chicken and beer.

“Mickey Mantle used to hit home runs, and he wouldn’t even remember the game,” Clifford says. And let’s not forget Dock Ellis and his famed LSD-influenced no-hitter:

Clearly, talent matters a lot more than intoxicants. Boston’s bullpen, however, lacks talent and intoxicants, which leads to disaster. Vicente Padilla allows a lead-off triple, and Franklin Morales lets the inherited runner on a sac fly.

The bar crowd up until now hasn’t had much reason to cheer. Pitchers’ duels, though beloved by baseball “purists” (whatever the hell that means), are pretty damn boring to watch for everyone else. And this isn’t a “Red Sox bar” – it’s a “local,” as Clifford calls it. A neighborhood joint.

“Very few people come in just to watch the Red Sox,” he says it. “They might hang around a little longer for an extra two beers watching the game, but they would have been here anyway.”

Things change in the top of the ninth, when the Red Sox mount a full-blown rally. Small angry person Dustin Pedroia doubles, then goes to third on a single by Adrian Gonzalez.

Adrian Gonzalez has the most beautiful swing in baseball. His mechanics are so flawless, he’d look good performing a colonoscopy, so long as he did with a bat.

The Sox actually tie the game 2-2 in the top of the ninth on a sacrifice fly and an RBI triple from newby Ryan Sweeney. The crowd has finally reached yelling-at-the-television levels, though not everyone’s on Sweeney’s side yet.

“If I was that big and only hit two or three home runs each year, I’d be ashamed,” Clifford says. “He wore a skirt up to the plate.”

Of course, the bullpen gives up another run in the bottom of the ninth and the Sox lose 3-2 on a walk-off single.

The 2012 Red Sox bullpen flat-out sucks. Shitty relievers could easily cost the team a lot of wins this season.

Still, the rally does two things: 1) It gets Lester of the hook in a game he didn’t deserve to lose, and 2) it costs Verlander the win, which provides a bit of Schadenfreude for the bitter, chippy Red Sox fan that lives inside me and everyone else who grew up in Massachusetts.

Even though the Sox lost, I’ve had about as idyllic an afternoon as possible. Places like Bus Stop Pub stand in stark contrast to the big-name sports bars near Fenway and TD Garden.

“You can line up a hundred of them, they’re all the same,” says Clifford.

Not Bus Stop Pub, though. This is place is completely unique.

Matt Goisman is going to write about a game each and every week from America’s #1 city for sports: Here. We’re calling it 52 Games, because that’s what we’re going to end up with. Last week, he caught his first-ever Gaelic Football match at awesome Irish pub the Banshee in Dorchester. This week, he watched the first Red Sox game of the season with the locals at Bus Stop Pub in Allston. Next week: the Bruins start the playoffs, and the Red Sox return to Fenway Park! Keep up with him here.


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