Lester on the mound vs. Verlander in Detroit at 1 pm today. I’ll be in the car doing my best to drown the polar bears by driving the way-too-familiar 250 miles from NYC to Cape Cod. As a card carrying member of the BLOHARDS (Benevolent Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Red Sox Diehard Sufferers of New York) offer this listening tip for any fellow Bay State commuters who carry the ring into Mordor every week on Route 95.
The first solution is to drive a contemporary vehicle with SiriusXM and listen to the game via satellite. That isn’t in my cards, nor is bluetoothing the MLB app on my Android phone into the car’s speakers. That’s way too hipster and just … weird. So, for your old school listening pleasure, here is the roster of radio stations to code into the pre-sets listed in order of a return from the land of Darkness back to the Promised Land. There really isn’t anything to compare with listening to Joe Castiglione and Dave O’Brien call a game through the 1950s-tinny crackle of an AM radio.
- Manhattan to Bridgeport — 1490 AM WGCH in Greenwich
- Bridgeport to New London — 1080 AM WTIC Hartford (best signal in Connecticut)
- New London to Warwick — 1440 AM WILI Willimantic (unneccesary if you switch to from WTIC to the station below around Mystic)
- Warwick to Fall River — 103.7 FM WEEI Providence
- Cape Cod — 96.3 FM WEII Cape Cod
The full list of stations in the Red Sox Radio Network is here.
Now, with everything possible before us and no real numbers on the board (sorry, but the Mariners vs. the A’s kicking things off last week in Japan does not constitute a real Opening Day in my book) the slate is clean, everyone is without sin and hope springs as eternal as …. Spring. My prediction for the 2012 season: the Tigers win the World Series. Ok? Got that? The Beloved Red Sox duke it out with the Blue Jays to finish above Baltimore at the bottom of the AL East, arguably the most difficult and competitive division in any pro sport. The Sox just don’t have the pitching this year in the fourth and fifth slots in the rotation to have any hope. Dice-K might be resurrected like some apparition rising from the ashes, and pigs might fly, but there just isn’t any there there when it comes to the starting pitchers. So, let’s celebrate Fenway’s 100th birthday and get all mushy about the lyric little bandbox, put d’affaire de poulet et biere behind us, give Bobby V. his honeymoon season and hope the Money Men do well with their hedge funds and can afford some new arms next winter, because they didn’t spend diddly this year.
Oh, and one last thing. I already miss Tim Wakefield, my favorite Red Sox since Bill Lee. The man was a hero to all men of a certain age and I once rode an elevator with him at the Mass Eye and Ear Clinic. So I have that going for me.
And another last thing, since every purple-prosed baseball poet has to end the season with that weepy Bart Giamatti quote about baseball seasons ending and breaking our hearts, every cliched Opening Day post must embed this classic sonorous James Earl Jones panegyric to the pastime from Field of Dreams:
ESPN allowing us TimeWarner subs to watch this live online has made this work day much more bearable 🙂
Go Tigers!
Bless you David for suffering through the entire game through many frequency changes (speaking of frequency hopping, Google Hedy Lamarr). Anyway, my good fortune was that I only had to listen to the last 2 innings on my way home from Lakeville. However, I did have to suffer through the annual first phone call from a dear friend and avid Yankee fan in which he gleefully informed me of the latest rumor — that the Red Sox pitchers have traded their attraction for fried chicken and beer for “thumb-wrestling”. Hence the injuries. I prefer to believe it is not true.