Tonight was my first trip to Fenway Park as a Boston resident, and it was a great one. The weather threatened rain all day, but the clouds seemed to part in the middle of the first inning, and it turned out to be the perfect night for a game. Shannon’s dad and I sat way up in the bleachers, and in addition to eight and a half innings of good ball, we sat next to a dad teaching his nine year old daughter how to score a game, saw a fight lead to two guys sliding down twenty rows of concrete stairs on their backs, and swam in the midst of more inebriated half-naked women than I’ve ever seen at Yankee Stadium. We also got to see the 10,000th home run hit in Fenway Park and the 100th home run hit by Manny Ramirez in a Red Sox uniform, and a great ninth inning push by the Orioles before Byung-Hyun Kim secured the win.

All that being said, though, I’ve never seen a fan base that’s more wrapped up in the hatred of another team than they are in the love of their own. There may have been more “Yankees suck!” jerseys than there were Nomar Garciaparra jerseys, and on top of those, there were shirts recommending the Yankees shove their 26 World Series rings up their asses, yank certain Red Sox body parts, and pretty much every other tired joke you could think of. Pretty pathetic, actually.