A baseball fan who always kept his eye on the score

When my father learned last winter that he had inoperable brain cancer, pitchers and catchers were reporting for duty as spring training got under way.

We talked baseball.

He was in Rockport, Mass., in the same boxy brick and wood home on Summit Avenue where he raised me. Like always, we talked about our Boston Red Sox.

Just as I have every year since I turned 6, I liked the team's chances to win it all.

My father, as always, was the voice of reason.

I'm the optimist. He was the realist.

The cancer was swift. There was little time for optimism.

I tried to be cheerful and positive about his illness. He was realistic. He told me in February that there was nothing doctors could do.

We talked a few more times by phone that month. I noted the Sox were pretty sure that young pitcher Casey Fossum would be the answer to the lower part of the rotation.

When there was nothing left to say about the inevitable, we could still talk baseball.

The old man assured me the Sox couldn't win without pitching. And be real, he said: Without superstar pitcher Pedro Martinez, the Sox pitching statistics stunk.

At the end of March, I was visiting him in Massachusetts, still freezing cold outside, when the Sox opened the season against the Devil Rays in St. Petersburg. We talked about watching a couple of innings together on television, but the aggressive cancer exhausted him, and he fell asleep.

The Sox blew it.

The next morning, I told him a no-name reliever served up a two-out home run to the Devil Rays in the ninth inning.

His smile said: "I told you so."

When I was a kid, I was hooked on the Sox. My dad's parents had moved to California years before I was born, and when I was old enough, I would visit them for weeks each summer. That was during the heyday of the Oakland Athletics, when mustache-wearing stars hit clutch home runs, stole home plate and made impossible saves. More important, they won three World Series championships in a row.

My relatives were A's fans. I can still recite the players my uncle took me to see and my grandmother talked about over a cigarette at breakfast: Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue.

But when he would take me to the Oakland Coliseum, my uncle always made sure the Red Sox were in town. That was my team.

I remember the 1975 Sox, when rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice led a monster team. They went on to lose the World Series.

I commiserated with my father again in a phone call from college when the Sox blew the 1986 Series.

Every year it was the same. I was sure they could do it. He was not.

He was a fan, but a realistic one. He'd feign ambivalence, but at the mention of an upcoming game, he could produce a statistic on how lousy a certain pitcher threw in a certain park, or month, or under pressure.

He took me to Fenway Park, where he always parked at a gas station around the corner from the field, and they packed cars in bumper to bumper. You had to wait until the guy behind you left before you could go home.

We went to a game once with our neighbors in their huge station wagon. We waited a long time that night for the people behind us to get back to the gas station.

When I was a teenager, he would surprise me during the summer with tickets, always in the skybox section, way above the first base line. It was freezing up there, even in the middle of summer, and I used his powerful, heavy binoculars to see the players far below. But it was where he liked to sit.

By mid April this year, my father had lost his voice, a strange casualty to the raging cancer. It was hard to communicate by phone, and I wasn't always sure he understood me.

I'd try to update him on the Sox.

I kept the faith. I knew the team would turn it around.

My father died in May.

The Red Sox, despite their winning ways in so many seasons, never won a World Series in his lifetime. He was born in 1936. He died in 2003.

I thought for sure this would be the year. In his honor.

Jeez, they came close.

The season is over. Same result. I don't really care who wins the final showdown, the Yankees or the Marlins. I don't even watch the games.

By now, we would have talked it over on the phone.

I would tell him I'm pretty sure that with some minor tweaks, maybe a fifth starting pitcher or a free-agent closer, the Sox are a lock to win the Series next year.

And I'm certain the old man would laugh at me.

He was, after all, a realist.

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