Thank you, Joe.
I live in a house where no one cared about baseball until I came along. So my girlfriend, who is not a sports fan but has learned something about baseball, will sometimes walk by while the game is on and make an astute comment, from the perspective of fresh eyes. During Joe Castiglione’s last game, she walked through during the ninth inning, when NESN had turned the broadcast over to Joe on WEEI radio to finish out the game and his career.
From the kitchen she observed, “This sounds different. This guy actually sounds like an adult instead of all the usual huh huh huh huh huh!” This last part was said in a Looney Toons kind of voice.
So that was hilarious. I think she was talking about Youkilis.
But the point was taken: Joe was a consummate pro.
I cried when he recited part of Bart Giamatti’s essay, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” as he does every season, to bring down the curtain. And Will Flemming cried—you heard his voice breaking as he thanked Joe just after he turned the broadcast over to him. There was a long pause as Flemming attempted to gather himself. Then he attempted to speak again, in an even more strangled voice, until NESN cut the broadcast.
But Joe! Pro that he always has been, he maintained his composure throughout, even making a joke that suggested he might unretire three times à la Roger Clemens.
All the Red Sox players left the dugout to see him off. Wow. More tears. Maybe I’m feeling extra sentimental these days for some reason. But I wasn’t alone, and I don’t feel bad about it.
That familiar voice.
Boy, do I know that voice. Don’t we all. Listening to Red Sox games, especially in my room at night as a kid. Or on the radio in the car when I moved back to Massachusetts, in the days before streaming music, when the local stations leaned far too heavily into James Taylor…Joe was there.
NESN’s broadcast had me crying at various points as they replayed some of Joe’s iconic calls—and none more than the call that closed the 2004 Word Series. I remember exactly where I was (who doesn’t?)—sunk on my knees to the floor, crying like a baby. I was in someone’s living room in New Bedford, Massachusetts, newly back in my home state after years of living in New York City. The group included a friend from Trinidad, who (even though their banks close when their soccer team wins a single game, she said!) was shocked at the output of emotion. I had to explain why this was so important, and how my grandparents hadn’t lived to see it, and how I’d thought I never would either. Then she got it. Joe was there.
So when I got to my feet for his last calls, in unison with the entire crowd at Fenway, I was crying.
The last line of Giamatti’s essay, which Joe didn’t read because he sticks to the first paragraph, goes like this:
“I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” — A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”
As I stood and cried in front of the Sox game, my dog took this opportunity to sneak in behind me and steal my seat on the couch. Some things never change. Life goes on. Play ball.
Thank you, Joe.