The 2022 Red Sox were bad… but they saved my life

How a crappy team rescued me from the brink.

If you were to encounter me in the wild, out with friends on a good night or at Star Market on a boring one, you might not ever guess that I’m into baseball. Stereotypically, the average bespectacled white girl with an alt-music fixation is not. But for as long as baseball’s been in my life, so has writing, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that baseball and storytelling have more in common than one might think. Baseball fans and writers are romantics. We live for the buildup of tension and the release of action, whether that be in a book or a bases-loaded two-outs situation. And as any sports fan can tell you, when things go your way, the serotonin release is pretty damn sweet.

Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

Living with mental health challenges means things don’t really go your way. You could have everything you want and need in the world, and yet you feel like shit for not being grateful for it. You could have the body of a deity and not be able to get out of bed. You could have everything that could possibly make you happy at your disposal and it still isn’t enough. Throw in some actual bad things happening and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel feels nonexistent.

That’s what happened to me in the summer of 2022. I’d just graduated college and had no job options, no housing opportunities, and no plans for the future. I resented going home after graduating while my classmates got their lives started with sparkling jobs in brand new cities. To make matters worse, I went through my first real breakup around the same time with my boyfriend of eight months, which was the most devastating part of all.

I had never considered Boston my future, or even my home. I was pretty unfamiliar with the city, having grown up in a distant suburb, and had really not spent much time there. I wanted to be a professional creative writer, but Boston didn’t seem like the ideal hub for that sort of thing, and the other options for me were too expensive or too far away. I felt extremely isolated, from myself, from my wants, from my goals, and from my ex, who, as it turns out, got a new girlfriend less than a month after we broke up.

When I found that out, all of my bottled up emotions exploded and I snapped. In mid-July I had the absolute worst mental breakdown of my entire life. Fortunately, I didn’t physically harm myself or anyone else. But in the aftermath, I made two extremely important changes: I got myself on SSRIs and I started following the Red Sox a lot more closely than I had in years.

I’d grown up a Sox fan, but had distanced myself from the team and the sport in my teen years as I focused on more traditional angsty teen girl things (boys, social status, etc). Even during 2018 and 2021, the Sox weren’t on my radar whatsoever. In 2022 I was home, and as I spent more time around my family than I had since before college, I got back into the Sox as a means of distracting myself. The 2022 Red Sox. By that July, when the FO did virtually nothing of significance at the deadline (Tommy Pham and Reese McGuire! Whooooo!), the Sox were a lost cause. That was the season with the 28-5 game! The season we lost Kevin Plawecki and the home run cart rides! The season J.D. Martinez turned into an absolute pumpkin! Yet I was hooked, and still with every passing embarrassment I didn’t let go. That beautiful serotonin feeling when we did win games and we did get hits and we did have fun had, to quote the Sisters of Mercy song “Marian: Version”, “save[d] me from the deep”.

Photo By Winslow Townson/Getty Images

It saved me more than I could comprehend at the time. I took Jerry Remy’s book If These Walls Could Talk with me on a family trip to Maine and read it multiple times while I smelled the saltwater of the Atlantic out the window. Through Youtube, I learned just how goddamned goated Pedro is, how awful the beginning of the Orioles 1988 season was, and what some of the funniest errors of all time looked like. I wanted to live to consume this content. A month prior I had wanted to die. Now I wanted to live.

It was pure chance when, a year later, I found myself living on Boylston St, right next to Fenway park, so close that I could look down from my terrace onto the field below. All thanks to my roommate’s mother—but maybe thanks to Fate too. I knew, after that summer, I couldn’t leave the Sox, or Boston, behind, not after the team and baseball itself had been my lifeline. I’ve since become active on Baseball Twitter/X and have become a huge fan of the Section 10 and Baseball Is Dead podcasts. I’ve gone to more Fenway games in the past two years than I’ve gone in my whole life. Like Riley with her islands in Inside Out, baseball is now firmly its own island in my mind. It means more to me than I could’ve ever known. And while the mental health challenges remain, they seem a lot easier to manage now.

So to bring this back to its title: the 2022 Red Sox were ass. I know that. A lot went wrong that season, but it did do one thing: It showed me the light at the end of the tunnel.

Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images