Page 3 The Sun Bay Paper August 2, 2026 Saved by the Boys of Summer: Baseball to the Rescue, Again At my age, I shouldn’t care so much whether the Boston Red Sox win or lose, let alone permit my daily mood to rise or fall accordingly. It’s only a game. It’s supposed to be a pastime (according to AI, something that “helps make the hours pass pleasantly when you are not working”), not an obsession. There are 162 games a year and letting your emotional state hinge on whether your favorite team scores more runs than the other team is obviously senseless. And yet. Generations of Americans have been swept up by the game. Children never forget their first trip to the ballpark or memories of playing catch with their father, or the ball players they elevated to heroes, or observing their elders go ballistic over a dropped ball. My friend Paul remembers being five years old and watching his father rip the radio out of the wall after the Red Sox grounded into a rally-killing double play. That was in 1958. For New Englanders, that kind of passion hasn’t abated much, even if people are watching games on cell phones. It’s been ever thus. “Six months out of every year, I may as well be made of stone,” laments the long-suffering wife of a die-hard Washington Senators fan in the 1955 Broadway musical “Damn Yankees”, while her long-suffering husband sings “Those damn Yankees, why can’t we beat ‘em?” Speaking of the Yankees, years ago I was comparing notes about baseball obsession with Floyd Abrams, the great First Amendment scholar/advocate, who has argued numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on erudite points of constitutional law. Abrams, an overcharged Yankees fan, told me that any neurosis I had about the Red Sox paled before his about the Yankees. “I doubt it,” I said. “Trust me,” he said, and related that every night, when he watched the Yankees games on television, he had to leave the room while the opposing team was at bat. “You win,” I said. Anyone who has ever dropped their kid off to begin their freshman year at college remembers the surge of emotion that the experience triggers: the sad wonder about the time that has flown by, the brooding about the things not done together, the re-discovery of the bedroom, hermetically sealed since age 13, suddenly open to reveal a space, once a pigsty, now deserted. As in every other New England family, my son and I bonded intensely over the Red Sox. The weekend after we dropped him off at college, while I was still in a post-dropoff funk, the Sox and their archrival Yankees played a three-game series. The Sox won the first game, the Bad Guys the second. In the final game, nationally televised, the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the ninth inning. I did not throw furniture. I did not rip the television out of the wall. But it’s possible that some of the pent-up emotion over the previous week’s college drop-off seeped out, just a bit. Perhaps trying to comfort, our teenage daughter attempted to reason with me. “Why does it matter?” she asked. “It’s just a piece of wood and a ball. This wasn’t helpful. Exactly at that moment, a text arrived from my son, looking after his old man, albeit from a distance. “Don’t do it,” the text said simply. “You have so much to live for.” Given the state of the world, there was particular reason to look forward to the Red Sox season this year: part diversion, part reason for hope. The team did not oblige for the first half of the season. They did not hit. They did not pitch. They did not field. Consequently, they did not win. Then a miracle happened. Call it a sign from God. The team won 15 games in a row. They are back in contention -- for now. My son and daughter-in-law have been staying with us for a few weeks. The old ritual has returned: sitting together to watch our beloved team and sweat every pitch. Point is: you have got to hand it to the Boys of Summer. Somehow or other, however bad things are, they give you reason to hope. And to remember. DAILY EDITORIALS BY: JEFF ROBBINS 'Murder 101' Isn't Much About a Murder at All Like parents, teachers can shape not just a child's experience in the world but also the very essence of who they are. Stumble into a class with a bad teacher and the encounter might stick with you forever. To wit: I'm a grown woman with kids of my own, and I still remember my 8th-grade social studies teacher, who, on the first day of school, made fun of my exotic-sounding Greek last name and told the giggling class that it sounded like a disease. But the right one can transform your very being. Mr. Hopkins was my 10th-grade English teacher. On his wall, he had a "no hunting" sign. By "hunting," he meant to humiliate or tease. "You aren't allowed to hunt each other," he explained on the first day. In the parlance of today's culture, he was telling us that his class was a safe space. I thought about Mr. Hopkins the other day as I watched the "Murder 101" limited series documentary on Amazon Prime. It's ostensibly true crime, but you could make a good argument that it's actually a documentary about teachers, and the way they can change a kid's life for the better. "Murder 101" follows the 2025 sociology class of Alex Campbell, a teacher at Elizabethton High, a small-town Tennessee school in the Appalachian Mountains. Mr. Campbell, as his kids call him, uses cold cases to teach sociology in project-based learning. Throughout the season, the students investigate decades-old murders, researching victims and suspects, accessing public records and collaborating with state law enforcement assigned to the cases. Without spoiling, I can tell you that though the framework of the show is ostensibly about their investigation, it's far more about the impact that Mr. Campbell has on the children in his class, many of whom come from families torn apart by drug addiction, poverty and abandonment. You watch the group progress throughout the year and see the ways that the class helps them navigate their challenges. Some of the kids featured in the series are a foster child with an imprisoned father, the orphaned daughter of a woman who struggled with drug addiction, a bullied girl who found her voice and a popular jock feeling lost as he approaches adulthood. But you'll learn through the documentary that these are just stereotypes and fail to capture the complexity of a life -- even a young one. Like the victims of the murders they study, the students are much more than what happened to them. One of the murder victims, a mother of three, worked as a prostitute before her death, and you can see the fierceness in one of Mr. Campbell's students as she says that she would do anything for her children, too. In news stories, on social media and in everyday life, it can be tempting to pass judgment. The climate of our culture virtually demands it. What do you think of this makeup? What do you think of this diet? What do you think of this parenting technique? Those implied or explicitly stated questions are how we're hooked into commenting. We have a powerful urge to believe that we can control our own fates. If you hear about a woman who was murdered, it can be scary to think that it could happen to anyone. It's much safer to believe that it was her fault, that she invited her fate with her choices or lifestyle, and that our choices and lifestyles protect us from any similar danger. The alternative is justifiable fear, knowing that we cannot prevent bad things from happening -- in fact, that bad things probably will happen to us, at some point in our lives, as Mr. Campbell acknowledges to the class in one episode. But if we allow that fear into our hearts, compassion will sneak in beside it. Compassion for others, of course, but also compassion for ourselves. Because the lessons that Mr. Campbell teaches these kids are that we did not deserve the bad things that happened to us and that, perhaps more importantly, those bad things do not have to define us. We can be more than a bullied girl, a foster kid, a jock, an orphan or a murder victim. We, and they, become a full picture rather than a stereotype by being known, by being understood. These both are and are not sociology lessons. They are also lessons about life, and about how to become the best version of yourself, which really is the only thing worth learning in school anyway. It's enough to make you wish you were back in high school. DAILY EDITORIALS GEORGIA GARVEY
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