Forgiving Ourselves: The Bill Buckner Story

Bill Buckner got the rottenest deal I can ever recall.

I was going to wax poetic about the return of Bill Buckner to Fenway Park, but the timeliness of such waxing has already evaporated and I’ve got to get a whole lot done today so I’ll just blast it out as quickly as possible.

• Bill Bucker played his ass off.  He played hurt, injured, and everything between. 
• He was good.  Very good.  He was one of the better players of his era.
• He helped get the ‘86 Sox to the World Series, so treating him like shit is like booing Keith Foulke.  Oh wait, bandwagon and idiot fans already disgraced themselves doing just that.
• He should’t have been in the game since he was effectively hobbled.
• He tried to make the play, it wasn’t like he half-assed it.
• The game was already tied, Buckner didn’t blow the lead, Calvin Schiraldi and Bob Stanley did that.
• It was game 6, not game 7.
• Schiraldi actually blew game 7 as well, so blame him, not the guts of that team, Buckner.

It was about time Fenway washed its hands of the shame brought upon it by mistreating a man of Buckner’s caliber.  It took a championship (well, two) to do it, but Bucker should have received that standing ovation the very next season, not 22 years later.  The man with the mustache talked about how he had to forgive the media after the game, and took the high road with the fans, saying he didn’t need to forgive them.  But he did.  Clearly.  And he did. 

Now we must forgive ourselves for turning an error into more than a decade of vitriol and pain.