The Falkirk lad and the miracle from the sky
It's the Rip Off World Cup, so you might as well make the most of it by catching a home run ball outside Fenway
By Stephen McGowan
For Ian Lindsay and his 17-year-old son Cillian, the journey from Falkirk to Fenway proved an expensive business.
A couple of tickets for the 1-0 win over Haiti cost $1000 (£745). To save money, they flew to Toronto via Dublin with travelling companion Alex Strathie and packed their luggage onto a recreational vehicle motorhome, meandering through New England before parking up in a campsite in Salem, 50 miles from Boston.
All the ticket and travel costs, all the visa stress and social media anxiety surrounding Gianni Infantino’s Rip Off World Cup were justified by one moment of baseball brilliance during a Boston Red Sox defeat to Texas Rangers on Sunday.
Joining 5000 Tartan Army conscripts, the trio had purchased tickets for ‘Scotland Day’, a smart piece of marketing dreamed up by the Red Sox to attract football fans in Boston to their iconic Fenway Park, the oldest active ballpark in Major League Baseball.
Opened in 1912, the old place had never witnessed anything like it. In a variation on the half-and-half scarf, Red Sox offered tickets with blue shirts bearing both a Saltire and the club logo.
Scots sung along to Mr Brightside by the Killers and eulogised ‘Super John McGinn’, and while most of those present had no idea how this baseball lark worked, they were hellbent on enjoying themselves anyway. Interviewed in the locker room after the game, Texas Rangers players praised a truly unique atmosphere while one Fenway bartender told of generating over £700 in tips from the game.
Willson Contreras, Boston’s Venezuelan first baseman, is having quite a season for home runs. In the second inning, he sent his second of the 6-4 loss soaring 337 feet over what they call the Green Monster. The Green Monster is the famous 37-foot-2-inch-tall left-field wall at Fenway. Standing just 310 feet from the home plate, the wall is a towering barrier that turns potential home runs into doubles and features a rare, manually operated scoreboard at its base.
And, just as Contreras knocked the ball out of the park, the Lindsays were leaving the arena to begin the journey back to their campsite in Salem.
“We left Fenway quite early, probably around 9.15,” recalls 17-year-old Cillian. “And just as we were leaving the game to catch a train back to where we are staying, we came out of Gate C and there was a big roar from the crowd.
“The roar was pretty loud and the ball came flying over the big green stand, hit some scaffolding close to me and bounced. There was no one there so I think, ‘I’d better catch it.’ I still have the ball and we are trying to go back to Fenway now to see if we can get it signed by the player who hit it.”
Dad Ian managed to get a picture of his teenage son clutching the ball in amazement. Neither of them had any real idea of how big a deal it was in American sporting culture to catch a home run ball.
Major League Baseball allows lucky fans to keep the spoils of war, creating chaotic, unseemly scrambles to bag one. While the ball might not be worth much, those lucky enough to catch one at a historic venue like Fenway have a story to tell the grandkids.
“A couple of passersby told us who hit the strike,” says Ian. “We were staying in Salem and had to leave to get the train back.
“My wife posted the picture on Facebook and it seems to have gone all over the place from then on. One of my mates in Falkirk follows baseball. And as soon as he saw it he said, ‘For Americans, that’s a really big thing to catch the ball belted out the park.’”
The experience completed an eventful 24 hours. A convoy of yellow public school buses had transported the Tartan Army to the Boston Stadium, the remote arena in Foxborough, to see Scotland secure a gritty, rather than pretty, win over Haiti.
Celebrating the national team’s first win at the World Cup finals since Italia 90, supporters had marched from Evans Way Park to Fenway the following evening to the sound of bagpipes. One of America’s cosmopolitan hubs, Bostonians looked on and felt like their city had been invaded.
“There was a pipe band there and Fenway was amazing,” adds Ian. “For a stadium of its age it was fantastic. I’m not sure that the Scots fans followed baseball etiquette terribly well but we were in the bleachers section of the stadium and it was just a brilliant party atmosphere.”
The Lindsays had read all the negative headlines regarding FIFA’s shameless cash grab and exploitation of supporters. The cost and travel had been justified by the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience at Fenway that captured local hearts and headlines.
“I was at France 98 and we thoroughly enjoyed that,” adds Ian. “We didn’t buy tickets then because we thought we would be in a better position next time. We didn’t realise it would take 28 years to come back.
“We have tried to make it the trip of a lifetime because the chances are that I don’t have another 20 years to wait for the next one. Cillian will, but this was an opportunity to just go and do it.
“Ticket prices were heavy. We bought tickets for the Haiti game first and got them directly from FIFA’s first issue and they were $500 each. We were in the Club Lounge for that and the seats and the view were brilliant.
“We bought tickets for the Morocco game through a friend in America and it was about $700 each for them. When we saw the price of travelling direct from Glasgow and Edinburgh and we looked to travel via a country that had not qualified to bring the price down.
“My wife is from Ireland and they still had not qualified at that point. So that was a good option, to fly via Ireland and Toronto. We then picked up a big RV (recreational vehicle) and New England and Boston has a European feel to it. The heritage and stuff.
“Organisers get a lot of criticism for the travel prices of the trains to the stadium and so on, but when you think of the scale of that and the number of people trying to marshal it at both ends you almost understand why it cost a lot of money. All in it has been a major expense but it really has been worth it.
“We didn’t expect to see Scots in so many numbers and as always everybody is pretty well behaved and even if it rained every day and we got hammered it would still be worth it.”
The Lindsays will travel back — via the Niagara Falls — next week. For most supporters paying and staying for all three games is simply too expensive. Others can’t spare the annual leave from work — even if Scotland go on to secure a precious, coveted place in the last 32 for the first time in national team history.
“It’s my first World Cup,” said Cillian, checking for the home run baseball in his pocket. “And it really has been completely overwhelming to be honest. Just brilliant.”