The life and times of a Red Sox hat

A Red Sox hat can be more than a hat, it can be a symbol of resiliency, of community, of time and place. It can also keep the mountain sun off your face.

It was blue when I bought it. Crisp and clean like the air in September during my freshman year of college. I wore it every day as I fell madly in love with being a Bostonian.

Just as I started to believe I really knew the city, it was irrevocably changed on a cloudy April Monday. Patriots Day, 2013. A four-day search for the marathon bombers left me staring out my dorm room window onto an empty Boston Common, heavy with silence that didn’t belong. I had grown so accustomed to the screech of the green line at Boylston, I couldn’t sleep when it stopped.

I didn’t take the hat off for weeks. Suddenly, wearing a piece of Boston demanded a responsibility greater than pride for a sports team. In the aftermath of April 15, deep compassion rose from the cracks of a city famous for cold weather and cold people. Time moved slowly; strangers made eye contact; everyone felt more present than in the impatient rush of a regular day. It was quiet in the way a community becomes after tragedy. People came together just to breathe next to other people.

When is a Red Sox hat more than just a hat?

But quiet doesn’t last long in Boston. David Ortiz made sure of that. Compassion tangled with pain, with anger, and it was all stitched together in the caps of an unlikely baseball team. The 2012 Red Sox recorded a last-place finish in the American League East, one of the worst seasons in their modern history, but that hardly mattered after Patriots Day. The 2013 Red Sox played a game bigger than baseball.

I spent more time at Fenway than I did in class that year. I put on a fake beard with my friend Shelby when the entire team stopped shaving, and for one night they let anyone with facial hair into the park for $1. I ate hot dogs for dinner more than I want to admit. We alternated between the last row of the bleachers because we were broke and seven rows from the first baseline because we were lucky.

But it didn’t really matter where you sat that season or if you were at the park at all. Everyone was a Red Sock that year, regardless of whether they were on the field or in the stands or at home with Don Orsillo or in the car with Joe Castiglione. The red thread in a letter B blurred the line between fans and players, holding the city’s blood on the head of every Bostonian who refused to stop running. For six nights in October, Shelby and I screamed at an old box TV from a dirty college couch, watching our beloved team win a World Series for the city it carried on its back.

The hat faded without my noticing: worn down from runs along the Charles and weeks of backpacking across Vermont, a move out west and a move back east. It was sun-bleached by summer baseball and eroded by harbor water until the only blue remaining was a splat of paint a friend dropped on my head. Sweat stains left salt rings on the tattered gray cloth, but I refused to wash it, content to hold it tight to my head while I jumped off the dock into Dorchester Bay.

On an outdoor leadership course in the fall of 2018, I lied to myself that it would keep me dry in the Pacific Northwest mountains. Olympic rain soaked the thinning crown and pulled ripped cotton away from the bill. I had plenty of chances on the three-month trip to swap it for a functional alternative, but the Sox were on the way to their most winning season in franchise history. We lived entirely off the grid for most of the course, only returning to the edges of society to resupply on food, where I developed a bad habit of nagging any stranger with a cell phone to update me on a series score.

After weeks of loyally donning the hat off the coast of British Columbia, without an update since the ALDS, I was rewarded with one perfect sentence from a staticky sailboat radio. “The World Series of baseball begins tonight with the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers.” A week later we learned the Sox had won it all from a bathroom janitor at Smith Rock State Park.

Not all Red Sox fans are lucky enough to be anywhere near Fenway when it matters, but I’ve never regretted leaving the city, in part because I’ve never felt more allegiance to Boston than when I wasn’t there.

I ran down a dirt road in coastal Vietnam, three weeks into a month-long trip where I hadn’t met another New Englander since flying out of Logan. The morning sun warmed my scalp through a growing collection of holes in the fabric of my aging ballcap. Dehydrated and out of shape, I contemplated stopping to walk as I returned a wave to a passing cyclist. His voice cut clear through the humidity. “GO SOX!” I threw a fist in the air and ran another mile. As long as that ratty hat was on my head I was never too far from home. Time and again it was the safety blanket that let me leave, while always binding me to a place I can’t seem to stay away from for very long.

Nearly 10 years after I bought it, you can’t call it a hat anymore. It’s a time capsule. A fossil of the sweat, tears, and dirty water that inevitably collect in the seams of every Red Sox fan.

All salt leads back to Boston.