Boston lost last night for the fifth straight game, but still managed to clinch a spot in the postseason when Texas lost 3,000 miles away and a few hours later.
Most of the Red Sox stuck around after their loss to watch the Rangers on television in the clubhouse, but getting into the playoffs that way doesn’t exactly lend itself to gregarious celebration. At least not publicly.
Here’s how Alex Speier of WEEI.com described the late-night scene at Fenway Park:
And so, the Sox celebrated. Behind the closed doors of the clubhouse, the muffled sounds were of players hollering and, as manager Terry Francona had suggested just a couple days earlier, grown men behaving like little boys. Because the ballpark was empty save for team employees and the couple dozen remaining members of the media, there were no snapshots of a celebration: no Riverdance, no opportunity to spray the fans with champagne, no occasion to storm nearby watering holes and pour drinks for the celebrating fans.
The clubhouse was never opened to the media, instead a steady drip of six bubbly- and beer-soaked players making their way into the concourse just outside of the clubhouse to offer their reactions to the accomplishment. The exchanges were a bit awkward, as the players left the thumping bass of the clubhouse for the silence of the empty ballpark, but the enthusiasm, sense of achievement and anticipation for another October run nevertheless came through.
Speier puts a nice spin on it, but based on their Twitter updates there were quite a few media members not thrilled with waiting around until the wee hours of the night for a handful of players to emerge from the partying clubhouse with quotes. Photographers from Reuters and the Associated Press didn’t even stick around, so we’ll have to take Mike Lowell at his word when he said that Jonathan Papelbon “is probably in a thong right now with goggles and drinking Budweiser.”
