Ornoth

Last month, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

That’s not something to take lightly. My father lived 71 years and never saw the Sox raise the trophy, despite four futile World Series appearances, as the Curse of the Bambino lasted a dispiriting 86 years. But now we’ve earned four titles in the past 15 years: more 21st century championships than any other team in Major League Baseball.

The timing is a source of amusement for me. With the Series taking place at the end of October, all four of those wins happened within a day or two of my birthday, often a milestone one. This year it coincided with my 55th, and the previous win came while I was celebrating my 50th birthday with a two-week trip to Culebra.

I can’t say I was ever into baseball myself, but I did wind up playing Little League. Having moved to a new town at age eight, I had few friends, no siblings, and aging parents, so I killed a ton of time throwing a ball against the wall at the DMV office building next door (or hitting balls against it with a tennis racket).

Wrongly thinking that was an expression of interest in baseball, my parents somehow lined me up to play for the local "Bath Iron Works" Little League team. Looking back at it now, I don’t have any memories of my parents attending games; I guess it was just a convenient way to get me out of their hair for an evening.

While all that idle ball-tossing made me an exceptionally good fielder (at third & first base), I was a terrible hitter, having never practiced batting at all. Stepping up to the plate felt a lot like standing on the painted line in the middle of a highway, trying to put your face as close to the onrushing cars as you could. It was as if those balls were being hurled at me at top speed by a blindfolded tyrannosaur with Parkinson’s, bouncing on a trampoline! Needless to say, I was nothing but a liability on the offensive side of the game.

Thankfully, I aged out of Little League, stepped out of the batter’s box, and took those asinine stirrup socks off for the last time. I could finally resign my unwanted career as one of the Boys of Summer!

As an adult, I’ve had absolutely no desire to reconnect with the sport. Baseball—like golf and bowling—is incredibly tedious to watch. It’s only interesting if you’re participating, and playing baseball holds about as much appeal for me as a colonoscopy, architectural school, and childbirth.

But when the Red Flops win the World Series, it’s still worth noticing.

I’ll never forget a classic Bostonism from my 25-year residence in town. Before the curse-ending 2004 series, where Storrow Drive passed underneath the Longfellow Bridge, a sign reading “REVERSE CURVE” was permanently graffitied to read “REVERSE THE CURSE”. I may think baseball is shit, but there’s still a lot of Boston solidarity flowing through my bloodstream.

Back in 1995, I left my job running a mainframe for a medical software company and joined a small but growing local IT consulting company. Their ambitious corporate tagline was: Changing the Way the World Works.

It’s not often that an individual can have that kind of impact, but earlier this month I was presented with photographic evidence that I found both deeply touching… and deeply humorous.

During my seven years with that consulting company—Sapient—we grew from 100 people to 3600, had a public IPO, and were named to the S&P 500. I was one of their first web developers, who helped them transition from just client-server IT projects to doing their first large-scale e-commerce, banking, and stock brokerage websites.

Today Sapient employs over 12,000 people globally, and (for whatever reason) they’ve chosen to sponsor the Boston Red Sox. While that tagline seemed awfully ambitious for a 100-person company back in 1995, one of the visible signs of Sapient’s success at “changing the way the world works” is the recent presence of their corporate logo adorning that most famous edifice in Major League Baseball: Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

That kinda freaks me out, but it is also a reminder that I had a part in something that really did have a major impact on the world.

During my tenure at Sapient, I started riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge, a fundraising bike ride for the Jimmy Fund. The PMC has been a partner of the Boston Red Sox since 2003, and each year they devote one game to recognizing the PMC and its riders. And in recent years, that has included unveiling a huge PMC logo on the Green Monster.

Having been part of the PMC for 14 years—in the process, raising over $100,000 for cancer research, treatment, and prevention—that recognition means a lot to me.

So I was pretty heartily amused when I saw the photos from this year’s PMC Day at Fenway Park. There in huge script for all to see are two of the biggest accomplishments of my life—the Pan-Mass Challenge and Sapient—right next to one another on the biggest billboard in professional sport.

Obviously, I can’t claim sole responsibility for those two organizations’ work, but I can take pride in having made a meaningful contribution to each, and that those contributions have helped create thriving organizations that will continue to have positive impacts on the world.

But I still think it’s funny as hell whenever I see those two logos out there in left field, right next to one another. Life sure is strange!