May 15, 2007
A Connecticut Yankee in Red Sox Nation
May 15, 2007. A former baseball pitcher owns a New England hangout spot…
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.
And no, this is not what you’re thinking.
I’m talking about former New York Yankees prospect Scott Patterson, who played Luke Danes, owner of Luke’s Diner in Stars Hollow, Connecticut and on-again, off-again love interest to Lorelai Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, which aired on The WB (and later The CW) from 1999 - 2007.
In the show, Luke was depicted as a Red Sox fan, though the show played fast and loose with acknowledging outside events. Luke never even mentioned the Red Sox breaking the curse! In this post, we’re going to explore May 15, 2007 - the date that the Gilmore Girls series finale aired. What was the world like on that day? What were the Red Sox doing?
And if Stars Hollow were a real place, what would its residents have been reading about before the Red Sox game? Now, since Stars Hollow is not a real place and the Stars Hollow Gazette is not available, we’re going to read events captured by the Hartford Courant in Connecticut’s state capital (and, of course, home to Richard and Emily Gilmore).
The front page of the Connecticut section of the paper touched on an issue that may be familiar to modern readers, safety on social media. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal joined with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper to chair a group of eight Attorneys General asking MySpace to release the names and addresses of sex offenders on its platform. MySpace had previously announced that it hired a private firm to find sex offenders so the request was not as impossible as it may sound. From 2007-2009, MySpace removed the profiles of 90,000 sex offenders. It’s a rare success story in the world of social media safety.
Elsewhere, the State of Connecticut found itself in the Connecticut Supreme Court defending its ban on same sex marriage. It was a battle that they would ultimately lose just over a year later.
The City of Hartford also attempted to crack down on gun violence by passing an ordinance that allowed the city to sue gun owners who do not report a gun missing that is later used in a crime.
The Courant also carried an article that discussed the end of Gilmore Girls, which aired locally on WTXX, Channel 20. The article noted that it was the last television show set in Connecticut that was on the air at that point.
They also reported on a Quinnipiac poll that found that Yankees fans outnumbered Red Sox fans in the state. The results are provided below:
Not surprisingly, Yankees fans dominated the parts of the state closest to New York City. I’ve heard that the Connecticut River is the unofficial boundary between the two fanbases, and this poll more or less confirms that. It also shows how heavily the population distribution of Connecticut favors those areas. Poor Luke Danes found himself in the minority among his fellow Connecticut baseball fans.
The 37% of Connecticut baseball fans who rooted for the Red Sox had reason to be happy. Their team was off to a hot start, posting a 26-11 record and leading the American League East. Though there were some injury concerns for Josh Beckett, who exited a game the previous day with a finger blister. It amounted to nothing of any real concern.
A sellout crowd packed into Fenway Park as the Red Sox prepared to face off against the Detroit Tigers, whom had they just beaten 7-1. Perhaps in the Gilmore Girls universe, Luke, part of a minority of Red Sox fans in Connecticut, tuned his TV to NESN to watch.
If you were driving to the game, you might have listened to these songs on the radio, the top songs of that week:
If you were planning to go to a movie that weekend, you might have seen one of these movies, the top movies of that week:
Spiderman 3
28 Weeks Later
Georgia Rule
Disturbia
Hot Fuzz
Tim Wakefield got the start for the Red Sox against a second-year pitcher by the name of Justin Verlander. Future Red Sox manager Alex Cora started the game at second base.
The Red Sox were able to get to Verlander early and score in the first inning off of a JD Drew single that brought Kevin Youkilis home. The Sox held the lead until the third inning when a Brandon Inge solo home run and Magglio Ordóñez three-run home run put the Tigers ahead 4-1. The Tigers scored three more times off of Brendan Donnelly (who had just come into the game to relieve Wakefield) in the eighth inning to take a 7-1 lead. Kevin Youkilis hit a home run in the bottom of the inning for the Red Sox’s second run of the game. But it was too little too late.
Verlander left the game immediately after and was relieved by Fernando Rodney who kept it at 7-2.
Unfortunately, Luke and his fellow Connecticut Red Sox fans went to bed that night disappointed. But that disappointment would not last too long. The Red Sox did win the World Series in 2007 after all, their first since they broke an 86 year long dry spell just three years prior.
It was a good time to be in the 37%