Comedian Steven Wright Talks Red Sox Fandom, Learns About the Grimace Mets in the New ‘In The Gap’

On an all-new episode of the ‘In The Gap’ podcast here on Just Baseball, legendary stand-up comic and long-time Boston Red Sox fan Steven Wright talks about the highs and lows of rooting for the Sox since the 1960s and navigating living in New York while wearing his famous Red Sox hat back in the day.

Wright also gets an illuminating introduction to the Grimace Mets and the wild fan culture going on in Queens this season before demonstrating what his signature home run call would sound like and talking about his book, Harold, which is available now in paperback. 

Here are a few condensed quotes from the interview, but I cannot stress this enough, the way to appreciate this unique bit of baseball and creativity banter is by listening to the full episode. Words don’t do it justice. 

In The Gap: I’m going to illuminate you on the world of the Mets this season. They were awful to start, pretty much. They were terrible in May. People started looking for reasons to find hope. So at one point they had a veteran of World War II who was in the stadium, his name was Seymour Wiener, and so that became a thing. And then there was a dollar hot dog night. There’s a guy called Mets Pimp, who dresses in like a fur coat or Rally Pimp, rather. He’s become a thing. And some people in the media were upset about it because of the pimp imagery. 

Steven Wright: He’s been in a fur coat and it’s like 75 out. He’s trying to get the rally going?

In The Gap: He’s trying to get the rally going. He’s the rally pimp.

Wright: I love it. I love it.

In The Gap: But then they fell off and then they rediscovered the magic and saved their season after a guy in a Grimace… from McDonald’s. So McDonald’s has, you know, Ronald McDonald, they have the Hamburglar and they have this guy Grimace who’s just purple, I don’t know what his deal is, but he’s just a big purple blob. And they had Grimace to the game, and Grimace threw out the first pitch, this guy in this big costume, and then the Mets won like eight games in a row, and so everyone started worshiping Grimace and now Grimace is kind of the God of the season. And then there was a dog called Glizzy Iggy, or Izzy. He was in the stands and I guess he was eating hot dogs.

Wright: A real dog?

In The Gap: Real dog. Grimace is fake, the dog is real.

On Baseball As a Soothing Distraction

Wright: Even though I don’t watch the whole game, the game is so simple and beautiful and the world is on fire. The whole world is burning down and it’s these wars and everything and it’s an amazing distraction. It’s an amazing, you’re in a time machine, back in time, it’s like 1945. If you’re focused on the game, it puts the madness of the world on hold. It’s out there. I’m watching the game on the TV. it’s like there’s a “calming-ness” to the game. It’s always been like that. And with the world insane. It’s very, it’s like, oh, so relaxing. It’s like a great intermission from the madness. Is this guy going to steal? Is this guy going to steal third? Oh man, great. Rather than thinking about all that other shit.

On the Difference Between Doing Stand-up and Writing 

Wright: The thing is with the stand-up, you can try the jokes out. Only one in four that I would write would get a big enough laugh to stay in my act. But I’m trying them out, I’m weeding them out and keeping the ones that work, obviously. But with the book, there was no trying it out. The book was almost like telling a joke. It took me years to write the book. So it was like telling a joke. It took seven years to tell this joke and you don’t know how it’s going to be received. So I was happy it was received well because I’m just going on my gut feeling. I never wrote a book before, but I was amusing myself with it. I would try to write something almost every day, and luckily I wasn’t putting it under a microscope. I wasn’t judging it that much. None of it was like, “Well, this, I think they’ll like this.” It was like I was in my own world, like in a tree house playing, making stuff up. So then when it came out and then it was received positively, it was just fantastic.

Wright on using the novel as a means of talking about things that wouldn’t fit in his stand-up: 

So when I started writing Harold, I thought, oh, I know what I can do. I can put a funnel on Harold’s head and I’m going to pour into his head other things that I think of life, the universe, everything. Right and wrong. Evolution. Science. God. I’m going to pour everything. I think about that into his head and have him think it. It was a way to get in a lot of stuff that was in my mind that was not in joke form. So I got to get all this stuff about being alive out through that book.

You can find Harold on Amazon and where books are sold. 

You can listen here to Hall Of Fame broadcaster Joe Castiglione sign off one last time at the end of this season, saying goodbye to his regular work calling Red Sox games and reciting the poem Wright mentioned, “The Green Fields Of The Mind.”