Solving the 25-year mystery of a viral Red Sox song

In the 2000s, amid peak Red Sox mania, when the iconic curse-busters inspired a panoply of cultural tchotchkes – films, books, bottle openers that played Joe Buck’s legendary call whenever you cracked a beer – I recall an epochal song that, while popular back then, has since been forgotten.

It was a countercultural, subterranean ditty – acerbic and witty, laden with profanity and underpinned by a wry anti-Yankee sentiment befitting the times. I stumbled across the viral mp3 on LimeWire around 2007, but the homespun lyrics suggested earlier provenance: 

“Woke up late, it was quarter to noon,
just thought I had to be at Fenway soon.
I’ve gotta get drunk, before the game begins,
4.25 draughts cost a lot when you’re drinkin’. 

About to go, and near went blind,
Damn Yankee fans showin’ their behinds.
I went inside to get my Yankees Suck shirt,
and my Yankee beatin’ stick. 

I tailed outside with my Sox cap on,
Nomar’s gonna knock one, without question.
I jumped on the T and paid my fare,
it’s better than paying twenty bucks to park there. 

Watchin’ the game at Fenway,
I was sitting in the bleachers on a hot Sunday.
It was strike, strike, put up another K,
Pedro’s working on his low ERA. 

Sittin’ in the bleachers, in my $14 seats,
eatin’ Fenway Franks and Crackerjack treats.
I went to concessions, for another beer,
knuckleheads out there said ‘two drinks max.’ 

Yankees talkin’ shit, now wouldn’t ya know,
I reached back like a good fan, and I slapped that hoe.
Now Jeter’s at the plate, and he’s starting to shout,
so Pedro threw a fastball, struck his suck ass out. 

Cuz Pedro’s on the mound, and he’s gonna throw hard,
come talkin’ that trash, and he’ll pull your card.
Knowing nothing in life, than to swing at it,
don’t talk Spanish, Pedro, I can’t comprendo it.

Yankees will always suck my ass.
Pedro’s on the mound; he’s throwing his Spanish fly.” 

I’m a Yankees fan, by way of full disclosure, but this catchy tune has always brought a wry smile to my lips. The lyrics are tattooed in my psyche, and the entire vibe is a quirky time capsule of a halcyon age, back when the Yankees-Red Sox feud electrified sports. Therefore, despite the incendiary overtones and the explicit slander of my heroes, I have long been fascinated by the track, as have other internet-brained baseball nerds.

There is just one problem, though. Well, a few problems, actually. Nobody seems to know the song’s title, nor its artist. Just a handful of generic recordings are left, deep in the YouTube abyss, and any hint of an origin story – beyond wistful LimeWire nostalgia – seems to have been lost to the passage of time.

I have pecked at the mystery for years, however, and have finally solved it – 25 years after the song was recorded. This is the story of how I cracked the code, including an unlikely conversation with the incognito composer himself.

***

To start, I googled “‘woke up late’ + ‘quarter to noon’ + ‘Fenway’,” which yielded three measly hits – the most promising of which was an old forum post from 2 October 2003, in which a nondescript user, ‘JangoFett4Hire,’ regurgitated the lyrics. (1) No further explanation was given, and the post was roundly ignored in the chatroom, but its existence gave me a helpful clue: the song existed, in some form, by that date. It offered a guardrail for my search.

Next, I analysed the song’s lyrics with a fine-tooth comb, searching for contextual clues. The heavy focus on Pedro Martínez established 1998 – his debut year in Boston – as another guardrail. The reference to a ‘Yankees Suck’ shirt further reduced that scope, because the popular garments debuted in October 1999, according to a Grantland interview with the originators. (2) I also found that Fenway bleacher tickets were $14 in 1999, though searches for beer and parking prices proved futile. (3) 

Naturally, I next mined the comment sections of the YouTube videos, which are the only accessible versions still in existence. I found a bunch of people who, like me, fondly recall the song and have coveted it for years. Some commenters mentioned LimeWire, while others speculated as to the artist, from Tom Green and Andy Dick to Carl Beringer and – bizarrely – Adam Sandler. All were easily dismissed with a little googling. 

Tinkering with various searches, I discovered a 2013 Reddit post by ‘superteflon,’ who was ‘looking for the Red Sox version of Boyz in the Hood,’ with a sample of the familiar lyrics included for reference. “Boyz in the…Kenmore?” it asked. And though nobody replied, that post turbocharged my quest. (4)

Boyz-n-the-Hood, of course, was the 1987 debut single by rapper Eazy-E, who later reprised it – with some tinkering from Ice Cube and Dr. Dre – on an N.W.A album. (5) That jived with the following YouTube comment, which I had earlier overlooked:

Indeed, the Dynamite Hack version featured the same unmistakeable instrumental, and many similar lyrics, as the forgotten Sox song. Dynamite Hack released it in April 2000, further reducing my timeframe to between then and October 2003. After all, it seemed obvious that the Sox song originator had ripped the backing beat from Dynamite Hack. I also found an affirming mention of a ‘Boyz in the Hood Red Sox parody,’ linking to the most prominent YouTube version, on an obscure 2018 blog post by Jason Stershic, a ‘relatively obscure internet personality,’ by his own admission.

Returning to one of the YouTube uploads of the forgotten Sox song, I found an interesting comment from ‘@fdurdenc,’ who remembered ‘hearing this like 15 years ago on yankeesuck.com.’ That sent me down another unhealthy rabbit hole, as I spent days trawling through the anti-Yankee wastelands of millennium-era cyberspace via the Wayback Machine. There was a cornucopia of cringey ‘Yankees Suck’ websites, pages and blogs at the turn of the century, and I shlepped through all of them, finally finding something of note on yankees-suck.com, a site conceived in 2000.

On 15 December 2001, in fact, yankees-suck.com referred to a ‘Yankees Suck song contest’ held in conjunction with FNX, a New England radio station. “The contest is over, and the winner has been decided,” read one rough post. “Thanks for all the entries. Here are the zip files of all the entries for you to download.” A list of 19 hyperlinks then followed, though none were archived by the Wayback Machine. Nevertheless, an artist was named for each entry, and I vowed to track down each one in painstaking fashion. (6)

Before beginning, though, I decided to dig more into the ‘Yankees Suck song contest,’ and discovered it was an annual event that began in 2001. A literal concert formed the showpiece, followed by an anti-Yankee rally and a ‘bikini parade’ of near-topless models down Yawkey Way before a Red Sox-Yankees game. “Song must be 2 minutes or less and contain the phrase ‘Yankees Suck!’” read a write-up on the website of WFNX, the radio station sponsor. “Songs must reflect your strong feelings of how much you hate the Yankees.” (7) (8)

A bonafide entity, 101.7 WFNX was known for its ‘iconoclastic tone’ and ‘pirate radio vibe,’ according to the Music Museum of New England. (9) On air since 1983, the station gained legitimacy through live studio performances by Nirvana, Green Day, Willie Nelson and others. WFNX was owned by the same media group that ran the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly newspaper that once published a young Bill Simmons, and that association lent it a further patina of credibility.

The station’s most anarchic fringe was embodied by The Storm and Birdsey Show (TSBS), which ran on weekday afternoons. Steeped in contemporaneous gonzo-style bravado, TSBS pushed the boundaries of acceptability, embracing jocular vulgarity at the confluence of music, pop culture and sports. Imagine an audio hybrid of Gawker, Barstool Sports and Kerrang, if you will. The show spawned ‘Steak and Blowjob Day’ in 2002 – a concise summation of its oeuvre. (10)

TSBS was the headline sponsor of the annual ‘Yankees Suck song contest,’ and that encouraged me to dig further through the WFNX website archives. There, on a Wayback Machine snapshot from 10 June 2002, under a section relating to TSBS, I found mention of ‘Sox N The Hood’ among downloadable mp3s. The Wayback Machine never archived the actual mp3, but I felt pretty sure this was the Red Sox song in question. Finally, I had its elusive title. (11)

I tracked the breadcrumbs back as far as the Wayback Machine allowed, and Sox ‘N The Hood was linked on the WFNX website as early as 17 May 2001. Interestingly, it was grouped with ‘Storm’s Weed Song’ and ‘Storm’s Lapdance,’ while the file name – ‘storm_sox.mp3’ made me wonder whether these were songs written, recorded and/or published by the titular ‘Storm’ of TSBS. (12) A snapshot from 30 September 2000 confirmed that hunch:

Now, I had the song title (Sox ‘N The Hood), its artist (Storm Zbel), and a triangulated timeframe for its release (between April and September 2000, based on the WFNX links and the Dynamite Hack release date). I narrowed that even further – to April-August 2000 – by unearthing another mention on the WFNX website:

I had to track down Storm Zbel and fish for the full story. I wanted to ask him why he hated the Yankees so much, in addition to learning more about the genesis of his folkloric underground anthem. Finding him seemed problematic, though, because Zbel moved to a different radio station in 2003, and the original WFNX went off air in July 2012, regardless. I would need to get creative to reach the OG meme merchant. (13) (14)

Searching online, I discovered that Storm Zbel moved from Boston to Costa Rica in April 2007 with his wife. Together, they ran a popular local bar, while Storm – real name Daniel Zbel – developed a successful career as a voiceover artist. After cross-checking a few details via Instagram and LinkedIn, I confirmed this was the same guy who illuminated WFNX back in the day, and reached out to him via email. (15) (16)

“Holy shitballs,” came his reply. “That’s a blast from the past. It was fun to listen to that again. I’m not up for an interview, but here’s my thoughts on it: back then, radio was still awesome, I was the nighttime DJ at WFNX on from 6-10pm. I went by the name Storm Zbel and the show was called ‘The Storm Zbel Radio Experience.’ Your favourite radio station was like your favourite sports team. You wanted to be part of it. You wanted to win with them. And DJs could connect with a city’s listeners by doing fun things like this song.”

I was grateful for Zbel’s response, but I got the sense he had – understandably – moved on from those days of nascent internet trolling. It was 25 years ago, after all, and we have all posted things online we would prefer to extinguish. I do not want to disparage the guy or bring any trouble to his door. He does a lot of excellent voiceover work for marquee clients these days, and a frivolous song from 2000 should in no way detract from – or impinge on – that professional success. We all grow up, move on, and do different things with our lives. Storm Zbel is no exception.

To that end, this was a well-intentioned, fun-spirited challenge, as much as anything. An obscure pop culture node triggered the obsessive curiosity transmitter in my brain, and I wanted to discover everything about it. Now, I have. And the overwhelming takeaway is that the internet yields the answer to so many esoteric mysteries – if we care and dare to dig deep enough. Oh, and the Yankees don’t suck, for the record. No matter what so many fleeting 2000s webmasters would have you believe.

Sources

1. The Smart Marks Forum. [Online] October 2, 2003. https://forums.thesmartmarks.com/topic/42021-tsm-karaoke-bar/?page=5&tab=comments#comment-1029421.

2. Barshad, Amos. Grantland. [Online] September 1, 2015. https://grantland.com/features/yankees-suck-t-shirts-boston-red-sox/.

3. Bevis Baseball Research. [Online] https://bevisbaseballresearch.wordpress.com/research-archive/red-sox-ticket-prices-1912-2004/.

4. Reddit. [Online] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bostonmusic/comments/1lwaax/boyz_in_thekenmore/.

5. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyz-n-the-Hood.

6. yankees-suck.com. Wayback Machine. [Online] December 15, 2001. https://web.archive.org/web/20011215052255/http://www.yankees-suck.com/download.html.

7. Radio, WFNX. Wayback Machine. [Online] August 16, 2001. https://web.archive.org/web/20010816072904/http://www.wfnx.com:80/jock_storm.html.

8. —. Wayback Machine. [Online] August 27, 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20021222093123fw_/http:/www.stormandbirdsey.com/Storm%20and%20Birdsey/Photo%20Album/YankeesSuckBroadcast2002.htm.

9. Music Museum of New England. [Online] https://www.mmone.org/wfnx/.

10. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_and_Blowjob_Day.

11. Radio, WFNX. Wayback Machine. [Online] June 10, 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20020610192327/http:/www.wfnx.com/jock_storm.html.

12. —. Wayback Machine. [Online] May 17, 2001. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517055519/http:/www.wfnx.com:80/jock_storm.html.

13. Lesemann, T Ballard. Charleston City Paper. [Online] April 19, 2006. https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2006/04/19/feedback-file-storm-kenny-get-past-the-sh-crap-and-look-ahead/.

14. Hollands, Courtney. Boston Magazine. [Online] May 17, 2012. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2012/05/17/r-i-p-wfnx-1983-2012/.

15. Ballenatales.com. [Online] https://ballenatales.com/jolly-roger-bar/?amp=1#gsc.tab=0.

16. Z Town VO. [Online] https://www.ztownvo.com/.