Toucher & Rich: Meet The Red Sox Bag Guy
BOSTON (CBS) – Things have gotten really bad over at Fenway Park.
The Red Sox are just 12-19, in the basement of Major League Baseball with the likes of the Twins, Padres and Royals. Josh Beckett was booed off the hill Tuesday night as the team dropped their sixth straight at home to the Cleveland Indians, 8-3.
The fans are getting restless.
One fan doesn't even want to be seen at Fenway.
So he put a brown paper bag over his head for Thursday night's game. Sitting behind home plate, he became a very popular figure around the Boston-area, and even made his way to the nightly highlights on ESPN. Twitter nearly exploded because of him.
He is The Bag Guy.
For two innings, Bag Guy graced the television screens of all those still brave enough to watch Red Sox games.
But when he went missing in the second inning, an all-out Twitter search party was assembled, and a #FreeTheBagGuy movement started. It was the one of the top trending topics in New England.
So of course, 98.5 The Sports Hub's Toucher & Rich hunted him down to get his story.
He is Jon O'Hara, a comedian from New Hampshire. The 25-year-old lifelong Sox fan bought the tickets at a discount Thursday afternoon, and went in to Fenway Park with a plan.
"There are two things behind the bag," O'Hara told T&R Friday morning.
"First of all, I like to think that if I can't recognize the team anymore, I don't want them to recognize me. And the other thing is it's embarrassing now to be a Red Sox fan. Everywhere I go I still wear my Red Sox hats, my Red Sox shirts, but I get comments now 'how come you are wearing that hat?' This team is not caring about winning like they used to."
There were fears that the team had booted Bag Guy when they realized he was the center of attention. One would think they would have welcomed him, taking some attention of Beckett's implosion. But that was not the case.
"In the second inning, the second batter, the people whose seats they really were showed up. The usher just came up to me and said 'can I see your tickets?' and I told them they weren't our seats, so we took off."
Read: Unapologetic Beckett Crosses The Line
But the team did not ask him to remove the bag at any point. In fact, some in the park though it was pretty funny.
"Before that happened, it was around he first inning between innings, one of the security guards who goes down between aisles said 'they might ask you to take the bag off. They haven't said anything so until then, it's hilarious."
After that, it was off to his actual seats in the loge section a little further back. The brown paper bag remained on his head until the sixth inning.
"People behind me by the sixth inning were like 'are you going to wear that bag the whole game?' I was like I was planning on it, so the guy goes 'can you take it off, I paid $100 for this seat.' So I took it off and was like 'I paid $4.'"
This isn't the first time O'Hara has donned a brown paper bag at a Sox game.
The first time was in 2010 on Mother's Day, a 9-3 Red Sox win over the Yankees. Had they not won that game, it would have been a clean sweep for the Yankees.
And, Thursday night likely won't be the last time O'Hara is seen – or not seen – at a Red Sox game.
"I was hoping to maybe throw a 100-year sticker for next time," he joked.
Listen to the interview here:
