Pat & I went for the 25% off obstructed view seats on Wednesday, and it worked out okay. The seats were right behind the section 23 pole, on the third base side of home, barely outside the screen. So we had a chance for a foul ball (except it would've hit the pole, of course).

The guy next to me was an older man from Boston, who came with his autistic son, who sat in the seat in front of him. Their seats were not obstructed. The guy was very nice and understanding of my situation. He let me lean over him, and he made sure I was leaning enough to see the batter. (He had the aisle on the other side of him, so he had room over there.) By the tenth, some people started to leave. So we moved to unobstructed, awesome seats. From those we saw the Cabrera game winning HR.

We had a great view of that 4-2-3 double play. As well as Ortiz diving in to first, and his 40th dong of the year. It was a great game, except for Foulke.

I got a ball, too. David Newhan flipped it in to the crowd in BP, and I nabbed it. That's getting one the easy way.

And at one point, Larry Luchino came walking up our aisle. I saw him and yelled out, "Fairfield County wants NESN!" I don't know if he even heard what I said, but he stopped. He pointed at the huge pole right in front of my face and said, "Hey, what kind of a seat is that??" Heh. So I stood up, you know, after laughing at his great joke, and said, "We live in Fairfield County, CT, and we can't get NESN." His eyes brightened up and he said, "I was just talking about this today. It's considered yankee territory." And I was like, "Yeah, I know." He told me to call my cable provider. I told him I've done so, and that they told me that it's not their decision, it's MLB and the teams that decide which regions are allowed to see which teams. Larry told me to just keep putting pressure on the cable company. And I wish he'd said, "And we'll handle the rest," but I did get that impression.

So I guess it's back to square one: Comcast. I wonder if they'll say anything different to me when I say, "No no, you don't understand, the owner of the Red Sox said I should call you..." But I doubt it.

The one thing I've got going for me is that since I do have Comcast, I probably will get NESN, should it ever be allowed to be shown in my county. Because Comcast seems to be a big Red Sox sponsor. We'll see.

I'll see the games this weekend, albeit with crappy yankee announcers.

Overall, it was the definitive Fenway trip: a genuinely nice fan next to us, a ball, a blown lead followed by a walk-off win, and a pole.

The magic number is 15. All the talk now is about the yanks' magic number, But as long as they've still got one, we've still got one. We can wrap this thing up in 8 games. But there's only 10 games left, so we need to get on that quick. Pedro, be ON tonight.