Woohoo! I am on cloud effin' nine right now. Thank you, Papi.

This turned out to be quite an important night.

The Sox and yanks games were parallelling each other all night. Both teams had a lead, but allowed the opponent to tie it up late.

When the Angels had the go-ahead run on third with one out in the ninth against the Sox, the yanks were tied, but with home field advantage, still seemed to have the edge on their toughest opponent, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

But Wake got out of it, and David won it, guaranteeing we'd be at least three up at the end of the day.

The yanks were ready to keep pace, as they had Bernie up with two on and one out in the bottom of the eighth. The yankee Stadium crowd felt a little of that last-century arrogance, but they should have known better. Bernie lined into an inning-ending double play. They still looked good, though, as Mariano came in for the ninth in a tie game, to the strains of the land of Chokia's National Anthem, Enter Sandman. But thanks to Robinson Cano pulling a TPS (Timo Perez syndrome)*, the D-Rays scored the go-ahead run, and held off the yanks in the bottom of the ninth. 4-3 Tampa. D-Rays win season series. With five games left in it. I'm wondering if George actually keels over tonight.

It could easily be a two-game lead right now.

But it's four! And the Tribe won, closing to within one of the yanks.

To have that piece of tall shit Randy lose after he was so pumped to actually pitch well in his last start is so key. They need the Randy games, because they can't be trustin' Chasmall and Con. I mean, Chacon and Small. Especially when they're facing a quality team, like they will be weekend.

Manny predicted Ortiz' game-winning homer. Because with Edgar up, he was in the dugout, on the bench. He did have a bat in his hand, but to me, it just seemed like what he was doing was saying, "This game will be over before I even get up." Which usually means an Ortiz homer flying through the night air.

Speaking of Manny and predictions, earlier in the game, with the count 1-2 on Manny, mom yelled out, "Ooh, let's walk, Manny." I said, "Mom, it's 1-2." Three pitches later, my mom was right. Good call, Mom.

Tomorrow I go to Fenway, which is why I'm at my parents' house, which is way closer to Boston than New York is. Also, they get the games on TV. It was really key to watch tonight's game on an actual TV.

The Sox should have worn the red jerseys tonight, but only in honor of Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, who died today. RIP Bob.

*TPS (for the last time): n. 1. When some dude plays really well in his first year, giving a manager false hope, and costing his team big time with late- or post- season rookie blunders. See 2000 World Series.

In tonight's example, Cano, who has fooled the yanks into thinking they have a second baseman with some minor examples of good hitting which were put to rest when teams started getting scouting reports on him, misplayed a grounder in the ninth, allowing the Rays to score the winning run. Shoulda brought in Bellhorn! Hahahaha.

[An AP Photo was used in this post very legally.]

The A's and Indians are currently two games behind the yanks in the loss column for the Wild Card lead. With the A's still battling the Angels for the west title, and still having four games left against them, and any Red Sox wins against the Angels helpng the yanks, I'm focusing on the Indians to get that Wild Card.

Wahoo's Tribe has games left against: the Tigers, two series' with KC, and Minny, TB, and Oakland, all at home. They do play two series' with the White Sox. But one is the last series of the season, which may turn out to be meaningless for Chicago.

So it's definitely a possiblilty that they can gain three games on the yanks. But, who knows, a lot of things can happen. I just hope the Indians have their team-owner-woman cardboard cut-out ready.

From the Progress Report:

The message from Bush and [White House communications director Dan] Bartlett is that state officials were "slow to call for outside help." The reality is that Louisiana state officials reached out to the federal government for assistance before the storm hit. On Aug. 27, Gov. Blanco sent a detailed letter to President Bush requesting assistance because "this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster."

One of them, anyway.

Got a Bad News Bears jersey. Amanda's number 11. Cha-ching. Milestone birthdays get you the best presents. But I've still got a few more days of hanging on to my twenties. The last of which, Wednesday, will be spent at Fenway watching the first-place, World Champion Boston Red Sox, with my Amanda jersey on. Not a bad way to close out my third decade on earth.

Curt got all of his lingering crappiness out of the way today. He should be all set for the yanks next weekend.

Edgar, seriously, dude, come on.

Actually, I wasn't totally pissed abou that, because I had this strange calm over me, like I knew we'd win anyway. But, still. My dad had been trying to tell me some of the good things Edgar's been doing. Like his baserunning and his singles and doubles. And then he goes and nearly blows the game.

It did make me prediction come true, though. Essentially. I said Tito would take out Clement in the ninth, he'd get a big ovation, and we'd watch, like, eight Orioles get on base in a row and win by one instead of three. Close. My other correct prediction was that Manny would be trying to take the ball the other way on his at bat where he untied the game, and he did. Nice job, Manny. And your dropped ball was a catch, despite what Remy said.

Bedard looks like Lilly, my dad noticed tonight.

Where was Drinkwater, aka Kapstein, aka J.K., aka Rowlings, tonight. Didn't show at any point. May be a first. Maybe he has Labor Day vaca plans.

From last night: Wasn't Green Day hilarious, with their gloves and uniforms on?

We're only four back of the White Sox for home field advantage through the World Series. So Monday's noon make-up game is actually kind of key.

[Note: Title of post refers to a kid from my neighborhood named Bedard who was taunted relentlessly for looking like a bird...by the Hungry Hungry Hippos kids.]

Y'ever get the feeling that if the hurricane had hit Beverly Hills, everything would've been fixed by now?

I made some alternate logos for our friends, the Orioles. The "Shit Birds" one is in honor of Pat, who calls them that consistently.

The good news from tonight is that my "month of stuff happening the way it should" continues for the yanks, with Leiter getting tagged for 6 runs in the first, an inning he didn't make it out of. It's now 12-0 Athletics in the 8th. Payton and Hatteburg have been super-dope homeboys from the Oaktown, and they're known as such, and their homers have been a beat, uhh, the yanks can't touch tonight.

Bellhorn now has the double-flap helmet for the yanks. And he looks like a damn fool. The Red Sox double-flap looked normal on him somehow. Maybe it's just that arachnid, the one that guards the gates of Hades, on the front that makes it look so wrong. And his hair may be shorter in back. Maybe he's doing an installment plan. "Make me a robot in three short weeks" or something. 0-6 with 0 walks as a yank.

Funny, I thought I wouldn't have to see old pal Eric Byrnes this weekend, since he's no longer with Oakland. Little did I know he got traded again, and is now on the Orioles. So not only do I get to see him (on NESN instead of Yes), but instead of being done with him for the year, I'll see him all month long, since the Sox and yanks will be playing Balty numerous times. In fact, I just checked it. I'll see Byrnes's face literally eleven days in a row in late September. Newman! At least he's out of the playoffs.

In our game, well, I guess you can't expect a win when you've got a guy making his first ever start. Overall, he didn't do too bad. Gave us some innings. And at 6-3, it seemed like Stankonia just tried to get everybody work, disguised as "playing the percentages." Even Foulke got in for the first time in almost two months. I liked how Harville, despite walking the first guy he faced, threw the guy out at second on the sacrifice attempt. He said, "I'm not letting a guy get to second fuckin' base. Not on my watch!" Kind of. I liked that.

I was kind of pissed at Edgar in the ninth. Just take a few pitches there. Let the crowd get into it. Make Ryan think about how Ortiz will be the tying run if he puts you on. It would've been fun to see that match-up. Instead, Edgar swung at the first pitch, blooping out weakly to end the game. In the bizzarro NL, that may get you into the Hall, but here in the real world, we do what we can to get Papi up there. I still wanna love the guy, but, I don't know, it seems his numbers when I'm watching are about .050 with 1 HR, and when he's in the field, there have been numerous balls up the middle that he's nowhere near because he's playing in some National League position I don't know about. Like, in foul territory or something. I even made a little plastic gumball-machine into a temple that I planned to pray to when Edgar's up. And when I tried it for it the first time, I looked back at the screen, and I'd forgotten that Johnny was out that day, and someone else was at bat. That just fit so perfectly. Like, even when I'm trying to help him out, he's standing harmlessly in the on-deck circle. He did work a walk to start off the next inning, and I've kept the temple in its special spot, but have slacked on praying to it. Maybe I'll start that again soon.

TJ by RemDawg tonight, calling a fan in the stands a "yankee fan," when the guy was clearly wearing a yankee hater hat. I figured by now, everyone, especially people who go to every game at Fenway, double-checks when they see what appears to be a yankee hat.

Tek looked like Willie "Mays" Hayes on the "whoops" double. I thought that meant that everything would go our way tonight, but it wan't to be.

And Nixon popped out on the 100th pitch. A swing! And contact!

Finally, I was reading on somebody's blog about how popular and larger-than-life Remy now is. And with Piniella in town last weekend, and Remy talking about the '78 playoff game tonight, well, it all just ties in to something I've said before, but will say again:

As most slightly older Sox fans know, in that one-game playoff, 27 years ago, with the Red Sox down a run in the bottom of the ninth and a man on first, Jerry Remy hit a fly ball to right field. Lou Piniella lost the ball in the sun. It bounced in front of him, and was about to go past him to the wall, when that sloppy beyotch used his 20th-century yankee magical powers (read: blind-ass luck) to reach out at the last second, barely grasping the ball with his glove. Had the ball gotten by him, at the very least, the tying run would have scored. In that case, Rice and Yaz would have each had a shot at delivering the winning run. Remy himself might very well have circled the bases and scored on the play, though, winning the game and sending the Sox into the ALCS.

As one reporter, and I can't think of who it was, said, Had the ball gotten by Piniella, not only would history have been altered, but Jerry Remy would've become the third-most popular player in Red Sox history, after Williams and Yaz. While Bucky Dent would've been so forgotten that he might not even exist right now. "Erased...from existence!" --Doc Brown

I think it's really interesting how, all these years later, Remy's really climbed that popularity ladder, the one he should have rightfully been near the top of anyway.

This story is why whenever Looooooou is whining and complaining when we're beating his Rays, even when he's right, I just smile real wide and say "Them's the breaks, ass-wipe."

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad. (Sorry to bring up the Piniella play on your special day.)

These kids in my neighborhood used to play Hungry Hungry Hippos using live ants instead of marbles.

But it wasn't enough for them to have the ants simply be "eaten" by the plastic hippo heads. That would only entail them getting pulled into a hole and falling an inch into a hippo-free safety zone. Then they could go on living, not even really knowing they were swallowed by a fake hippo.

Instead, the kids would fill the base with liquid soap. This way, the ants could experience a more realistic death. Go into hippo's mouth, fall down hole, sink into warm goo for eternity.

Maybe these kids' personal hell will be: Trapped on a giant Hungry Hungry Hippos board with live beasts chomping away at them from four sides. But you really can avoid them by just getting to a spot they can't reach. Then again, what if you filled the entire board with people. There'd be all kinds of pushing and shoving. Mass hysteria. Wow, I should make a movie about this.

Thanks to NU550 for reminding me of HHH.

'nardo goes tonight against John Maine, who hopefully can't get there from here. My school, Nebraska, also goes up against Maine this weekend, on the iron of grid. Weird. I wonder if this is the first time the Huskers have played against a New England school.

What I like about Olerud is that he's been playing long enough so that he knows when the team only needs, say, a fly ball to the outfield to score the tying run. He came through in that situation tonight, and as a bonus, the ball went over the wall for his second dong of the night, and a 6-4 lead. Just the fact that he hit a fly ball is the most important thing to me.

7/7/7 in our last three games. Johnpot.

Another comeback, and a sweep of the mighty, mighty DR.

And guess which two yankee pitchers were integral in the yanks' loss tonight...Embree and Mendoza! God, that was sweet. Jeter is crying tonight. (And planning his Carribbean vacation for October 2nd.)

3 1/2 up. 4 in the loss. O-birds coming in. yanks to Oakland.

Update on something I forgot to mention in the first place: Turns out he was scattering his mother's ashes. So, anyway, I was at a cockfight and--oh, right, uh, so this guy ran on the field at Safeco last night, and Kay said he had a sign and a can of some kind. Cameras showed remnants of what looked like sand in the outfield. Thanks to Devin at Mariners blog Lookout Landing for the info. I hope he's not the Dirt Dog of Seattle.

This article, "The Tragedy of '04" by Scott Stossel, is the type I know I should ignore. But it makes for good blog fodder, so here goes.

The article, written by a Red Sox fan, talks about how the team finally ending their drought is a bad thing.

Before I address the actual content of it, let me say that what immediately pisses me off is the fact that Stossel has taken a much-talked about notion and presented it as if he was the first to think of it.

For a long time prior to last season, people, mainly yankee fans and media-types, have said that the Red Sox winning the World Series would be "the worst thing to happen to Boston." Or that it would turn the Sox into "just another team."

Only to have Stossel, a Red Sox fan, come along and rehash all the same garbage, telling everyone that those theories actually are, in his mind, correct. (I guess he's a busy man, since it took ten months for him to get this article out.)

It's not like he hadn't heard these theories before last October. In his article from August 2004, he gives all the old cliches about how Sox fans are united by losing, they expect the team to lose, it's the losing that makes them lovable, bla bla bla. (Although I do admit we all used to drag that stuff up every once in a while.) So why write this new article in a way that suggests no one's ever come up with these ideas until now, or, worse, that they're real at all?

What he's done compares to a lottery-winner writing an article about what they ended up buying with the money--you don't need to win to write it.

And that's what gets me. If you did write a piece on what you'd do if you won the lottery, you'd hopefully write about the good things you'd want to experience, instead of saying that you plan on being loved only for your money, feeling like your soul got poorer while your bank got richer, and dying alone, more depressed than you ever were before the win.

People did write negative things like this, only the average Joe represented Sox fans everywhere, while the jackpot was seeing the team win the World Series. Instead of ignoring it, Stossel brings it right back. "Yes! It was all true! We hate this!"

He claims to be a true Red Sox fan. He says the Red Sox are embedded in his soul. I don't know. I read an article that refers to the 2004 World Series as the "2005 World Series," and says that the Sox won seven straight games after Game 3 of the '04 ALCS, and I feel like I'm reading material by someone who doesn't pay much attention to the Red Sox until October, if you know what I mean. (Also, does the Boston Globe have editors? I seriously wonder about this.)

Thinking maybe those were just a couple of random typos, I read that previous article of his, and noticed he said that Aaron Boone's home run went to the "left field bleachers" at yankee Stadium. Which, of course, is almost impossible, considering they're about 500 feet from home plate.

Terrible job.

Now, on to the substance of the article. I write about this stuff all the time, so you may know my opinion already: I'm happy the Red Sox won the World Series. Surprise!

So happy that my whole body tingles when I write and subsequently comprehend that sentence. Like the head of hair atop the guy in the Head & Shoulders commercial. By the way, I use Head & Shoulders and I've never felt that tingle. What am I doing wrong? Anyway, even if I did feel that, it would be nothing compared to this: (Hold on while I write this sentence.) The Red Sox, in real life, came back from down three games to zero to beat the yankees in the ALCS, before going on to sweep the World Series. Ahhh.

I know what the guy means. As I said above, I heard it all described so many times before they actually won. But the pre-2004 Red Sox weren't about losing. Well, they were, sometimes. A lot of times. A lot of really important times. But didn't we have fun? When you were little, rooting for the Red Sox, and I mean really little, did you know about the history of baseball? Did you care whether or not they'd won before? Or did you just love the team unconditionally, because that's how you were raised?

And when you learned the history, which for some of us was when we were very young, did you want the Sox to win any more or less?

Life is about tragedy, and not always getting the proverbial girl. I used to talk about this all the time. I once said on this blog that Red Sox fans are always the ones who get splashed by the car, while the yankee fans make it across the road unscathed. Well, it was something like that. And yes, the whole point of Charlie Brown missing the football is that he always misses it. But you know what? Good things do happen in life. Every once in a while--a long, long while--the sun shines right on you. Or you get every green light on your way to work. Or you find a four-leaf clover, only to get hit in the shin with a line drive against Lions later that day in your Little League game...oh, whoops. But, see? That's what I'm talking about! We didn't bond over the tragedy, we bonded over whatever the Red Sox did, just like we do now.

Jeez, you want tragedy? Just wait. Something bad will happen again. But while you're wishing for the pain of yesteryear, I'll be dancing down the streets of Manhattan with a fucking World Champion Red Sox T-shirt on!

But feel free to walk around Fenway Park with a sign that says "26-6" if it makes you feel better, and lets you hold on to your glory days. While you're at it, slap on a yankee hat, because if you can't enjoy being a Red Sox fan now, there's really no point in being one at all.

And if you're really concerned about how this changes Red Sox fans, and you just can't handle it, well, look at it this way: Aren't you at least glad that we changed yankee fans? Isn't that how your theory works? If you consider 2004 to be the worst thing to happen to us, wouldn't that mean that it was the best thing to happen to them? See how ridiculous that sounds?

Cherish this. If you can't do that for yourself, do it so that yankee fans don't get the satisfaction of seeing us depressed or intimidated by them in any way, in the one year of our lives where we've been allowed to be on top.

Don't worry about the past, or about how the Red Sox relate to religion, or how we're just another team, or any of that crap. Just keep supporting your team. They deserve it. In fact, maybe you'd think differently if you went into the Red Sox locker room and told all the guys who got us that championship that you kind of wished they'd lost, and saw the looks on their faces.

Stossel asks "What now?" Well, a few million Red Sox fans have decided to pack Fenway to root for the Red Sox, to the point where every game has sold out, despite the highest ticket prices in baseball. As well as travelling the country to see them. I almost feel like he hasn't paid attention this year, or wrote the article in November or something. Again, terrible job. But he did write a book about the Peace Corps, and I'm sure he didn't mean to piss me off. So he's got that goin' for him.