Wow. Usually when you win the ticket lotteries, you get through right away, because only a few other people are allowed to get in, as opposed to the whole world. But today, I sat for three hours in the VWR before I had to get on with my life, and now I'm tring again, so far with no luck. A lot of games have sold out by now. (This is for Monster seats.) At one point I flew to close to the sun, opening one too many windows, which exploded my Firefox. It only cost me a few minutes, as opposed to losing my place in line, since you're selected randomly, not in order. Still, that could've cost me. I try to limit my browser windows to: "enough to stay competitive, but not too many to lose karma points." Usually about five or ten. But I've gotten through early with only one window open.

I hope the people that already had tickets up on the scalper sites for $3,000, able to because they were so sure they'd get them because they probably have 8,000 minions working for them, all slip and fall today. And also die.

You know what's weird? I got into the VWR five minutes before the scheduled time, and they were already saying four games had sold out, including Monday Devil Rays game. Something's fishy about that.

Edit: As I was hitting publish, a window opened up. Eat that, Jere-haters. Was only going for standing room anyway, and I got 4 for a Sunday summer game. Gold. My season is pretty much set now: Plenty of early season and late season games, a bunch of summer ones, three Yankee games, a Giants game, a few foursomes. I'm, again, gold. The lesson here is that those scalper sites should be blown up and are pure evil, but it is possible to get plenty of tickets, all the legitimate way, if you pay attention.

The Rich Gedman bio I wrote is now up at the 100 Greatest Red Sox blog. More on that later. Now I'm in the virtual waiting room, trying to get Monster seats...

Every once in a while, I swear they're bugging my house. Last weekend, Chan and I were looking for snack treats at the local convenience store. I wanted my standard Jax cheese doodles. They didn't have any, so I got Wise potato chips. Chan got Wise cheese doodles. He was telling me how good they were, so I tried some. The Wise kind are like Cheetos as opposed to the more doodly Jax variety. I found myself loving them. I ate half the bag. Chan left for Connecticut, and I ate the rest, deciding I'd just buy another bag, eat the first half of that bag, leaving him with a half-bag. Then he got home, I told him what I'd done, and he said, "It's okay, you can finish that bag, too." Which I did immediately.

I almost blogged about it. I was even trying to come up with some joke about how Chester Cheetah is a little "too extreme," making Wise the perfect doodle for me.

So unless Lucchino's monitoring me (battling Steinbrenner's secret cameras that have been here all along), what are the odds that a week later, the Red Sox name Wise the official cheez doodle of the Boston Red Sox? How often do they put out press releases like this anyway? I swear, ever since I got to the point of buying almost ten Fenway games per year and they introduced the 10-game plan, I've been in tune with the team in weird ways. I'm like their test audience or something.

Twelve Year Old Kid Rips Manny, Wants to Go to "Outer Space" Someday

As usual, here I am defending Manny in a situation where he did nothing wrong in the first place. Eric Wilbur's interviewing children and putting it on the Extra Bases blog. A 12-year old feels Manny should be more of a team player. He also stated if he weren't a little boy, he'd choose to be a firetruck.

What are we doing? This is so ridiculous. Thank you, media. You've brainwashed our youth.

Now, look at this statement from redsox.com:

If outfielder Manny Ramirez was scheduled to attend a car auction in Atlantic City, N.J., on Saturday, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein says that is no longer the case.

If! If Manny was gonna do something that never existed except in the media. What an absolute joke. It's getting to the point where I almost hope Manny doesn't show up at all out of spite. If he had normal hair, there would be vigils for his sick mother. Instead, it's "Manny lying again, but if he's not, well, look, he's still going to a car show, which nobody ever said he was going to in the first place." And now that we find out he's not going (which, again, if was going to go at all, he surely decided against it as soon as he knew he'd have to be with his mom), does the Photoshopping get undone? Nope, we've already propagated the myth, and until we invent something new to make fun of him for, Manny will be that "wacky car show guy."

I'd love for Manny to come out and say, "I made the whole story up just to see what you'd do, and you've all disappointed me yet again. Terrible job. Bye!"

In Wilbur's blog entry linked above, the main topic is that "we fans all somehow think Curt Schilling should be signed immediately." No, Eric, not all of us do. He makes the ridiculous comparison to letting Bronson go when we thought we had enough pitching. I was huge on saying the Bronson trade was a mistake--that has nothing to do with this. No one would've thought of saying "sign Curt now!" if he himself hadn't brought it up himself in the media. Of course we want to see how he does, if he stays healthy, before committing to the 40-something for an entire other year after this one. People made fun of me for wanting to keep Bronson, saying "You just want to hang on to the past." No, I wanted the team to not come in third place! And I still don't, that's why I want to be cautious about signing an old dude, regardless of the fact that I'll always appreciate what he did for me in 2004.

Red Sox Chick agrees with me on this stuff. We seem to be a dying breed...

[What you read above was a well-thought out, often funny piece (with humor based on reality, not fiction, hence making it actually comical). Had I instead decided to put up tired, rehashed images that make fun of my own players, when there are so many Yankees to make fun of, I could've got on fucking Deadspin. Crap, I gotta remember that! (Maybe I should re-post those colorful pics of silly-looking mascots that got me on there once before...)]

Speaking of mascots, Empy did a great post from Lefty & Righty's perspective about the new hats. Hope boston.com doesn't use your photo uncredited again, Empy!

Aside from Rich Garces' comeback, there's plenty of other Rich G. news. I've been working on my Rich Gedman bio for the Top 100 Red Sox blog. Watch for it in a few days. On the Mets channel tonight, they were showing Game 7 from '86, so I got to see a little Geddy on TV as well. (I hadn't watched the late innings of Game 7 probably since that night, so I'd forgotten all about the smoke-bomb delay...)

But the coolest thing is that I was looking up Rich Gedman's son, who's playing college ball, and saw that he'll be on a team this summer, the Sanford Mainers,* who play in the NECBL. That league sounded familiar...oh, right, that's the league that the Danbury, CT Westerners play in! Danbury is where I lived from 2000 to 2005, after living the 25 years prior a town away from it. You know where I'm going with this. Son of Ged will be playing in my old hometown this summer. At the field where Chan, Brian, and I have hit and fielded many a baseball. And played "home run robbing" at the outfield (chain-link) fence.


*I didn't leave out an R. It's Mainers, as in, people from Maine. Specifically, I guess, Sanford, Maine.

B.T.F. (beyond the footnote): Jason sent me this link. Looks like Kerry was serious about fighting that DirecTV ridiculousness.

Just saw a pretty funny-ish story on the news. Since Omar Minaya seems to refer to everyone as a "friend," the Met people around him in camp have been passing out F.O.O. (friend of Omar) caps.

DJ died. He was my favorite Celtic. You may be saying, But Jerry, you didn't even like the Celtics! First of all, it's Jere, and second of all, well, no, I didn't--DJ was the only one I liked. Hence, my "favorite Celtic." I grew up a Nets fan, but I totally rooted for the flashy Lakers over the "now there's a haircut you can set your watch to"-ish Celts in those 80s Finals. Not like I cared either way, but, if I watched, I rooted for the more kid-friendly team to the neutral fan. (Believe you me, rooting gently for the Lakers like three times in no way made or makes me a Lakers fan. I've hated them completely for years.)

Anyway, there was something about DJ's look I always liked. Plus, 3 is my third favorite number, so...

Damon continues to make a fool of himself. (And who is Mike Myers to talk about any of this stuff?)

If Damon does great for the entire four years, then we can sit here feeling bad that he's gone, especially if we don't get a lot of production out of Coco. But did anyone notice Johnny's average dropped 30 points last season? Oh right, batting average doesn't count anymore. Well, it does to me. His slugging went up, but that's because Vic Tayback, "Mel" from TV's Alice, could hit a home run to the short porch at Yankee Stadium. And he's dead.

Some good stuff coming from 3000 and the rest of the Extra Bases crew today. (As the concept of "newspaper" becomes less and less relevant...)

You've got the great Mike Lowell defending Manny once again with some great quotes.

And Curt says he couldn't play for the Yanks. Strangely enough, BDD read this and was able to make it into "Schilling could pitch for the Yanks." Wow. That's just solid journalism. Even at a time when Curt could easily try to play the Dunbar card as some kind of leverage tool, he still says he couldn't pitch for the Yanks, and DirtDogs tells the hundreds of thousands of fans, whom he knows get their news from him, that Schilling "could" pitch for the Yanks. Note: I didn't click the link, I only saw the teaser on the boston.com main page. But I have a feeling there's a hilaaarious picture of Curt in some type of Yankee gear or hugging Joe Torre or having sex with a pig or whatever. The good news is, BDD's little icon has fallen to the 9th spot out of 10 in their little bloglist, behind the "schools" blog and the auto racing one. Woohoo!

But about Schilling and the issue of not getting an extension and all that: I'm just so sick of these players with their talk of "respect" and all this crap. There should be a rule that you're just not allowed to talk about any contract issues in public.

What the hell is "respect," anyway? From what I've gathered, it means "hate dressed up as love." Example: "I respect Derek Jeter" = "God, I hate that guy, but I wouldn't want people to think any less of me, so I'll wuss out and make it appear that my feelings toward him are positive." I'd sooner just say what I actually mean.

Pride. Tradition. Half-moon gussets.

These hats will be worn by Dunbar this season during BP. I think we're only a few years away from the final piece of tradition's wall being knocked down by the big, green dollar sign. It must be something Big Stein battles with every day--phony traditions and standards vs. the illusion that every dollar he spends is for the good of the team.

Wait a minute, what am I saying? They've already played two regular-season games with the Ricoh logo on their uniforms.

I just assumed everyone knew who Don Orsillo was. But just now, I had ESPNews on, and they went to live bonus coverage of the last few seconds of a Providence basketball game, and the anchor gave the name of the announcers. "Now we throw it out to so-and-so and Don OR-sa-low." I was only flipping by, and I'd already hit the channel up button, but my brain processed "OR-sal-low" just before moving on to the next sound it heard, so I went back, and sure enough, it was Don. (He was a little premature with his "and the Friars will win" call, but he turned out to be right.)

Here I'm acting like people should all know his name, and I didn't even realize he announced Providence basketball...

Here's what happened today:

Edes reports Henry and Werner having an Abbott and Costello-style dialogue about closers.

Good friend Evan Brunell, Over the Monster, and Yanks Fan Vs Sox Fan suggest at their blogs that what they might have meant is that Papelbon just might be, possibly, maybe, kinda, the closer.

Edes says "terrible job, I never said that!" to the "blogosphere."

I'd just like to say that I'm pissed that I missed all this at the time, and I would've gone more overboard than those blogs if I'd thought they were actually hinitng at Pap being the closer, since that's been my hope all along.

Either way, the "truth" (?) is that "nothing's changed." And they've always said Pap still hasn't been "ruled out" as closer. I'll restate my position: We've got a great staff, a great lineup, and the best closer in the league. Let's keep it that way. That's a winning formula, I think. Again, I think Jon would be great as a starter or reliever, but he's our only closer, why change things?

Jeter responded to his buddy A-Rod's comments from yesterday. From the mlb article about it, talking about the play where the two of them botched that pop up last season:

"...the next day's tabloids claimed that Jeter had been spotted shooting Rodriguez a dirty look.

"We laughed about it in the clubhouse," Jeter said. "You guys didn't see it, but we laughed about it..."

Remember that dude in high school who claimed to have a girlfriend, but no one ever saw her, and when asked about her, he'd tell you she lives in Canada?

Moving on, today is Two 20 07. Cobain would've been forty today. Can that be possible?

Red Sox State of Maine. A new(er) Sox blog by a left-wing, old-ish-school, Clemens-hating, non-dirtdog-linking, (at least) third-generation Sox fan. Nice!

She also has a political blog.

See the bottom of my list of Red Sox blogs at right for some other recent additions. Right above the "Plays of the Decade" link. (But don't click that because those videos got taken down. I'll get the PoDs back up one day.)

I'd like to apologize to the dude who does Red Sox Monster. A few days ago, I was pissed about deadspin's linking his post about Dice-K's weight, an idea first brought up by bostondirtdogs. He posted about the whole issue here, after reading my criticism.

I was mainly pissed at DS and BDD, and this guy took a third of the brunt for being the man in the middle. What set me off were two things:

1. deadspin has the power to link whoever they want. There are a million blogs. I don't expect every single piece of nonsense I come up with here to be honored and praised and linked to. But when I see that they've chosen to link to a post which was nothing more than somebody reading dirtdogs, of all places, and nonchalantly repeating it, well, that can feel like a slap in the face--not only to me, specifically referring to the times when I really work long and hard on a post, but to all the other bloggers. If Joanna Empyreal Environs wrote a post that consisted of a few short paragraphs saying "Dirt Dog says this about a player's appearance, I wonder if he's right...," she'd fire herself. Again, there a lot of blogs who work very hard and do a lot of amazing work for no pay. And you know what? This guy at Red Sox Monster does a lot of good work, too. It's not his fault that a post he wrote has become what he's known for, to some people. Besides, all his posts aren't like the "fat" one. And I'm sure he'd tell you that he's done plenty of other work that he'd rather have recognized than that one. I'm not saying it's not okay to do a nonchalant, quick post about some minor detail--I've made it an art form. It's just too bad the way this all worked out.

He also talks about not taking ourselves too seriously. I'm glad to hear him say that as that's obviously something I agree with. In fact, I never even said "Oh, poor Dice-K, he might feel bad if we make fun of his weight." I was only pissed that people were making something out of nothing. Especially since he just arrived and has done nothing to deserve anything but fair and friendly treatment. Until he actually does something wrong, why not just let him do his job?

2. I'm disappointed in the way this dirtdogs thing has turned out. I started this blog three years ago, and shortly after that, I realized the ridiculousness of Boston Dirt Dogs. It's the USA Today of Red Sox sites. There's nothing on that site that can't be found on boston.com, its employer. Even when it was an independent site and had some inside info, it still was all about attempting to drive our beloved players out of town, while supporting the white, clean-cut guys and constantly hounding the players with darker skin and weirder hairstyles. The way I see it, the perfect audience for BDD is a bitter, racist, simpleton. But hey, that describes a large percentage of this country, so I guess he'll always be popular.

So my point is, I kind of thought, years ago, that we were all seeing this, and slowly BDD would fade away. Instead, he gets picked up by boston.com, and new bloggers are linking him in droves. I had really hoped my little bunch of rag-tag bloggers could've influenced everyone to at the very least not link dirtdog, as if A. he needs any more links and B. people didn't know about him. We were always kind of upset that the SG/Beth "popular kids" crew linked to BDD, but at least I'd hope new bloggers would link them, if not us, at least over BDD. But in the end, my old rag-tag crew kind of fell apart. The fall of the Bullshit Memorial empire hurt us big time. 12-Eight stopped, too, although it's just now being revived by Andrew. Reb rarely ever blogs, Witch City has moved on to a new blog, and Sam at felineanarchy is bust with her Tigers blog. Empyreal and I are still going strong, although she keeps the offseason blogging to a minimum. (But she makes up for low quantity with the highest quality.) And some of the blogs I was happy to inspire are also still going, without a dirtdog presence.

Wow, this turned into a retrospective. Anyway, great job by the old rag-tag crew. I thin everyone accomplished what they wanted to, and even if we got just a few people to think twice about dirtdogs back in the rag-tag era, we did our job. I like saying "rag-tag."

A-Rod arrived in camp today, and Mike & the Mad Dog just played 11 straight minutes of everyone's favorite children's book author and playoff choker talking to the media. As usual, Alex-i La Las started in a hole and succeeded in digging himself deeper. Really funny stuff. I love it. His attempt to end all talk of his and Jeter's downsloping marriage lasted about ten seconds.

"Sometimes you feel really bad for him, and other times you want him to shut up."--Mike Francesa

Take a look at the town right above Ft. Myers on this spring training map.

Today, I decided to go 100 blocks north to the George Washington Bridge. I've driven over it so many times; I wanted to walk across it for a change. Click the pics for enlargement, please.
I thought this was as close as I was gonna get at first, as I couldn't figure out how to get to the pedestrian path. I checked for a way on inside a bus station under the roadway leading to the actual bridge. It was so depressing in there. They even had an OTB. I walked around outside some more, only a little intimidated by the group of biker kids, who spend their Sundays doing tricks under the roadway, and almost decided to just go home. Finally, I saw signs for a bike path over the bridge, and followed the arrows. It worked. I made my way up the skinny ramp and onto the bridge.
One guy walked past me, but other than that, there were no people on the bridge. Except for the ones in cars, of course. The walkway was cold and barren and scary. There was only a five-foot high guard rail protecting me from falling to certain death--over 200 feet. And I wasn't even over the water yet. In fact, I didn't even get to the first tower. (Above is looking down the path toward Jersey.) I got some shots of the city and then turned back. I got a pretty good sky for these shots looking south.
Bottom right is the mighty Hudson River. At left you see the buildings of midtown.

Another shot on my way back down the ramp. Almost identical to the first shot. But a little different.
I tried to capture the cool-looking sky once I was back home, with the sun setting in the far background, and the gray swath, and the blue above.

Two months ago, I asked you, the readers, to guess how Ken Griffey, Jr. broke his hand. Here were your answers:

"nerve tonic related"--1 guess (100%)

Looks like Matty guessed closest with his guess of "nerve tonic related." Turns out Griffey's 12-year old broke it, with a wrestling takedown.

Nice job, Matty.

Mark your calendars. Dice-K vs. the EF-agles.*

*Deca-bet reference

Keith says goodbye:


In honor of Keith, who has officially retired, here's video I shot of him here in NYC in September 2005. After this, he came outside and hung out on the sidewalk, talking with Reb and I, and just generally being a really fan-friendly type of dude. No "rush to the limo" for Foulke.

Even if he hadn't been so nice to us, that wouldn't have changed the fact that I'm eternally grateful to this man for, you know, that other thing. And by other thing I mean greatest comeback in baseball history and all of us finally getting to see the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. (As of this minute, I still haven't woken up to discover it was all a dream, so as far as I know, it really happened!) Thanks, Keith.

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