"The Sack" pitched three perfect innings today, and Okajima, Lopez, and Corey each allowed zero runs. Nice. A Manny double has knocked in the only run of the game for us, and we were one out away from a win, but Mike Burns blew it. Tied now 1-1 after nine.

Don't forget to vote for Joy of Sox in this Sports Illustrated poll. He's taken over second from Beady D & the Boyz and seems to be pulling away.

Now for the Matt Damon pics. Again, his new flick was filming right near my work on Friday, so I grabbed some shots.



No captions necessary for these. Except "click to enlarge if you wanna see Matt Damon's acne."

This one above gives a better sense of how far away I was, and also shows them actually filming the scene, with a rolling camera-unit.

A close-up of Damon and Joan Allen doing the scene. Now for some other pics. This from my drive to pick my parents up at JFK last week:

Pretty nice shot of the Empire State Building with trees and those cool streetlights. The sky's kind of washed out, though.

And after going through the Midtown Tunnel, here's the ESB from Queens.

Then when I was bringing them from the airport, I had my mom try to get some shots of midtown right before going back into the tunnel. It's one of the coolest entries into Manhattan, visually. No such luck on the pictures, as, you know, it was dark and we were in a moving vehicle and my mom had never used this camera before. But I thought the above shot had its moments, such as the red and white hooded creatures on some sort of death march.

Now, the grand finale. You know how when the water's running down the drain, sometimes you get that cool underwater tornado? I tried to get a shot of that, but it didn't work out. I did take one looking right down the funnel, though, and it came out pretty sweet:

Outside of work today. More pics later.

A dark-haired Sox fan with a dark sweatjacket and jeans was spotted on 1st Avenue in the East 70s today. No, it wasn't Jere from A Red Sox Fan In Pinstripe Territory. It was Matt Damon, filming The Bourne Something-something. I took some pics of him and an actress who I later found out is called Joan Allen. Pics will be up here, uh, at some point. It's cool when movies film outside your work's front door. Well, it's at least not uncool.

Sox are getting no-hit by Birdy Bedard today. Schilling's only given up two runs, on back to back doubles by Gibbons and Millar, in five innings, and has struck out five batters. The 3B umpire is listed on Gameday as Tom Verducci.

Update: Wow, a rare reverse-jinx. 'tek immediately breaks up the no-no with a homer. The blogging belly-itcher is still in for the sixth.

I was reading Sports Illustrated in a waiting room yesterday. Baseball preview issue with a great story about Matsuzaka. I was reading the preview for each team (in the American, or real, League only, of course), and when I got to the Devil Rays, I saw this little section which allowed you to vote online for the D-Rays blog with the best info. There were four choices listed. I thought, Wait, are they doing this for every team? I flipped back to the Red Sox page, and there they were: four Sox fansites. The first one listed: Joy of Sox! Honestly, I still can't find on SI.com how to get to the page where you can vote, but AJM gave us the link: VOTE FOR JOY, YET AGAIN, HERE.

Looks like a certain uppity, country-clubbish message board is well out in front in the voting. But Joy definitely has a shot at second, as he trails Capital Crud Canines by six percent.

I like how Joy has linked back to me recently, so people coming from the magazine will come over here, look at the post below this one, and say, "Wow, this dude Jere heard that news about Pap's shoulder and went right out on a limb and said the team just made that crap up and that he'd just go right back to closing, and now it's actually happened! There's a guy who can get things done. I wonder what makes him tick. I wonder if he's interested in knowing what makes me tick. I wonder if he'd accept these season tickets to Fenway that I no longer use."

No right field grandstand, please.

The grassroots effort within my brain has worked. Pap is closer again!

On January 4th, I gave the chance to the Red Sox to change their bullshit story about Pap being more easily injured as a closer. Apparently, today they will. In the Rotoworld article, there's something in thee about Pap "requesting" the move. Suuurrre. I also saw the report scroll across on ESPN.

Predictably, the fantasy fools at Rotoworld are against the move, saying "more innings=better." Yeah, for your non-existent fantasy team! For the real team, we need him as closer!

Update: Terrible job, also, by Rotoworld for suggesting the team is doing this based on fans and media pressure. I mean, I like to thin they read my blog, but I hope they wouldn't just base actual decisions on it. However, it should be noted that it was the Rotoworld types who they listened to in the first place! They're only seeing what should be done, and making the correction.
(Of course, this whole report could prove to be bullshit, so we'll all keep our eyes open.)

Update 2: If you're against this move, think about it: We had the best closer in baseball last season. Now we still do. Good? Good. Without him in the ninth, we have a chance of blowing great game after great game thrown by our starters.

Final Update, before I just start a new post already: "He was lights out last year. I'd love to have him back as closer. It makes us a better team." --Tim Wakefield

Pac-Men stuff for sale update: I just checked the ol' ebay for more of the ol' my old band. Only one thing there now--someone selling a bunch of 'zines, including one we were interviewed in. I remember this interview being hilarious--I accidentally poured an entire strawberry milkshake onto my face and the surrounding area during it. I recommend bidding the 99 cents. But don't go above, let's say, 100 bucks.

Also, a TV fave of mine has died. Calvert DeForest, aka Larry "Bud" Melman was 85. What a sad ending line to that article:

At his request, there will be no funeral service for DeForest, who left no survivors.

I'm just honored to be mentioned in the same post as Larry "Bud." Oh, wait, I wrote the post myself. Myyy mistake. (Note: I have changed the title of this post to a perfect double-meaning line. I'm honored that Larry's spirit came to me and gave me the line. But no, it doesn't mean we're actually getting the band back together. As far as I know.)

Now ESPN joins the Jere camp. Announcers on SNY, Yes, and ESPN have unanimously decided that Papelbon should be the closer. They agree with me--that whole thing about protecting his arm: there's just as good a chance he hurts it as a starter. And since we absolutely need him to be there in the ninth to save the games pitched by the five other starters we have, it's more important to get him out to the pen and do what you have to do with him to prevent injury. Granted, I don't agree what all these guys say all the time, but there are seven pople right there, many of whom are ex-players, who agree with me. I don't feel as crazy now, at least...

Orel Hershiser even said the Red Sox are a world champion ballclub with Pap as the closer. And he knows a thing or two about pitching--and showering. Remember the shampoo ad he did where he claimed to take "four, five showers a day"?

Dice-K was awesome today. Really fun to watch. Many innings, few baserunners. Was hitting 95 and striking Pirates out left and right.

Lowell's in-game interview was funny, as he talked about the gyroball (which pitching coach Farrell said was a changeup with sinking action) and about learning Japanese.

Dice and the Red Sox are on ESPN today at 1.

This will be the fourth Sox game I've seen this spring on the fourth different network. On the other three, announcers have been saying the same things I have:

Stop the charade, get Pap back in the pen. (Are we seriously talking about Tavarez as a closer? If you were the Yankees, who would you rather face in the ninth, hothead Tavarez, or literally any other pitcher in the league? "Hey, it's the ninth, oh no, we gotta face Pap--oh wait, it's any other guy, okay, we're fine. Hey Cano, you don't even need your corked bat, it's not Papelbon!")

and

Why the hell did we get rid of Alex Gonzalez? Our middle infield fell about eight notches on a scale of, let's say, a few dozen total notches this offseason. I also wouldn't have minded waiting another year on Pedroia, since we had Loretta and still have Cora.

Hopefully, our strength, the starting pitching*, makes it all irrelevant.

*Would be even stronger if we hadn't traded star pitcher Bronson Arroyo to the Reds for a backup outfielder. Arroyo is currently the coverboy of the Reds' media guide, while Wily Mo is sitting on the bench wondering what to do with 40 subscriptions to Vibe. Note for new people: I've been saying this since the minute the trade was reported. Not hindsight stuff. Note for old people: I know I'm at Michael Leggett-level obsession about this, but, come on, it's all true. Let's hope your side proves me wrong this season.

Did you ever wish you could go back in time and watch a scene from when you were very young? One of those "family legend" moments, just to see how it really went down?

Well, now you can with my new Jere-corder! i.e. we and all future generations are able to look back in time, because our whole lives will be recorded in one way or another...

But this isn't a post about the pros and cons of a documenting-obsessed culture.

This is about the fact that I just purchased, with my skillful fingers, a video recording of a concert I attended in 1994. It was a Bikini Kill show at a coffee shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was going to college at the time. It will be interesting to see how the reality differs from my memory.

I recall Kathleen Hannah stepping into the crowd, parting us like the Crimson Ocean, and doing a cartwheel or walkover, and then going back up onstage. In my memory, I was right there at the edge of the cleared area, and she flipped right past me. The video will show where I really was, if I'm visible at all.

From the site where I found that show, I also got a vid of a NOFX show I went to in Omaha around the same time. The weird thing is, I already got on TV for that one, because highlights of the show were on the local news the next night. We were sitting there in the dorm room, and we saw this teaser for a story about college kids having premiscuous sex. They showed a bunch of kids at a concert, and we realized it was us, at the NOFX show. We'd wondered what the really professional camera with the bright light on the edge of the stage was for. Turns out it was to show that we were some kind of deviants for going to punk shows!

The point of all this is that I think I might try to seek out videos of other shows I attended in the past. Or not. It would really get interesting if people started selling bootleg videos of stuff like "kids playing kickball at Ridgebury school at recess, 10/5/84." Hey, I could be in that!

You know how everywhere you go, people act like the waether there is so crazy and unique, and they have a little slogan about it? Well, the new "our weather's the craziest" is: fans of every team acting like the players their team trades away always seem to thrive elsewhere.

It used to be the Red Sox and Mets, and some others, but yesterday on the FAN, a Bills fan claimed his team's ex-players always do good after they leave Buffalo, as if they were the only team this happened to.

I don't know if the rest of you want to join me at this advanced level of thinking, but I'm gonna go ahead and say this stuff happens to every team.

Where do we go from here? Think of it this way: What players does your team have that stunk before they got there but now kick butt? I mean, we're complaining about Anibal Sanchez--but look at David Ortiz! Doesn't that acquisition make up for the next ten years of Josh Bards? And what about the dudes we trade who don't amount to John Squat? It's just a "focus on the negative" issue, and I'm personally ending it right here and now. Actually, I'm full of shit. Talkin' out my ass. But, still, just remember, almost every superstar on your team came from somewhere else where they weren't quite as good. It all evens out in the end. Unless you have a really shitty GM for, like, 50 years.

That Raissman never fails to make me chuckle... "Ma and Pa Pinstripe," ha.

I've also noticed Steve Somers has been calling Jeter "Captain Cologne."

I love that the internet is a great resource for all things. For any subject I can think of, I can find out almost everything about it on one of these little electronic boxes that live in my house, at my work, and everywhere else.

But...

I hate the fact that there's no more "I wonder...."

Especially when communicating with someone electronically, which, for better or worse, is the most common way to communicate in 2007. I can't say "I wonder who did the writing for the old Wonder Woman TV series." I can't say, "I think Bob Geren wore 53 for the Yanks." I can't say, "I don't know." Because whatever it is, I can look it up.

Out in the world, I can wonder. But even then, there's a chance the other person can get the internet on their little special device.

It's the same with songs. Hearing "Here Comes the Rain Again" isn't nearly as cool when you buy it by pressing a few buttons without ever getting dressed, let alone leaving the house, and then pressing a few more to make it play as it is when it just comes on the radio. It's cool to not be in control sometimes.

Technology can be good, but I still say one of these generations is gonna come out swingin' against it. I can see the scene playing out in a movie from two hundred years from now, celebrating the revolutionaries who said, "You don't understand, mom and dad. We want to play in the grass. We want to talk to other humans face to face. We want to use our whole bodies, not just our fingers. Our fingers hurt! You can sit in your e-chair and just mind-control away the day, but we can't take it anymore! We're going outside!"

What's the number on Michael Keaton's inmate Halloween costume in Mr. Mom?

(Let's see who's willing to leave work early to go home and check their DVD--or BUY the DVD!)

Unrelated sidenote: I saw Don Imus today. Said "Hey, Don!" (twice, he ignored the first one) and he gave me a nod.

I wish we'd get this Nick Markakis guy already. Grew up rooting for the Sox on Long Island, had an amazing year in '06 (from June on), and is hitting .400 in 40 AB this spring.

Pitching was solid today in win over the O's with their Jere-ish trio of Markakis, Stern, and Millar.

Smarch Smadness update: Chan's Florida squad is currently tied with eight minutes left.

Two things I forgot to mention from the Sox-Mets game last week: 1. They showed Pedro in a crazy, orange, striped shirt, laughing and being Perdoey. 2. In the ninth inning, the Mets' catcher was waiting to catch a pop up. He flipped the mask, and it went right toward the umpire. Umpy reaches out like a hockey goalie and catches the mask. It was amazing. It wasn't a soft toss, either. Great instincts by that ump. Chan and I saw it, but the SNY-nouncers said nothing about it, and no replay was shown. Did the NESNnouncers say anything about it?

I took this last weekend while driving into the city. I held up the camera for a quick second and snapped. It came out at a 45 degree angle, but I used P-shop to straighten it out.

And then there's this one. The Schillings were nice enough to come into the Chanland Studios and sit for this photo, which I'll use to promote my blog. Click these to enlarge.