"I'm a HUGE Derek Jeter fan, so I'm ecstatic that Matsui hit that home run in the ninth that Jeter had nothing to do with, because that necessitated NESN showong Derek in the dugout."

Nobody's saying that, NESN. It's bad enough that Yes and the national networks do it almost every time. Can you go ahead and NOT do it, please? Again, I don't need to know what the president of Yum! Brands does every time Ed Koch buys toilet paper with his debit card. And I don't expect to see what Derek Jeter's doing in the dugout every time a Yankee hits a home run--especially from the Red Sox' network.

Millicent Penny had it tonight. And by "it" I mean his usual pile of dung. Too bad we couldn't bring in anyone who could hold them to seven-ish. I still don't know why in hell they made the call to dump Masterson.

We gave up 20 runs with our shitty pitchers. We scored 7 off of the not-so-mysteriously quick recoverer. So I'm definitely not scared of this Yankee club. The latest buzz phrase is "the Yanks' old guys have outplayed the Sox' old guys." Well, okay...so far. Their guys could still have breakdowns and/or get agonizing injuries. I like to beat them at full strength, but, you know, either way. I'd love for them to end the season thinking, "We definitely would have won it all had it not been for that unfortunate freak melon baller injury."

About this whole good pitcher/bad pitcher thing: Why is it that we and the Yanks and probably every team only put in the "good relievers" with a lead or in a tie? If we're down one and the starter comes out, I feel like we're automatically giving up by going with the "bad" squad. It's different when your entire bullpen is pitching lights-out, but why can't we ever say, Hey, we're only down one, let's bring in the best we've got, all the way to the closer, and trust our really, really good offense will get at least one run? Now, tonight was an extreme case, but I still got the feeling like if we had just kept their run total at a reasonable level, we could have come back and won. Why not always try to keep the opponent from scoring, as opposed to just having someone "take one for the team" and eat up innings while giving up more and more runs? I know, so we don't waste the bullpen. But if we treated all our relievers equally, we wouldn't have to worry about specific ones being wasted. Okay, obviously you see who's doing the best and you want them in the key spots, but my point is that every game is winnable. And what if we use the good guys tomorrow and lose 1-0? You never know what you're offense is gonna do. Tonight when it was 7-1 I kept saying, Hey, this could be a night where we were gonna score way more than 7 anyway. And look, we scored 11, 7 off Pettitte. But we still lost by nine because we decided it wasn't worth pitching good relievers. And we started sitting hitters. I'm just writing this as I think it so it's not a very polished idea but you see where I'm going with this train of thought? Discuss.