I was gonna talk about how Beckett was pitching differently since he had a big lead. But maybe he just didn't have it. We win 10-9. If Josh is gonna give up that much, it's very key that we get the W. Almost blew that one, but we close to 6.5, with the Yanks on the west coast. HH goes tomorrow against the man whose name no one can pronounce.

Now that Victor Martinez is on our team, we're a "sometimes throw to first after a strikeout" team! Noooo! That'd be like if they finally started changing our exit numbers to coincide with the mileage, like they do pretty much everywhere else but around here. Or like being a "third base dugout at home" team. I don't know how I'm gonna handle this new lifestyle.

You know how NESN often fools viewers into thinking fly balls are homers by showing the ball in flight while ignoring the fielders (who unbeknownst to us are standing under the ball pounding their gloves)? Tonight, it's like they overcompensated. Or that guy was told not to do it any more. So on Bay's dong, the camera never even got high enough to show where it hit above that lower deck. Oy.

Hey, do you like it when they talk about fantasy baseball on TV? I feel like I wouldn't even like it if I was doing fantasy baseball. The whole point is to see what's going on and make your own thing out of it. So if the thing you're making out of it becomes "what's going on"....know what I mean? It'd be like if SportsCenter started showing the results of Moundball and telling you which teams are better to pick.

Speaking of that game (if you don't know it, it's the one the people at the ballpark in front of you play, yelling and screaming for seemingly no reason at the end of every inning and then passing money around, and generally acting like what they're doing is way more important than anything you do), I've got a new game. I call it GGG, which stands for Grass, Ground, or Glove. Each person picks one of those things for each batter (or inning or game or whatever), and the first thing the ball hits off the bat is that round's winner. Ground = dirt, just to keep the Gs. Any fly, pop, or line out is a Glove. A ball chopped in front of the plate, or hit through the infield hitting dirt first, or hit on a fly off the warning track, is a Ground. And any grounder that hits grass first, or blooped to the outfield, or into the gap hitting short of the track, is a Grass. The outfield wall doesn't affect it--it could still go from the wall right to a glove, or to the track, or, unlikely, to the grass from there. Foul balls don't count unless they're caught by a fielder. Home runs don't count, either. I'll leave the specifics up to you, but that's the general idea. I think the three things happen pretty evenly, but I haven't done a full test yet. Let me know how it goes. And tell your friends who came up with it.

[I think Beckett just said "god damn" on the air...]