That's what my mom always says, and that's what that jerk A.J. Burnett did today.

Red Sox 14, Yankees Way Less Than 14. Me is happy. If Beckett comes through Sunday night, we're 5.5 back. I still say let's make up the 5.5 and then pull away!

Four minutes left in the week, so it doesn't look like I'll be getting those Futures pics up when I said. Ah well. Someday.

"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.

A road sweep. Nice. Gotta give credit to Mr. Gray Area on his 4-4, two-dong night. Who need the Vic-E Mart? We doooo. That guy's rippin' it proverbially up at the plate. A-Gon being back in our infield is so key, as we knew it would be. We're 6.5 back going into the Yanks series. I want to destroy them, as you might have guessed.

This morning I was thinking about two of my favorite things I write about:

1. How much I hate "it is what it is," and my little joke that goes, "Everything is what it is. You don't need to tell me that. If something is what it isn't, or isn't what it is, by all means, tell me. That's something I'd be interested in. But there's no point in answering every question with 'it is what it is'."

and

2. How much Yankee fans ignore the bad and only remember the good, and how at this point they revel in things far less than world championships since they don't really get those anymore.

And it all came together! The entire Yankees organization, in the minds of its fans....

is what it isn't.

I wouldn't be surprised if a Yankee fan wore a shirt listing the championships:

...1996
1998
1999
2000
2001 (come on, there were no losers that year)
2002 (essentially)
2003 (got there, at least!)
2004 (well I definitely don't remember what happened so I'll assume we won)
that time we tied for the division title in 2005 and got won the tie-breaker
that stretch in August 2006
that stretch in August 2009 when we were SURE, yet AGAIN, we were going all the way...

Class. Tradition. Ifs. The New York Yankees.

They are what they aren't.

"the thing of it is is..."

"my point is is that..."

America--try just saying one "is." The sentence still works, you'll save time, and you'll feel less retarded!

HH beats Halladay and we're 68-51. Last year after the same number of games? 68-51.

Last year before the last home Yankee series, which was also on a weekend, the team put tix on sale online on the Thursday afternoon. Just sayin'. No guarantees though.

Remy will be back in the booth Friday! I predicted Monday, because why come back for Friday when Saturday and Sunday are national games? But Jerry decided to come back for a Yankee game.

I feel like other teams (the A's, helloooo) will be offering Eck contracts to be their color man in '10. We'll see.

Sox at TOR, 7:07.

Go to nyt.com. Click on their "Sports" link or any article within the sports section. Scroll down the page until you see the ad for tickets on the right side. Every month I see this, and they (fucking Ticketmaster) screw it up every time. They show a list of upcoming games, and they use a template for the dates. So when they get to the 21st, it says:

August 21th
August 22th
August 23th

Who the hell's in charge of that?? It sure isn't the person who came up with the secondary market site within their own site which allows them to raise their own already-ridiculous prices by selling the tickets they've already sold and bought back without anybody being able to do anything about it. He double-checks his work...

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...]

So I saw the highlights from a recent military tribute-type day at Fenway. They had five troops on the scoreboard, giving a message from Iraq. They had a Red Sox flag behind them, and talked about how they keep track of the team over there.

Fine.

But one of the five was holding his gun at the ready across his chest.

Can you put the goddamn gun down for one second? Were they under attack while recording the spot? Does he think we'll feel more "protected" that way? Aren't we at the point yet where most of us would feel safer if we weren't occupying countries that didn't do anything to us in the first place?

Red Sox occupy Canada, 7:07 PM. Youk's back.

Yanks release Tomko and it bites 'em in the ass, as the Chokers lose again in Oakland.

New review of my book on Savvy Verse & Wit.

Beckett goes tonight in Canada, 7:07.

I have a Statcounter which I haven't checked for months...until tonight. And I saw that last Wednesday and Thursday alone, I got tens of thousands of hits on my blog. I'm not big on talking about this stuff, but I will say that that's WAY more than I usually get. Statcounter shows me where my recent hits are from, but it doesn't go back to last week. Does anyone know if and/or why I was linked on some popular site or something? It's not like I can do anything about it at this point...or...even when it happened...but I'm curious. Anybody?

A buncha stuff, probably. And those pics from Futures at Fenway, which will feel about a year old in this Shittery* society. Oh well.


*my new abbreviation for "shitty, Twitter-y"

Like I've said, I'm pretty much avoiding the Internet while the game is on these days, and pretty much avoiding the Boston sports media in general, but I did check in with Extra Bases after the eighth, only to see Adam Kilgore's headline "Looking Bad." I'm just so sick of these people. They can watch Friday night's amazing ninth-inning comeback, and then two days later see that we're down by one with one inning left with the top of the order coming up and think the game's over. (I also hear the "it's not looking good" line from other fans a lot earlier in games than that. Nothing is worse than the guy who said "the Red Sox will have trouble hitting this season, mark my words." He said this after the first guy got out in the first exhibition game against a college team in February! When is this attitude gonna get flushed outta town? Apparently World Series titles complete with historic comebacks just aren't enough.)

So I fully blame Kilgore for today's loss.

Today, Don Orsillo said his dad caught him an Enos Cabell foul liner down the third base line at Fenway when Cabell was on the Tigers. Of course, I tried to figure out which game it was. Enos played in three series as a Tiger at Fenway in '82 and '83. The first two were weeknight series, each including a post-8:00 Monday Night Baseball game. Even though they were in June, I'm guessing it's more likely the senior Orsillo would've chosen a weekend game. That leaves the September '83 series. I'll just go out on a limb and say it was the Saturday game--Eck against Morris--over the Sunday one--one of Oil Can Boyd's earliest starts. Neither game showed me that Cabell was hitting the ball consistently to the left side, neither had a much higher attendance number.....okay, I'm done. That ball very well could have been pitched by (one of his) booth-mates, Dennis Eckersley.

Update: Yanks lose 10-3.

Red Sox at Rangers, 2:05 eastern, or real, time. Out-of-NESN-area folks can watch it on TBS.

I can't believe we're three-quarters of ten games back. And this is another reason why I hate the wild card. Because now everybody gives up on the division and starts acting like the wild card is the only thing we're fighting for. I wish it didn't exist, so that every Red Sox fan, player, and employee could look at the standings and say, we're 7.5 out with a month and a half left, so here's what we need to do to make up that ground because it's the only chance we've got.

And to make it even worse, let's say we do come all the way back and win the division. Because of the shitty wild card, the team we spend all our energy passing STILL makes the playoffs, and now we're a spent team when we play them. So then it's like, Okay, we'll just take the wild card because getting into the postseason is the most important thing. Which to me is like giving up--and the whole crap-cycle continues.

You know what they should do? They should draw the wild card team out of a hat. Every team goes all out all season trying to win their division, and after the last game is played, one lucky team in each league gets in completely at random. It ain't any dumber than acid wash... (or having the All-Star Game count, having two leagues that play by different rules play each other mid-season, etc....)

Not an Oscar-worthy performance tonight. Eight stolen bases? Come on. Chimpland.

Did you hear Viola's story about the stolen glove? He said he and Wade Boggs had their gloves stolen in Cleveland, and for his next start at Fenway, he had three balls clunk off his new glove, costing the team three runs. Then he fired his new glove 20 rows into the stands, and somebody somewhere still must have that glove.

Eh, no Peg. I love it when ex-jocks tell stories, because faultfinding Virgo proofreaders get to look it up and see how much they screwed it up. Here's the game he's talking about: August 21st, 1992. Third inning. I read the newspaper articles from the next day. There was a grounder by a young Ken Griffey Jr. that he deflected, and then one by a young Tino Martinez that he bobbled. Neither were scored errors, and they weren't back to back. Another article does mention three muffed balls that inning. That stuff, whatever, I can't expect a guy to remember everything from 17 years ago exactly as it happened. (Unless they're Dennis Eckersley.) But what about this glove-tossing? One article said that after the inning he fired his hat and glove to the ground, and quoted manager Butch Hobson, who said, "I thought he was going to throw it into the stands one time."

Doesn't that tell you that as much as Frank wanted to throw his glove into the stands, he didn't actually do it? So, if anyone out there caught Frank Viola's glove that night--you're lying, too!

Viola also failed to mention that he pitched an eight inning, one-run game between the glove being stolen and this game. So the new glove didn't cause any problems until two starts later.

Who knows, he was there that night and I wasn't--maybe the people who documented the night were on drugs. I don't know.