No Don, the Red Sox are walking off. We lost. Leaving field. On foot. Rays run on the field to celebrate. Red Sox walk off. It's convenient--my annoyance of the incorrect usage of the term often corresponds with being pissed off about having just lost a game in the shittiest of fashions.

(Also, do you ever turn off the game right when a walk-off homer happens, and then wonder hours later if maybe the guy missed third or time had been called and the game was still going on?? So let me know if we didn't actually lose right there. This happened to me in the Aaron Boone game. After my 14-hour slumber that night, I didn't want to see any newspapers or anything--but had to check just in case the home run somehow didn't count.)

It looked good twice there--Ortiz after a big thunder clap* hits a gapper leading to a 1-0 lead. Then the late Victor dong had visions of October sweatshirt-baseball pogoing in my cranium.

Too bad their first run came because of a two-base throwing error. (Weird how that play and the following sac fly that tied it involved JD Drew getting the ball way over in the Rays' bullpen.)

Why do I get the feeling casual fans (and maybe some not-so-casual ones who just don't think of stuff like earflaps) were completely baffled when Zobrist had the wrong helmet--his "left-hand hitting helmet"...

So last night's results are canceled out but two more days have been erased...from existence! Just gotta start a new streak tomorrow--a rare Sunday night in Tampa.

And the Kalish somercatch from tonight may be the play of 2010, at least for our team.

*Don had said there was thunder outside the dome--they even showed the lights on the ceiling shaking. But I wonder if the sounds we'd occasionally hear were just foot stomping. If not, that was pretty cool that Papi did that The Natural thing. Not the lights exploding, the thunder-clap extra base hit. That either was or wasn't in the rain and had the cover of the ball either staying on or coming off.

Juicy the catch Kalish just made? I don't think I've ever seen one like that.

Since the break:

Red Sox: 23-18 (8-8 in July, 15-10 in August)

Yankees: 22-17 (10-5 in July, 12-12 in August)

Devs: 24-16 (10-5 in July, 14-11 August)

The Orioles are also 14-11 in August. The Jays are 13-11. So we are barely winning August over the Rays, O's, and Jays, while the Yanks take the Loser prize. There are a few games left in the month though. Basically this division has stayed pretty much the same since the break, but the Sox have done the most positive moving lately, the only team in the league with as many as 7 wins in its last 10. It shall continue. All we have to do is catch one of these two above us, though I prefer to pass both.

Not quite the El Perfecto I predicted, but a fine job all around tonight. 3-1 win. We gain a game on TB, and the Yanks are getting their asses kicked.

I loved the "every run matters"-ness in Don's voice tonight.

Tomorrow we take Garza OUT. We shouldn't need a lot of runs, though, with HH on the mound. But that's why they play the games, Suzyn.

Stinks that we could be without Youk and Pedroia the whole rest of the way. Still, I say sweep this weekend. I got Lester comin' back strong with a perfect game tonight. Then HH with a 6-hit shutout Saturday. Then 10-7 us on Sunday.

Did some grave hunting recently. First up, Kim and I went to Oakland Cemetery right next to Roger Williams Park in Providence, looking for Charlie Babington.
Took a long time, but I finally spotted him, with a bunch of family members. Charlie had eight hits for the New York Giants in 1915. Here's another shot from that cemetery:


Then the other day I had to go to the DMV to renew my license, and had to go the the one in Warren. I noticed that Barrington's Princes Hill Cemetery was right near there--that's where Harry Pattee's buried.
This didn't take very long, which was good since it was raining. He had a sweet spot right in the middle.

His grave's in the middle here--behind it is the big one with the cross, which had a sweet water view behind it.

Harry played at Brown U. before his brief time with Brooklyn. Then he came back to Providence to coach at his old school.

I have sent one each of these guys' graves into that Deadball Era site, so I'll have four photos up there.

As you know, a cab driver was nearly killed in midtown Manhattan recently because he was Muslim. The attacker was a 21-year old white boy from a town right near where I grew up.

So.

Any blue-eyed, blond, white guys between 18 and 35 should not be allowed to move into apartments or start businesses or Jesus churches in midtown Manhattan. It would be insensitive to the the victim and his family.

All kidding aside, this is exactly what I'm talking about. That cab driver was violently attacked and all he was doing was going about his work day. It's no less tragic than what happened to each victim of 9-11. But just because it was one type of person that attacked others, it doesn't mean other people of that same type should be denied their rights.

This incident also shows that some people may put up a good facade, but are actually raging bigots on the inside and hate other people based on the way they look or what religion they practice to the point where they'll try to murder them.

Laura Kaminker has made a list of every ad you see or hear during the action in a NESN Red Sox broadcast. The actual list comes after her intro, and it shows you the ads inning by inning. It's incredible! And she didn't even include the Citgo sign, the Majestic logo on the uniforms and other equipment logos, or the pre- and post-game bombardments.

The stuff we have to hear and see during the game is just sickening. This sport has so much built-in space for ads--why do they have to do any at all during the innings?

And around the park itself has just gotten out of control. Look at a picture of Fenway Park from 1998. No ads on any of the outfield walls, or the walls along the field in foul territory. Just green. Laura says there have always been ads on the outfield walls. I think she's referring to the walls at the back of the stands, as Fenway has always had those--the equivalent of the Brut sign and that whole row of ads Yankee Stadium had. Now the shit is right on the field, surrounding it.

I would also like to see a Yankees version of this ad list. They take it to the next level with the broadcast booth itself having a sponsor, and a commercial jingle playing at the stadium after every strikeout.

I love all seasons equally, but I'm getting really psyched for fall. And that, besides playoff baseball, means Husker football! I got a DVD a while ago with some old Nebraska games, and tonight after the Sox game I broke out the 1971 Orange Bowl. I found this warning by the NBC announcer to young athletes interesting...

"You young athletes watching today's game should know that the NCAA has condemned the use of any drug by college athletes. Its team doctors agree there's no known drug which helps a player to perform better, despite some rumors you may hear. Naturally these doctors warn against the use of illegal drugs by all young people. The drug scene isn't smart or cool, it's dangerous and destructive. College athletes who depend on their minds and bodies to win games know it. Players don't pop pills."

And just as I was about to post this, the same announcer asked for donations for the Pakistan flood victims! Guess they had a big one in November of '70, too. Worst disaster of the century, they called it....

9:45: The crowd is into it, we're down two, going bottom nine, here we go! Updating below.

9:46: Lowell pinch-hits... Yeah! Single.

9:47: Nava up. Yanks one strike away from losing their game... 2-0 on Nava.

9:48: God damn it. Tailor-made double play.

9:50: Fly out. We lose. I thought we were gonna catch some magic there. Oh well. Good homestand. Tamper Friday night.

10:00: Yanks leave 'em loaded in ninth, Granderson hits a near grand slam but it's caught, and they lose 6-3. I love that they almost came back but didn't. I bet Michael Kay got very excited. Now he'll just have to masturbate to the usual rhino porn instead of a Yankee win.

Lester moved to Friday, Wake to pitch tonight. Looking for win #179 in a Sox uniform!

Yanks and Rays won yesterday, and now we have won yesterday's game. But today. So basically things stayed even again. So now we start tonight's action. Which for the Rays is today. They trail 4-1 early. We get going again in 3 hours.

Beckett and Lester go for us today/tonight. They have to be the real Beckett and Lester today, and for the rest of the season...

[I'm posting these all at once, but I have to divide them into parts to avoid my front page and archives getting screwed up by Blogger.]

Got down to lower Manhattan around 10:30 a.m. (this was August 7th--see the video version on this very special edition of Randomonium). We would have done the walk from north to south, but we wanted to catch Summer Streets, which ended at 1 p.m., and went from the Brooklyn Bridge to 72nd Street along Lafayette Street and then Park Avenue. Above, a turkey hangin' out in Battery Park.

Lady Liberty. Okay, Manhattan runs north-south, but turned a little to the east. So the true southern tip differs from the "bottom-most point" were you to turn the island so the avenues are running exactly top-to-bottom. So I think the real southernmost point, not including docks that stick out, is at the Coast Guard Station. But the lowest point the other way would be...

...this spot. (And since you can't get into the Coast Guard building, this is as far down as you can go whichever way you're measuring....) (Here's the full map of our route for reference.)

We walked around the Wall Street area (seeing this gigantic dog which is actually taking a dump in this blurry shot), got a bagel at a random place, and saw some movie/commercial/TV show shoots. We got a pretty perfect weather day for what we thought would be a 12.5 mile walk.

Still in lower Manhattan--look closely and you'll see the Brooklyn Bridge.

I thought the view down this alley was cool. Because you have to look at the picture for a while before you realize that that's not sky at the top, it's yet another building.

Ahead to Part 2
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We finally got to the point where the Summer Streets route started. It was very bike-heavy at first.

You don't see this every day in Manhattan.

People playing tennis in an alley off of Lafayette Street.

Loooove cobblestones.

Graffiti inside the peephole.

Got three consecutive shots of a biker going past this big bottle. Here's the third in the sequence. That biker, by coincidence, was Naomi Watts. Click here for full story.


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Looking back downtown after passing that spinny cube at Astor Place.

Now on Park Ave above Union Square Park, looking back downtown at the smokin' hole. At left you can see where the old Zen Palate was. It's now, sadly, a TGI Friday's.

Getting close to Grand Central. The best part of the whole walk was this whole Summer Streets deal--so cool to walk up Park Avenue in the street.

One of the infamous "dumpster pools," just south of Grand Central.

That road that goes around Grand Central--this is not a place you can walk normally.

Chan on Park Avenue, somewhere in the 50s I think.

We got to 72nd just as they were reopening the avenue. We were ushered to the side right around 70th. Then we headed over to Central Park. Above, a Hartford Whalers shirt in the park.

Ducks, turtles, and fish fight for food in the Turtle Pond in Central Park. We were already hurtin' in various places at this point. We'd probably walked 7 miles at this point and had somewhere close to that left to go. We continued to survive on water and summer treats from vendors along the way, figuring we'd have a big dinner at the end.

Ahead to Part 4

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Near the top of Central Park, we headed farther west so we could walk up Broadway and/or Riverside Drive. Here's the blimp from 106th Street, headed to Yankee Stadium for the Sox-Yanks game, which was starting at 4 or so that day.

"Monk's Diner," as most of us know it from Seinfeld, at Broadway and 112th.

We saw Columbia U. at around 114th Street and decided to check out the campus. I immediately recognized the above view from Ghostbusters--the scene after the guys get kicked out of the university. The campus seems really cool, the way it's its own little world separate from the city streets around it. Yet surrounded by the awesomeness of New York City. Would be a fun place to go to school. I know, I know..."you never studied."

At the entrance to Columbia's physics building. We rested on the campus, and now I was thinking I must have broken a bone in my left foot. And the back of my right knee was a little iffy, too. But nothing was gonna stop me from finishing this lifelong dream of mine of walking the length of Manhattan.

Now we're going along the Hudson River on Riverside Drive, still pretty far south of the George Washington Bridge. I didn't even notice the "Going the Distance" billboard--or at least didn't think about its relevance at the time....

Now we're even with the GWB at around 179th, and I'm dyin'. Limping along and audibly moaning with each step. Chan had minor issues, not as bad as mine.

187th Street. You don't see many houses like these in Manhattan. Around this point, we were getting toward the very top. Our maps were electronic, and without a signal, we didn't know exactly which route to take. Again, there are two "northernmost" points depending on how you look at it. Both seemed to be in wooded areas. We then took a right turn at a fork, onto Fort George Ave instead of Fort George Hill. I thought we were entering Inwood Hill Park at the tip, but we were actually going around that big curve, and when we came out the other side, we couldn't understand why the streets were going down again, or how we could have possibly gone farther north. As you can see by the linked map, we were stuck in that little loop, and like Christopher Columbus before us, we mistook our destination for something else. I shot one last video from what I thought was the tip, which you can see on that Randomonium episode.

So we didn't technically make it. But we walked over 17 miles that day altogether. I made a map of our route, which is as accurate as I'm gonna get it based on my memory of the day.


View Length of Manhattan Walk in a larger map

It was about 5:30. Our goal was to get back to Saigon Grill on the west side for dinner. It was an excruciating walk to the subway (we didn't know where the nearest station was up at the top there), a long wait for a train, and more walking to the Grill, where I have to say, on the day in my life when I needed it the most, they were more on top of the water refills than any other group of restaurant waiters in history. I must have downed 20 glasses of water before the meal even came. And in another first--I just couldn't walk one more step. So I insisted on a cab ride from the restaurant to Chan's apartment, where I got off my feet for the night and had the best sleep of my life. My feet/legs were heeled within a couple of days. No surgery needed. The end.

When Kalish got that sac bunt down and was greeted by a sweatshirted mob in the dugout, I had visions of October baseball. Also was a key play, as Scutaro then broke the 7th-inning tie with a two-run single.

I saw a dude that looked like Lackey at the Phoenix Diner in Absecon, New Jersey this morning. That guy could have made the play on the little grounder back to the mound. Lackey didn't, and it almost ended up costing us the game. You could see it coming on that play. Know what else I could see coming? The fly ball to left that the guy botched for them which also led to runs. Wind was blowing in so you knew he'd have to go far for it, and as he got closer to that wall, a disaster was imminent. A weird weather day led to the weirdness. Was so odd to be sitting there in Old Lyme, Connecticut this afternoon, and see clouds rolling in from the east. (We drove home from our vacation today, hence being in two different places on the same day.)

Yanks just lost! We finally gain....

Another day where every team either wins or loses. Sounds like Clay was dealin' yesterday. In case you can't tell by the weak posts, I've been on vacation, but the classic post style will now return. Thank you.

All lose Friday, all win Saturday. Hang tight and well start gaining.