You know what the Red Sox' record is when Lackey or Beckett pitches since August 1st? 5 wins. 12 losses.

Think of where we'd be if you reversed that record.

Next year, those two veteran horse-types better take a look at the young guys in their locker room (the real #1 and #2) and learn a thing or two. No, just one thing: how to win the way they used to. The offense is no excuse for them either--the fill-ins did what they could. Those two would have found a way to lose those games even with an all-star team hitting for them. The horses are being horses' asses. Get those asses in gear in '11, mansion-boys.

So we lose, and everyone else wins. Nice. As a side note, the 9th inning was kind of a microcosm of NESN's recent woes. Sox down one, in what could turn out to be the last tiny bit of importance of the season. First batter makes an out, and they miss it. They cut back from a pitch-replay only to see the shortstop just catching a ball. Pitch missed, swing missed, suddenly there's an out. Then with two outs, fly ball to deep left center. The outfielders jump for it, the ball hits the wall with a loud thud and goes bouncing away--and Don has no idea what happened. I can never figure out why he's so often in the dark on what seem like obvious plays. Anyway, Victor gets to third on the play, but I feel like he might have had a shot to score. But when they go to a replay (after a mistaken cut to the blimp camera which is panning around haphazardly), instead of seeing Victor's journey around the bases, we get that shot where they cut from batter's swing to close-up of crowd in background. In this case, it's an acne-faced boy who looks out at the field. Yay. Even if they'd stayed with him long enough to see his reaction, it wouldn't have been that great because...wait a minute, see what I mean? Two outs in the ninth, tying run up, late September, and I'm stuck rating the quality of the fan close-up. You'd think by this point in the season they'd know how to do broadcast a game. So there's someone else that needs to buck up for 2011. You know what I blame, though? The ads. The whole network is so obsessed with sneaking in ads and spot all game long (in a game that has 18 fucking commercial breaks built into it anyway), it's probably pretty hard for everybody to do their jobs.

That ninth wasn't quite a 'cosm of the Sox' season, but I guess it did have a little of that "ohh...ahhh...wait!.....awwwww" we've come to know and pull our hair out over in 2010.

I love that Taylor Martinez had a good game on national TV. And it's always fun when McDonough is announcing your team. Nebraska 56, Washington, 21.

Red Sox vs Jays, 7:10. Somebody besides Lackey on the mound.

Yanks down 2, 2 outs and 2 strikes in the 9th, and A-Rod hits a 3-run dong and the Yanks go on to win. I hear the pitch before the HR should have been strike 3 but haven't seen yet. So now we have to have a 4-run ninth minimum, down 11-7. God dammit.

Update: We get the tying run to the plate. But lose. At least we don't lose ground on the Rays, but then again, we don't have 6 head to head against them. Also, to reiterate, god dammit.

I hope you cherished this 48-hour period of not losing ground. Because losing one game in the standings mean you need another day just to get back to where you were--and you can't be wasting 2 days when you've only got about 17 left. What I'm trying to say is, we can't lose too many more games if we wanna have a shot. Every win inches us closer, but every loss plummets us crazily. We'll see if we can stay afloat this weekend. I still vote Yes. Cecil vs. Lackey tonight.

Funny thing from a few weeks ago I just thought of: Heard Jon Sterling talking about Yankees tickets during a game, and he advised fans to "check with Ticketron" for availability. Ticketron! Should I call 'em on one of 'dem rot-ree phones??

Fri 9/17: Sam Horn
Sat 9/18: Rich Gale
Sun 9/19: Skip Lockwood
Mon 9/20: Bill MacLeod
Tue 9/21: Rich Gale 2: The Squeakuel
Wed 9/22: "Tonight's Autograph Alley, expanded for Silver Sox Night, will host Jim Corsi (Souvenir Store), Bill Monbouquette (Big Concourse), Frank Malzone (Gate A), Ted Lepcio (Gate E)." (Silver Sox night is a thing where being 65+ gets you into BP at 4:00 and some other stuff.)

You should hear Francesa sheepishly defend Jeter. He's playing the "you're the one who's crazy" game while deflecting the whole thing by saying, "Is he supposed to tell the umpire he's out??"

No Mike, but he is supposed to run to first base when he hits a fair ball, not pretend he was hit by the pitch--which is what led to the ump giving him first base in the first place.

If you're gonna tell me he's doing "what anyone else would do," then you have to start treating him like everybody else. This is exactly the type of thing where if it was anyone else, you'd say "you wouldn't see Derek Jeter do that." (If you've actually paid attention instead of repeating what you hear on TV, you've noticed Jeter does things that "Jeter would never do" all the time.)

There's always an excuse for this guy. Shouldn't his supporters at least be saying something like, "I can see other players trying to take the easy way out, but I wouldn't expect it from Derek" instead of acting like he did nothing wrong? "Golden Boy made a mistake" sounds better than "If Golden Boy did it, it wasn't a mistake."

And even when Jeter himself talks about it, he's deflecting the real issue. He says, "hey, sometimes I get hit and the umpire doesn't give me first base." Yeah, well is that because the catcher played a recording of the sound of a ball hitting a bat at the moment the ball hit you? This wasn't "the umpire made a mistake, that's not my fault." This was, "I tried to make the umpire make a mistake (like I always do) and he did."

So make sure you point that out when someone gives you the "at least he was honest" excuse.

And an even less mentioned fact is how the ball was fair. The Jeter we know (ha!) is supposed to see that he hit a fair ball, and immediately start hustling to first. We'd be told that his incredible instincts allowed him to recognize that the ball went forward and he needs to run. Then the fielder would have made a bad throw and we would have been told that it was only because of Jeter's sneaky quickness that the fielder had to force it. Then the ump would have awarded him three extra bases for the ball going into the stands as a well-deserved "distinguished career/lifetime achievement"-type reward. And we'd be told that you can't teach that. And the camera would somehow cut to a shot of Jeter clapping in the dugout as he himself crossed the plate.

Ya know, I don't even care if every single person in the media and every fan comes to the conclusion that Jeter did nothing wrong. I'm just glad that finally, after 15 years, this guy's name is finally being mentioned in the same sentence as "cheating" somewhere besides this blog.

Three pics from NYC last weekend.




The first two are from SoHo. The last one is Union Square at night. It happened to be September 11th, so you can see the twin beams of light coming from Ground Proverbial Zero.

I honestly wasn't going for a verti-rama here. Just picked the three pics I wanted to show. But it worked out. I should put these three side by side and make a poster or something.

For possibly the first time in 2010, we get the "if" we were looking for. A sweep, and now we've already reached the 6 mark. 6 back of the Yanks, knowing we play 6 more against them. (Season series is 7-5 them right now if you are the one person besides me thinking home field advantage for a one-game playoff to determine wild card.) Also 6.5 back of Tampa. Just gotta catch one of 'em. (And we've put 2.5 games between us and Chicago.)

Back home for the Jays Friday night. I've got some tickets for upcoming games. Like Madison said to Alan, "please make them wonderful." Or something to that effect.

I'm sure you've seen the video of Jeter pretending to be hit by a pitch by now. As you might guess, this doesn't surprise me. This is the most deceiving, chicanerous player of our era. (Yet even Bostonian dads have been trained to say "when I teach my son the game, I show him Derek Jeter.") Jack-knifes out of the way of inside pitches to make them appear to be balls, over-sells every call at second base even when he knows the runner was safe, and now with the acting career. I guess when you're so overwhelmingly overrated, you try to get all the advantages you can get. One day this guy's empire's gonna fall (like they'll find out he cheats on his taxes or something), and when it does, I'm gonna be, as Mr. Henry said to Future Man, "front and center, laughin' my fucking head off." Or something to that effect.

Remember how pissed I was when MLB started putting ads right on teams' schedules on their sites? Well, I'm still pissed whenever they do it, which fortunately isn't that often. Today, I noticed a hideous ad for an HBO show on the Sox' September sked. Once again, MLB has chosen dollars over sense, and made the ad a solid color, possibly confusing people, since a white background is a road game, while your team's color is a home. So people who glance at their team's sked might think Sunday the 26th's road game is a home game at first. Especially if their team's color is close to orange! Look at the Orioles' schedule. I'd guess 90% of people who look at the 26th would initally think that away game was a home game. Because it's fucking orange. And then about 50% of those will continue thinking it's a home game. And then if even .01% go to Camden Yards that day, MLB should pay for their gas money. (In conjunction with the fine folks at BP? Huh?)

Check out the Astros and Giants, too. (How perfect is it that all the orange teams are on the road that day...)

A Tuesday night in mid-September, losing, late innings, 7 games out...and we've got Let's Go Red Sox chants in Seattle. Nice job, everybody out there. They heard you and came back to win. Back home, we stood and clapped for the last strike in our jammies at 1:30 in the morning.

We go for the sweep tomorrow at 6:40 eastern.

2-out rally in the 8th capped off by a massive three-run dong for Papi. We lead by 2.

Info here and schedule itself here if you didn't know. Cubs come to Fenway for the first time in our lives (not you, 92-year old). We also get the Brewers and Padres and go to Pittsburgh, Philly, and Houston.

And the rumors were true about the schedule starting on a Friday (April 1). Weird.

Freakin' Crawford gets thrown out at third on a fly to shallow right to end the game. Yanks win by one after earlier blowing a six-run lead.

We lead 3-1 early in Seattle.

Lester did no wrong tonight. Easy win.

So we're 7 back of the Yanks, 7.5 of Tampa. Hear me out now. If we can win our next two in Seattle, we'll be between 5 and 7 back of the Yanks, and between 5.5 and 7.5 of the Rays. I'm shooting for the Yanks again. They're falling apart. And we have 6 left against them. Think of it this way. If we were 7 up on them with 6 to play head-to-head, and we'd just lost 4 in a row, the Boston media would be making rear view mirror non-jokes hourly. As it is, they've long since moved on to football. Of course, I could be wrong, I haven't listened to/read any Boston sports media in months. And let me tell you, I have seen the top of the mountain. And it is good.

I love how Ichiro climbed the wall on a home run tonight. That's what I'd do. Every time. Why not?

Did a New York weekend. I figured Saturday would be "lug camera around" day, so Friday night when I got there, Chan and I headed to dinner in the East Village sans lens. I was aware that if I saw a celeb, I'd be powerless--no blurry pic, and worse, no Randomonium spot should I get up the courage to ask and should I deem that celeb Rando-worthy. But as we know, sometimes not having a camera allows one to witness the magic. (Besides, if you see something awesome it shouldn't matter whether you took a picture of it. And it would be dark out anyway....)

So a dude comes out of his apartment to walk his dog, and walks right past us. I immediately recognize the face. It's the Smashing Pumpkins' guitar player, James Iha. I tell Chan who we just walked by, and of course he wasn't having it. He--as an Asian himself--even deadpanned, "aw come on, we all look the same." But I was pretty sure this was Iha. I'd need to consult the web to prove it though.

My Iha had a dyed blond mop-top and a small dog. Google survey says: Bam! Still, Chan says this is too common. My Iha lived in the East Village in what we determined--after inspecting the place on our way back from dinner--was a very nice building. Google survey says: Bam! From jamesiha.org: "He currently lives in a million dollar plus single bedroom apartment in the East Village area of NYC. He occupies the same town house co-op with Chloe Sevigny (and formerly Parker Posey)."

At this point, I was fully convinced. Chan still says Asians with dyed hair in the Village with little dogs are a dime a dozen (or roughly a yen for ten).

But I knew right away it was Iha. I felt like Zack Hample getting that first batting practice ball right when you get to the ballpark. Then you can go through the rest of the weekend care-free, knowing your streak is intact. (Not that I have an actual streak going, I just mean it seems like I see a celeb every time I go to NYC. But off the top of my head....I must have a three-gamer minimum going, with Iha, Naomi Watts, Colbert--if you count going to a taping and seeing the host/guests, which of course I do, and the time before that might have been the time I saw that Twilight actor, so....) Alas, Iha would be only one this time. But that's cool because he's the man who played a lot of sweet guitar parts that I was all into in 1993. Still am, in fact--just heard "Mayonnaise" on sat. radio. Corgan wrote some great tunes at his peak.

Just wastched the Sox highlights on channel 10. I see they're still using the 2008-and-previous logo. I can't wait to see who goes to that THIRD year without noticing that the team they cover changed their logo. Anyway, 8 back of the Yanks with 6 games left against them! Still hangin' on. Bare. Ly. Late games in Seattle the next two nights.

[Postus scriptus: Got to work Monday morning, and asked my co-worker (the one who knows everyone, has been everywhere, etc) to guess which celeb I saw in NYC. I gave her a hint of "music," and her first guess, incredibly, was Billy Corgan. Nailed the right band on the first try. Also, I forgot to change the date on this post, that's why it was originally hidden below and appeared to be from late Saturday night instead of late Sunday night. Myyyy mistake.]

...at giving you just a bit less than what you need. If Lackey pitched a shutout, we'd lose 0 to -1.

We fall to 0-2 on this must-sweep west coast trip.

[Wow, just after posting that, I see Mo blow a save and then hit a batter with the bases loaded to end the game! Pretty funny... What's that called? A jerk-off?]