Remember that Dropkick Murphys show at Fenway I went to with Kim on my birthday in 2011? Well they've been airing it on Palladia. And Kim and I are all over it! Of course you have to know where to look....

I love this shot because we're right in the little focus zone.

Here's one where Kim gets screwed as she's obscured. Okay, I think you know what we look like now, I'll stop with the labeling.

Here's a close-up of me from the same shot, only this time I've extended the shot to the right so you can see the guy who was going nuts a la that one guy at the end of Little Miss Sunshine.

This is basically the full screen as they did a close-up of the singer, and in the bottom right, with the Palladia logo plastered on my face, it's me. (Kim screwed again, off-screen.)

Now Kim has the logo on top of her (she's taking a picture anyway so her face is covered) as I scoot out from behind it. I swear I was having fun at this show! You'd think I was paralyzed or something....

And a close-up from the shot above, of paralyzed me.

And one of us from the camera that swung over the audience. Which I'm staring into of course, while everyone else including Kim enjoys the show. Who am I, Alan from the Hangover movies?

Check out Ryan Lavarnway's fiance's blog, Cooking with Red Socks. Ryan and Jamie live in Pawtucket and have Connecticut connections which is cool for me as a CT native who now lives in RI. I like the entry about the New Haven restaurants.

In honor of this momentous occasion of me finding Jamie's blog, here's a brief/horrible video I shot from the hip of Ryan (and John Farrell) the other day at the Fenway Holiday Bash:

Remember how I noticed that mystery week in April where Red Sox home games are at 6:30? Well I was doing a STH survey today and one of the questions was "we're thinking about changing start times for April weekday games," followed by choices for what we'd prefer. The choices were 6:05, 6:35, and 7:05*. So I guess that somewhat explains it, and also, the fact that they're still tinkering with times could mean they'll add more weekday afternoon getaway-day start times.

[Note: I do remember they've had earlier start times in April in the past--this time it was just curious because the first two weeks had normal times, and the third week had 6:30s.]

*Since the normal time is 7:10, does this mean they're definitely changing the April times, to 7:05 at the latest? Or did they just make a mistake and mean to say "6:10, 6:40, or 7:10"? These are the things I wonder about, when I'm not wondering what your mind experiences when you die.

Sox get reliever Koji Uehara. This dude is old but he's been great for the O's/Rangers since he came tot he states in '09. This guy doesn't walk anybody. Dude's got a WHIP like an elf dominatrix.

Section 36 did another post about a baseball card, and this time offered me a direct challenge! Figure out the date/place, with only this to go by:

Carlos Quintana, 1992 Stadium Club. Could be anywhere in the world, from the Taj Mahal to the Grand Canyon, right? Wrong, mofo! Let's play the Feud...

First of all, we have to go under the assumption it's spring training. Just sky in the background, no giant stadium-like structure in the way. Besides, if you were in a major league park, you wouldn't purposely omit it from your shot, and if this were Fenway (it wouldn't be any other park since he has a home jersey on), the camera would have to be even lower than this one is to have the background be only sky.

Since it's a '92 card, the pic should be from '91. (It can't be '92 anyway--Quintana's car accident kept him out of camp that year. He showed up on March 18th with his X-rays in street clothes but didn't suit up at all that whole season.)

If you're on board with these theories, stay with me. If not, turn to page 18.

So it's spring training 1991. Now, what do we know about spring training? Well, the Red Sox by 1991 had started to wear the "spring training jerseys." The blue ones. This can be proven by baseball cards, pics from newspapers, etc. So why would Carlos be wearing a traditional home white jersey? That's right: Photo day!

I did a news search and I see that Nick Cafardo wrote an article on March 5th, 1991 talking about how Ellis Burks couldn't fit into his jersey for the yearbook photo as he'd bulked up in the offseason. That puts photo day at March 4th, a few days before the exhibition schedule kicked off that year.

"But Jere, what's with the long-sleeve undershirt? It's Florida! And using your teachings, I went to the Weather History page on almanac.com and it got up to 66.9 degrees that day in Winter Haven! You're wrong, detective boy! SUCK IT!"

First of all, calm down. Does all this angst stem from me calling you a mofo earlier? It was a term of endearment. Second of all, great job using the almanac, but...you didn't scroll down far enough. Yes it got up to 66.9, but the low was around 60, and if you go down to the wind speed, you'll see there were gusts of forty MPH that day. Low 60s plus 40-mph winds, on the patented Jere Wind-Chillax calculator, gives a "feels like" temp of about...north pole. In fact, there was a newspaper description on February 28th that mentioned "the fifth day of raw, windy weather at Chain O'Lakes Park." So they were in a cold snap down there, regardless of the actual recorded high temps. And in the Philly paper on March 8th, 1991, they mention Ken Howell having injured himself on a "cold, windy day" in Clearwater earlier that week. I went back a few days to find out that the day of the injury was...boom, March 4th. And Clearwater is only 60 miles west of Winter Haven.

So March 4th was for all intents and/or purposes, cold and raw and windy. Hence the long sleeves.

Granted, they could have worn the home whites for a game, too. There could have been this March 4th day with just some uniform try-ons, and then a separate "photo day" later in the month on which they played a game. In fact, if you look at one of Clemens's '92 Stadium Club cards, you'll see he's got a home white jersey, and then if you look at him on the cover of the yearbook, you'll see he's also got a home white, but with a different undershirt. This points to multiple days wearing the home whites. A way to check would be to go through the newspapers for all of March and check the game pics and see if there was a game with home whites. I checked a few, and it was all blue jerseys. (It would be easier if the damn Boston Globe would make its archive free.)

Also, check out Quintana's Fleer card from that same year:
Note the jersey, undershirt, hat, hair, glove...all the same as the card in question. And it's also obviously spring training as that's not Fenway. (If you look at the back of Quintana's '92 Donruss, you see him looking similar to these photos, but he shadows are different, and you see a white undershirt. More possible proof they wore the home whites on multiple says in spring training 1991.) I also think this is a workout as opposed to a game. Putting it all together, I gotta go with March 4th as the day both of the pictured cards were shot on. The winds died down and the temps were more Florida-like for most of the month after this early cold snap, which also points to both of these as early March shots.

My final answer is March 4th, 1991, Winter Haven, Florida. If you can prove otherwise, I'll be happy to hear your theory.

P.S. Note to younger/less historically informed people who are saying, "What the hell is a Chain O'Lakes and who the hell is Winter Haven???": This is where the Sox played in spring training before Ft. Myers, ending in 1992. The Indians played at the park until '08, but now a shopping center is poised to destroy it, presumably as soon as an amateur baseball tournament ends this coming March.

I've filled up 55 pages so far in my "every ticket I've ever saved" project. I'm to to 2007 so it's gonna get even thicker. Each page has 6 slots and in the 2000s I started doing multiples in each slot. So there's something like 400 tickets in there as of now.

Why is it assumed that Jacoby Ellsbury will leave the Red Sox? Can someone tell me exactly what they're basing this on? I even heard Mike Francessa casually say "we know Ellsbury won't be around afta next yeah, he's made that clear." Apparently even Jacoby himself said he'll be leaving, yet I missed it. I just don't understand--are we a team with money, or a team without money? Why is it that when one of our guys is about to reach free agency, we all turn into Marlins fans, assuming the guy will ask for "too much" and we'll literally have no means to pay him? And that therefore we should trade him ahead of time to get something while we can? Why aren't we all saying, "Oh, Ellsbury's up for free agency? I guess we'll be giving him a lot of money, then." And the weird thing is, the guy has gone through all types of seasons: good, iffy, injury-plagued, MVP-caliber...yet no matter how he's doing on any given day, every single person in the world is completely certain he'll be gone.* It's almost like if he's bad, we don't wanna be stuck with him, and if he's good, we can't afford him. With logic like that, how do we expect anybody to stick around? Are the only players a team can keep the ones who are exactly right in the middle between not good enough and too expensive?

I know I asked these same questions before Papelbon left town, and it turned out everybody was right. But what is it that makes you so sure? And don't say "I just hear everyone else saying it." Was there a conference call I missed?


*Similarly, people assumed he'd be unaffordable both before and after we dumped all that salary from the payroll last year.

Red Sox sign Shane Victorino to 3-year deal.

He's that dude that's been on the Phillies for, like, a lotta years. Getting non-Swisher outfielders makes it that much less likely we get Swisher, so woohoo. I have an odd memory of taking a picture of Victorino behind the cage at Fenway around 2005, like maybe it was one of the first digital pictures I ever took...or one of the last non-digital. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Welcome aboard, Shane. Also, three Gold Gloves!

When I got to take batting practice at Fenway, you better believe FanFoto was in the house. And the Red Sox sent out a promo code for a free 5 x 7, so I took advantage. There were a few different shots of me--I chose a vertical one so I could get the Fenway sign in there:

Sweet.

Mike Napoli! I didn't want to talk about it at the rumor stage (I'd been checking his Twitter feed every few hours), but I am excited to get this guy. If you've ever watched a game where Mike Napoli is playing at Fenway Park, you know why. He hits long powerful dongs there. Like every time he's up. On the Joy of Sox board, we're always keeping track of his stats against the Red Sox, because he's just absolutely killed us for years. Search "Napoli" in the box at the top of this blog and you'll see what I mean.

He's not the greatest hitter in the world, but we've learned recently that getting the best players don't translate to winning. Napoli at Fenway is different from Napoli anywhere else. So I think he's a perfect addition. At least for half the games....

(Report is from "a baseball source" so we'll see if it's true but it seems pretty true.)

[Bonus: A-Rod out until May, June, or July, depending on what you read.]

The September games now have Ts and should go on sale in a few minutes, but like I said last night, the final series isn't up there. I don't know why they'd hold those out until the January sale--it could be that it's a mistake, like how one year they accidentally left out the September 8th game only to add it later in the day. I'm thinking that the doofus who went and changed all the September games went right up to the Yankee series (which is obviously being left out for the Yanks lottery) and thought it was the final series and forgot that there was one more series they needed to change the date for after that. Either that or they decided to make today's sale "September weekday games." But they have April weekends up so why not September? Anyway, get your September tickets now! Meaning 4 minutes from now.

Instead of driving out to Indy for the Big Ten championship game, I stayed around here, got some good stuff at the Yard Sale, and got some tickets. Tonight in the game, Nebraska lost. 70-31. So eff me, but at least I didn't go all the way out there for that feces fest.

Reminder, Sunday morning at 10, September games go on sale, starting with the 9/2 game and not including Yanks games. (Actually, that final series with the Jays is showing the January 26th date. Hmmm.) This is still a secret, but watch for the team to send out an e-mail soon. Unless I'm totally wrong.

Also, I noticed they've pretty much done away with weekday afternoon games. There's that odd 4:05 game during "mysteriously early games week" in April, and then there are day game on Opening Day, Pats Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. Other than those, every single weekday game is at night. As for Saturdays, there are only two day games scheduled, with more possible if they're chosen for the national broadcast. And Sunday's the opposite as usual--always day unless it becomes the national night game.