We started the homestand with a blowout win, and ended it with a 10-5 close-for-a-while win, taking 2 of 3 from both Texas and the Angels. Big days for Salty (2 dongs), Carp (dong), and Ortiz (dong--I don't know why Trout didn't rob it, see pic). So we'll stay at least 1.5 up as we head off to Tampa and Baltimore City.

NESN was on fire today. The cold, hard kind of fire. More than usual. With Remy still out, they had Rice in the booth with Don, plus a rotating third man, three innings each. It's almost like they knew they were in for a long game, so they gave Don this giant list of topics to ask Rice about. It was a close game into the sixth, with lots of stuff happening on the field--but they never talked about it! It was all the pre-planned stuff, which would have been fine for a blowout. So toward the end when it hit 10-3, at least it made a little more sense to just blab away. They've got all this tweet crap going on too, on top of the conversation-killing ad reads. It would have been a great day to just talk about the game, THEN go to blab-mode late. And with Rice's Magical Mystery Tour, you end up with him talking over plays all the time. Then when TC entered the booth, it was the ultimate irony as he joked about how when he was the sideline reporter, he'd always end up talking over important plays, with Don getting pissed about not being able to call them.

And all this was on top of the progressively worse coverage. They missed the first pitch of the first inning to Ellsbury because the junior announcer was still talking. That set the tone. Then they missed, as is their tradition, almost every pickoff attempt. One time a guy went to second on a passed ball, and they didn't show the runner. And any time something was missed where the announcer might be there to tell us about it, they were in the middle of some unrelated conversation.

It seemed like Uehara was getting yelled at by LeVangie as he warmed up, but of course the announcers weren't even watching. Then he came in and had one of his worst performances. Maybe the yelling could have given them a clue something was wrong.

I feel like some people might have seen this game and thought it was great because you had baseball (mostly) related conversation going the whole time. But what I'm saying is, they missed a great game because of it. It would have worked okay as a roundtable, but we've got a game going on here. A close game. Involving the first-place home team.

I kept making videos about the madness as the game went on. I'll post those tonight.