We went down 2-0 to the proverbial King, but came back to tie it in the fifth. The tie didn't last long, as Lester gave up a dong to the first batter of the bottom of the inning. Then everything went haywire, with all kinds of mistakes and anti-good pitching performances, and by 1:30 a.m. eastern time, we'd lost 11-4.

Tampa won their fifth in a row to close to 3.5 back. Balty and NYY lost so they stay 4.5 and 5 out.

Stuff:

Two bad jobs by the guys on Pedroia plays. Bottom 4, man on first, hard-hit grounder through the right side, but Pedroia gets his glove on it, slowing it down enough for the runner to go to third. But Don Burgundy and Remy Fartin' neglect to point this out. Remy even said it was hit hard (which would mean the runner should have only moved up to second). So why did he go to third? Because it was deflected. They should be saying this. Runs ended up scoring. This was a key if not key-esque or -ish play.

Then on that ball where Dustin got caught on the in-between hop: He made a nice recovery, got the ball, and threw to first. Safe. Guy appeared out. But D&R acted like it was just a normal play, not even close. I had to do my own slow-mo, and I could see the guy looked barely out. You'd think they'd at least say "that was close" or something, if not have a full-on "look at it in slow motion and actually analyze it." But they said nothing. I sometimes get the feeling someone's whispering in their ear, "no time to talk about that last play, ad copy needs to be read here."

After the Mariners made it go from 1-0 to 2-0, it took about two minutes for the score to change on the screen. (Count to 120 if you think that's not a long time.) And it actually effed me up! I had been switching to MLBN to try to get a Yankee final (I realize there are other ways of getting it but I was choosing that way, "screw you for judgin' me!"--the first Sandler album) and at that moment there was a play where Holt went into the crowd, and MLBN cut to the Seattle broadcast as they looked at the replays, which by the way were so much better than NESN's. So I was on there, then I switched back to NESN, rewound, watched again, looked at the score to see it was still 1-0, yet the bases were still loaded and the outs hadn't changed, meaning a run must have scored. I thought I'd missed a walk...I must have, but they're still saying 1-0. Finally they sneak in the change. So I had to rewind even further back to find that I had indeed missed a bases-loaded walk.

Speaking of Holt, on that play where he threw to first and the runner went second to third: Remy said it was great baserunning. I say it was bad to bad-like fielding. I know he didn't have much time, but you still have to look the runner back, as opposed to a cursory head tilt in the direction of him. Had he turned his head (while still preparing for a throw to first), he would have seen the runner way too far off second, with a guy covering the bag. Cock the arm, watch the guy make his move, and hold the ball, get him trapped, and you've retired the lead runner. This is up for debate, though. Everything was happening fast. (Remy didn't even bring up the possibility that Holt try for the lead man.)

Did you think Ellsbury would have *definitely* caught the ball to straight away center that Nava couldn't quite reach? I think it's almost mean to say he would have, as D&R did. It was a ball that hit right around the base of the wall. That's not an easy play for anybody. Had Ells gotten to it, it still would have required a crash into the wall, which is no guarantee it's caught. I felt bad for Nava when they acted like a better fielder definitely catches that ball. (Though Nava did look like a fool at least one other time out there.)

Finally, here's a great job by NESN, as they actually cut away from a play at first base, causing them to miss a really nice barehanded catch by Holt:



And final-finally, this was from the Yanks game earlier. This poor woman gets pushed aside by a guy in a yellow Dan Fouts jersey for a foul ball, and then gets pissed and appears to say "what...the...fuck." I don't know if people saw this already, but I thought she deserved to get her moment since the tool walked away with the souvenir. So here it is: