Lester only faced 28 batters. He faced 29 in his no-hitter. This one was better, it just lacks a cool name. Anyway it's good to see complete game shutouts regardless of how many baserunners are allowed. SOX win 5-0.

So sick of these hockey updates that happen right during game action. As if it's crucial to talk to those two hockey guys at that exact moment. They're just sitting there between periods! Why not have them talk during a break in the action? (I think we know the greenish answer to that one.) Or at the very least, start the incredibly unnecessary conversation after an at bat. And Ricky Gervais himself couldn't script the awkwardness that occurs every single time the two sets of announcers try to talk to each other, completely unaware of how long to talk, if the other is supposed to respond and when, how to end things, etc. Tonight they interrupted a PERFECT GAME for this crap. Imagine if the perfecto had been broken up right when the baseball announcers were forced to make chit-chat about hockey, with the game in a tiny box on less than half the screen thanks to the fact that we absolutely must see the two hockey guys as they talk....

Think, NESN!

*In case you think this has to do with the fact that I don't like hockey, I'll clarify: If they suddenly put up a live shot of me on my couch on half the screen during an at bat, you'd all get to see me yelling at them to cut the crap and show the damn game.*

Sunday is Mother's Day. Take your mom to Fenway! You get to run the bases with her after the game....

No matter how many times they practice it, a pitcher can never throw a strike to second base. This play haunts me in my sleep. It cost Lackey today, as we lose our sixth in seven tries. Too bad the Twins closer borrowed the Mo Zone in the ninth. It's now a three-way tie for first.

Pressly, in relief of Hernandez, gets the win, Webster gets the loss. Wait a minute. Pressly, spelled differently, is the King of Rock 'n' Roll*. And another Hernandez is King Felix. And Emmanuel Lewis, who played Webster, was friends with Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. (*It should also be noted that Perkins also pitched in this game. So it's really two kings, and two friends of kings.)

Anyway, some game, huh? We lose 15-8. I wasn't a fan of Doubront leaving the rotation, no offense to Webster, but they both ended up getting a chance tonight, with each of them crapping all over that chance. It was pretty sweet when we scored 5 in our first at bat after giving up 4 in theirs, but we quickly went behind again, and it was all downhill from there.

The highlight was Remy accusing Don of stealing Carlton Fisk's credit card.

The O's win ties them with the Sox for first. Us, them, and the Yanks all have 13 losses. NY is still an effed-up team--they even batted their pitcher 8th and had Vernon Wells at third base briefly tonight--but managed a win to close to within a game of first. The go-ahead run came with two outs in the ninth on an infield single where the guy hesitated before throwing to first. It still stinks that they can just put Mo in and have basically any pitch he throws be called a strike, but it's what the rest of us have to deal with, I guess.

Classic media: Shaughnessy decides he's gonna accuse David Ortiz of being on steroids to his face, writes article about it, then NESN Daily teaser says "And Peter Gammons weighs in on the latest David Ortiz PED rumors." So let's recap:

Person A: "Person B, are you a murderer?"

Person B: "No."

Person A: "Everybody, have you heard the rumors about Person B being a murderer?!"

Then there's the whole thing about how the media bash the guy whenever he doesn't hit, saying he's done, etc., then when he starts hitting again, it's "why are you on steroids?" Ortiz himself noticed this one and addressed it in a dugout interview, basically asking "what the hell do you have to do to make these people happy?"

The funniest part about Shaughnessy is how he pretends not to be a slimeball. The guy will rip you out of one side of his mouth while telling you with the other side that he's this nice, innocent guy. When he did the talk show circuit after the Francona book, he'd shamelessly tell each host how it's not meant to be a controversial book and how more is being made of it than should be, meanwhile, ten seconds earlier he was spewing the same controversy-inventing crap he wrote in the first place.

P.S. Word verification is back on. The spams are up to about 25 a day, I need a break. I don't mean banned Yankee fan comments, I mean actual robot spam, written in the same template every time, pretending to be a "real" person, ending with a link to a weight-loss diet site or whatever. "Great site! Hey, is anyone else having trouble with the format of this WordPress blog? My web site: acne products." It's been going on for months. Blogger recently came up with a new spam filter, and everything was fine. Then, the flood gates opened. So, I apologize. Good luck with those weird-looking words.

P.S.S or P.P.S. The "Allision Brown" ads have been running again. And I got a random person commenting on one of my old posts about it. Since I don't have the "recent comments" feature, you'd never know unless I told you. So thanks, that guy!

Thing about Newport is it has its own weather systems. And I don't mean that in a "if you don't like the weather in [insert my town or area here], wait five minutes!" kind of way. I mean that there's something about that island that makes it have different weather than everything around it. I'll never forget a few years ago when Kim and I did Cliff Walk, and a giant cloud walked along side us, all the way to the beach, at which point we walked around in it. Turns out this is a common thing, as I've discovered working in that area. Monday night, a cloud came in and sat on First Beach. Tuesday, when I got back there, it was still there. I don't call it fog, fog's different. Or maybe that's what fog means. But I think of this as being inside a cloud. I did a bootleg dash-cam video of me driving into and back out of the cloud:



I hope you can tell by the white sky and sudden lack of shadows that I was going through the cloud, but if not, here's a comparison of what it normally looks like at that spot (Google Maps Street View, left) and my video (right).



A few hours earlier, I walked around in the cloud on the beach:



Also got a shot of it rolling in, coming over the sea wall:



Maybe this whole thing is the effect of the sun hitting the cold water. Because it's obviously moving, yet it appears to stay over one large area. But then why wouldn't it do that every sunny day? And in every place where there's water? Can some scientist help me out?

We had a shot tonight, until the Twins put it away with 4 in the 8th, an inning that started with two consecutive errors by Pedro. (Glad Wakefield noticed the slight bad hop on the first one in the postgame, unlike Orsillo and former infielder Remy.) We also had Middlebrooks and Ross collide--both would eventually leave the game. 6-1 loss, but we've still got the best record in baseball and we're two up on the Yanks, who got Chicagoed in Colorado. Francesa has been making a huge deal about how worried about the Yanks as they leave for this trip. They did not disappoint in game one. Anyway, the O's jump into second place, a game behind us.

Was flipping around after the game and saw four doofuses sitting around on that CSNNE channel, and they had this graphic up:

"Red Sox Have Had Trouble Scoring Runs This Season"

You know how many teams in all of baseball have scored more runs per game than the Red Sox in 2013? Five! I later flipped by again and saw they had "Blanking Out" up there. Do they know we scored a run tonight? I hope most fans realize these shows are total jokes at this point, done solely to get ratings by inventing problems.

Hilarious photo caption from a Daily News article about that Mickey Mantle corking controversy:

"Mantle, who died in 1995 at age 63, was a celebrity of Derek Jeter-caliber during his heyday."

I kid you not, I didn't make that up. That's a real sentence written by some type of journalist. Or at least a captioner.

Daniel Bard throwing in the bullpen. From a few days ago. Turn your volume up.

Red Sox v. Twins, 7:10, Dumpster Divin'. I mean Dempster/Diamond.

Drew's brother was the star tonight, going 3 for 4 and driving in the winning run to cap off a 2-out rally in the bottom of the 11th. He also was called out at home earlier when he was actually safe, though if he'd just slid in much lower it would've made the ump's call easier.

Pedroia broke a tie in the 8th with a light tower power dong, prompting the two men shown here to go nuts. Hanrahan shit the bed as he's wont to do, blowing the save and sending it to extras. He left the game with an injury, and Bailey's already on the DL. And you know what? When you let the guy who knows how to close the door walk, as we did with Papelbon for reasons I'll never understand, you don't need to go with one closer. And that's a good thing when you've got a lot of solid arms in your 'pen. So maybe we can do that for a while, and see if either of our closers can eventually figure out how to A. be healthy and B. close.

That Twins pitcher gave us a gift on Salty's grounder in the 11th which started the rally. In classic 2011-present "everything's a hit" style, they actually gave Salty a hit. But I don't know how much more error-y you can get than picking up a routine grounder cleanly and throwing it nowhere near first base with the runner still steps away from the bag. Either way, that gift started it all.

And then on the final hit, the left fielder could have caught the ball. It hit about waist-high on the scoreboard. But for some reason, Don/Rem/TC/Wake decided this wasn't even something worthy of discussion. Seems to me like it'd be the only thing to discuss on that play, but I'm just some guy.

Ortiz extends to 26 with his double in the 8th.

And don't forget we were down 3-0 and 4-1 in this game, after having been swept. It was huge to get this win. Texas lost and St. Louis was idle, so we're back to having the best record in baseball. The lead is 2 in the east.

Look at this horse shit in NESN's box score. They only show the most recent nine innings in the linescore. I know mlb.com does this too, but at least they have a tiny arrow you can click to reveal the first few innings. But to not have it at all is preposterous! You just don't know how many runs were scored and when in each of the first two innings. In a 20-inning game, you'd be clueless on the first 11 innings of the game. The only way to figure it out is to go to "gameview" and then look at each missing inning's details. But you shouldn't have to do that. How are they not fixing this? (I just checked some other places. SI.com is also on board with the "final 9 innings only, with no scroll-back arrow" method. All you can do there is go to the play-by-play to figure it out. Same deal with Yahoo, though they give you the most recent ten innings. ESPN has the novel idea of...actually showing all innings in the linescore.) Oh well, at least I got to see this article about Otis Nixon cracking and driving. Check out that mug shot!

Speaking of NESN eff-ups: During Sunday's game, there was a scroll all day long showing the Bruins being in the "Stanley Cup Quarterfinals." I don't give a or know shit about hockey, but I'm pretty sure they're in the first round, and I'm pretty sure it's the same number of teams in the playoffs as the NBA. So wouldn't this be the...eighth-finals? In other words, the conference quarterfinals. Then it's conf. semis, then conf. finals, then Stanley Cup finals. I could be wrong, but I don't think I saw the word "conference" in there. If I'm right, terrible job, NESN.

Red Sox lose. Swept. We now go home to face the Twins, still with the best record in baseball (tied) and still with a 1.5 game lead in the east over the Orioles and also Yanks. More on the game later, But first, the mistakiest dong ever!

Just after I predicted that "Ortiz will hit a home run that will awe the crowd" (no proof available), Papi did just that. Unfortunately, NESN's camera people don't know how to track home run balls. We never saw where it landed as they showed us a spot nowhere near where the ball was. Then they cut to a close-up of the ball in flight (one which also didn't show the landing spot), and we see that the Rangers' scoreboard still uses the old (changed after 2008 season) version of that Red Sox logo:


Then we see a shot of a Sox fan in the stands, who's a big enough fan of Carl Yastrzemski to name a pet after him....


...but not big enough a fan to know how his name is spelled. All you have to do is ask! Or try the Web, it knows too! Granted, it's a difficult name. It seems logical it would start with "Y-A-Z". But in my opinion, the moment you decide to name a pet after the guy should be the moment you say, "I'm gonna go ahead and learn this name for good."

Later, NESN showed us a graphic about some Twins players....

Let's take a closer look!
Maybe we've got a big H.G. Wells fan in the NESN control room. Or maybe they do this shit just about every game. It's not like this is some obscure player, it's Justin Morneau!

Then you've got Don doing one of his classic "in the dark" calls. Maybe I should call him Don Squier. (After watching that again I started thinking maybe I'm the a-hole, that the guy really didn't know if the ball went out since he had looked down for the bag the first time, but...even in that case, you'd say he wasn't sure, as Don did, AND that he was going back to touch the base he missed. Man, if you haven't clicked on the vid yet, you don't know what the hell I'm e-babbling about right now....)

Another funny Don moment: Berkman hit a ball that "almost got out of here." Except it bounced on the warning track.

And on the Ross homer, again, NESN misses where it lands, even zooming in on the wrong spot as the ball is landing in the deck above.

Here's some great reporting from the ESPN Dallas blogger. Awesomeness in bold:

Beltre is 6-for-36 with runners in scoring position this season, but that's not why Farrell decided to walk him. He wanted the righty-righty matchup with Mortensen against Beltre, and he also wanted to set up the force play.

Mortensen got ahead of Beltre with a 1-2 count on all sliders. Beltre even swung through the third pitch in the sequence. He didn't miss the fourth slider, lining over the glove of Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia's glove [...]

No, they didn't walk Beltre to pitch to Beltre, and no, Dustin Pedroia's glove does not wear a glove. Then he goes on to write the following sentence--maybe he only had one verb left and had to use it twice:

They were able to grind out three runs on Lester and grind out a walk-off win.

Where do they find these people?

Back to the lecture at hand: I was pissed at Drew's brother. In the 7th, with one out and the game tied, Darvish walks Ross on four pitches. Drew then takes the first two pitches for balls. Catcher goes out to talk to Yu. Now maybe we were thinking, "here comes a strike, swing away." But I'm just saying, six balls in a row, game tied late, #8 hitter up, pitcher started that inning with more than 100 pitches, he's just giving us baserunners...you gotta make the guy throw a strike. Instead Drew swings, and fouls off a pitch that's probably gonna land outside the zone. It should have been 3-0 there, leading to a probable walk. Even if Ciriaco then goes down, at least you've got a shot with Ellsbury and the go-ahead run on second. Instead, it's 2-1, and Drew goes on to strike out. As does Ciriaco to end the inning. We wouldn't score the rest of the game.

Papi's streak is now 25.

Terrible job by Elvis raising the fist while running home with the winning run, on a play that turned out to be pretty close. It's pompous and it could cost your team big time. You better know you're gonna score before you start pulling that Jeter-ish crap.

And as long as this post is full of my pet peeves, to add insult to Inge, the mlb.com headline about this game was "Rangers walk off to sweep Sox."

The Yanks just left the tying/winning runs on base in the bottom of the ninth. Wells strikes out to end it. Beautiful.

Red Sox leading 3-1, halfway through. Runs came on Dongs by Davids.

Great match-up today at 3:05. Sox look to avoid the sweep.

Last night was pretty puke-barfy, we couldn't do shit on offense. But Papi did extend his hitting streak to 24. We're now 1, 3, 6, and 11 games up in the division in the loss column.

Meanwhile, I'm psyched for the new show Family Tree. It's by Christopher Guest and includes his usual ensemble, plus that really funny guy who played the cop in Bridesmaids.