Last October, the Red Sox were treated to an ALDS win thanks to the ghost that spooked Wil Myers. Tonight, the winning run scored in the 10th as AJ's fly ball hit off Myers's glove and rolled away while Myers collided hilariously with the center fielder. Red Sox win on a fight-a-licious night at Fenway.

That's 5 good ones in a row to follow up 10 in a shitty row. We're just 5 out of first place in the loss column as the rest of the division lost tonight.

Would have been an even crazier final play had no one been on base. Even AJ could have circled the bases on that play for a game-winning inside-the-park homer. But all AJ had to do was watch it and root Jonny Wadd around from first.

What's up with Remy? When Workman threw one behind Longoria's head, he was immediately ejected. After 2 minutes of replays and discussion, Remy says Workman "will probably be ejected." Then after Don notes that the Red Sox are on their fourth manager of the night, Remy says, "and the Red Sox are on their third manager of the night."

Stat of the night: The next pitcher to take the mound at Fenway will be Rubby De La Rosa, tomorrow night. The last pitcher to take the mound at Fenway tonight was a guy who kinda looks like Zack de la Rocha.

And only 4.5 back of the second wild card, mofo. Sox win their 4th in a row, all against the Braves, who are supposedly good. But right now I'm lookin' at the scout who discovered them like Max Mercy getting his first look at Roy Hobbs. But we don't have to worry about them again until the Fall Classic.

X got the game-winning hit+error in the bottom of the ninth. The Braves played unbelievably shitty D in the last few frames to give us the victory. I wonder how many times brothers have made errors in the same inning before tonight.

I hate when NESN shows the behind-the-plate view on live pitches. Tonight they did it a few times, but last night they did a big long stretch of it. How are we supposed to tell where the taken pitches go? Or the batted balls?

And I mentioned this last year, but it's gotten much worse this year: Inning ends, Sox coming up, and instead of showing the score, they show the three hitters coming up, with one arbitrarily highlighted. They must feel like since the score is up there all game long, we don't need to see it there. But that should be a scene-setting moment: here's your inning, the score, the hits for each team. I'd think they would especially want to do that headed for the bottom of the ninth. But they always do the three heads now in that situation. If the Sox are coming up with a chance to win in the bottom of the ninth, and you want to keep the casual viewer from changing the channel, the ONE thing you want to remind them of is that the team's last chance is coming up next. Some guy in a bar with no sound on the TV sees three faces, he doesn't know what the fuck inning it is. He's not gonna say, "Oh, Grady Sizemore is the highlighted guy of the three due up next inning, I'll stick with this in case it happens to be the ninth and the game is tied or they're down 1 or maybe 2." To Jaws-ify it, you yell "Pedroia," everybody says, "Huh," "What?" You yell "9th inning," and we've got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July.

Red Sox shut out Braves 4-0 for our third win in a row. The broadcast was really fun, as Manny, Pedro, and Millar were interviewed. Manny and Pedro were great, but Millar was absolutely hilarious, right down to mocking himself for starting a story with two outs. Which lead to them extending him for another half-inning of laughs. On Pedroia: "this guy stopped growing in 4th grade! Theo, is this really your first rounder. Nobody's better than this guy, coast to coast?" On the fatness of his 2004 mates, specifically Trot Nixon: "Have a salad with some lemon wedges." To Steve Lyons: "you sucked just like me." There was more. Try and watch it. And that goes for Kelly and Cyn, too, since they missed the broadcast by being behind right-handed hitters all night till the very end....

I turned the game on just as the '04 ceremony was ending, with Pedro talking about Disney World and Millar saying "play ball," so it worked out perfectly that I missed seeing Damon's stupid-ass face. And if they mentioned his traitorific name once during the broadcast, I missed that, too, so this night really worked out beautifully. I'm so pissed that redsox.com had a story about the reunion a few weeks back highlighting him, and now I see on there that the current #2 story is some stupid thing where Damon shows you his drumset or some shit, sponsored by Some Company Who Paid Damon The Most Just Like The Yankees Did. I should get a gun implanted into my computer that automatically shoots me in the face should I accidentally click on that video. Stop trying to force me into things, Red Sox! (That goes for Stephen Drew, too. I hate that he's waiting on the horizon to come in and break up our new winning ways with his not-nearly-as-good-as-people-are-saying defense and non-existent-except-for-like-2-weeks offense.)

So good job by the Sox and by NESN tonight, except for when Don thought Psycho Lyons only had two stints with the Red Sox. This is a guy who grew up following the team. Don, you don't remember everybody saying "Psycho IV" all the time?

Something else I forgot to mention: Andrew Miller. Clean shaven. Holy shit. Never would have known that was even him. And he's my favorite player! In fact, I paused it last night, yelled to Kim to come into the room, and asked her who she thought it was. Her only guess was Jason Segel.

Guess what? We're not in last place!

Contest still open. I've been receiving all your entries, I'm just not posting them until the entry period is over. May 31st, end of day.

There's such an excitement to this team when they win. Makes it even more of a shame we lost 4 in a row. I mean 6. I mean 8. I mean 10. Can you GD believe that? It went by so fast. Hopefully the 10-game winning streak goes just as fast. No, wait, slow. Whatever. Tonight we had another comeback win in Atlanta in front of the home crowd. Jackie's "2-run RBI," as the post-game interviewer called it, was huge. As was Jonny Wadd's defense.

Leave it to NESN, though, to miss the final strike. And then lose their picture.

Now the Sox go back to Fenway for two more with the Braves. We need to start winning at home. If we were merely 15-12 at Fenway right now, we'd be 3 out instead of 8 out.

Tonight I was thinking about how "selling the call" has become obsolete. It was on that reviewed play at third. Psycho Lyons stole some of my god-bowling by starting to bring it up, but he didn't do a very good job, so I'll have to explain: In the past, a fielder would make the tag and then raise the glove up confidently to make the ump think he made the tag in time. I've written here about how this sometimes makes me mad, because had the fielder just kept the glove on the guy, he would have been out in a situation where the runner comes off the bag. Now, with replay, there's never a reason not to do that. You can't "sell" a call anymore. Well you can, but the other team may end up getting a refund. But fielders still do it! Shouldn't they be told to keep the glove on the runner the whole time? Seems like these runners come off the bag very often, even if it's just for a split second. Keep the glove on him, and replay will prove he's out even if he beats the original tag. And the networks often aren't even looking for this when showing their replays. They focus on whether foot hits base before glove touches body, and don't even notice that shortly after, the baserunner no longer is in contact with the base. And I wonder if sometimes the video-umps aren't doing it right. Or if they're influenced by the announcers, or are stuck with replays that don't show the right thing, or aren't shown one of the available replays.

To sum up: there are major league baseball players still making a move which is officially obsolete. You may as well try to steal first. (Not the Lloyd Moseby way. Note: Bad job by whoever uploaded that, cutting off the end, where Moseby puts both hands on his head.)

I've had a busy weekend or whatever. At the end of one of my shifts today, I got in the car and heard Pedroia knock in two runs. Castig was all excited, but then noted that we "cut the lead in half." So I knew 4-2 was the best case scenario, which, considering we'd lost our last 50 thousand games, wasn't gonna cut it for me. Then he said the score: 6-3. Great, like that's gonna pay my mortgage. Joe then said something like, "imagine a long ball here from Papi," as one would tie the score. Moments later, he "picked up what he asked for," as we used to say in the Go Fish world. Or was it Crazy 8s? Anyway, I still didn't know the inning, only that we'd just come back from down 5 to tie it, all with two outs. It was 3:30, so between that and the extreme excitement in Castig's voice, I figured it was the 8th or 9th. Nope. Fifth. It would be until well into my next shift, at around 6:goddamn:30, that the game would finally end, with the Sox winning their first in a row.

If I ever get a second I'll tell you some other stuff. Meantime, the contest is still open for a few more days. Should be interesting with Shane on the DL.