Once in a lifetime?

This is what happens when I start working my ass off and neglect my baseball-watching obligations. I miss what was probably the most exciting play of the season: Jacoby Ellsbury stealing home in the fifth inning. Well, technically, I didn't miss it. I had just gotten home from work and was in the shower with my AM radio tuned to WRKO and balanced on the sink. I do wonder what my neighbors thought was going on in my shower, what with all the jumping up and down and the whooping and the bumping the tile wall with my fist. But I'm sure they understood if they heard what I heard.

After Friday, I truly thought that I had seen the most exciting game of the season. Now it seems I spoke too soon. You don't see that too often. Some people go through a lifetime of baseball fandom and don't see that happen. And it happened so fast, I don't think anybody but Ellsbury knew what was happening until it was over. The only downside is that it's probably the last time we'll see this from Ells in a while, as every pitcher in the majors from now on is going to know he's a threat to steal home.

It was a beauty of a game from J.Mast. And another nice visual, albeit not quite as exciting as Ellsbury stealing home? Michael Bowden setting down the side in order in both the 7th and the 8th--his second major league appearance--with key strikeouts of Jeter and Cano. Maybe I'm talking out of my butt here, but he kinda reminds me of Mike Timlin. A young Mike Timlin, of course. Also, he probably doesn't have an arsenal of hunting firearms in his clubhouse locker, so perhaps slightly less dangerous. (Hmm. Maybe it's the fatigue talking after so many long hours of work and long hours of baseball, but I do sort of miss Timlin's southern attitude. He, Beckett, and Buchholz could have been like the three Texas Musketeers. Or maybe Stooges, depending on how you look at it.)

Anyway. I digress. A short trip to Cleveland, and quick jaunt to Tampa, and then the Sox will settle in at New Yankee Stadium, the new Death Star of the Evil Empire. Just one request, Jacoby: do it again, but this time on their turf.

So what happens to the Yankees now, after a sweep? Their bullpen's ERA is a craptastic 6.68, and their top starters haven't really delivered. They have a gaping hole at 3rd base, and Nick Swisher is providing the heart and soul of the team. If history is any indication, they'll be picking up someone big before May is half done. Note to Brian Cashman: Pedro is still unsigned. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Shades of 2004

I have a confession to make. I had tickets to last night's game, and I almost didn't go. Faced with a long weekend of work and no room for play, I planned to sell the tickets. And damn hell, I'm so freaking glad I didn't. That'll teach me.

When I got to the park, I turned to my companion and said, I fully intend to have lost my voice by the end of this night. And indeed, we yelled so hard that I was all but croaking by the time Youk came through in the 11th, even though I made sure to liberally lubricate my throat with the traditional ballpark remedy, Bud Light. Now, I like my baseball quite a lot, but in general, the shorter the game the better my mood by the end. This game was four hours and twenty-one minutes. Oy. And I swear I was sitting directly downwind of a garlic bread-scented breeze. By the 7th inning stretch, I was so hungry I would have gladly ditched my seat and gone on a garlic bread quest if it wasn't for the hope of a valiant Red Sox comeback.

Is it too early to call this the game of the year? It's almost easy to overlook Ellsbury's first-inning theatrics when he singled, advanced to second on a balk, stole third, and then kept right on trucking to home plate on a passed ball. Let's not forget Jon Lester, either, who pitched well past the 6th despite a high pitch count. We had to wait until the ninth for more sugar, when J-Bay punished a Mariano Rivera hanging cutter and tied the game with two outs. Kevin Youkilis made the park go absolutely wild with his walk-off home run two innings later.

And so now I'm headed to work with a scratchy, overtired voice and an ever-so-slight hangover. But there's more good news: Julio Lugo won't be rejoining the Sox until Monday, when the Yankees will be long gone. Oh, and for those of you attending later this weekend, Father Curt has a message for you: don't be idiots, please and thank you.

Tim Wakefield: #1 Stud Muffin

Every single friggin time I sacrifice baseball for a salary (and not a large one at that), I end up missing a no-hitter, a near-no hitter, or an otherwise gem of a game. Such was the case on Wednesday afternoon when Tim Wakefield took a no-hitter into the 8th and put the Sox onto a plane with a complete game win over the A's.

And, okay, let's be honest. If we had our money on who would come close to a no-hitter this season, who would we pick? Lester again? For sure. Beckett? He would be the top candidate. Even Dice-K or Brad Penny might have looked good if we were taking bets. Shakey Wakey? Probably last on the list. But of everyone on the staff, this guy has lived through more managers, more doubt, and more shit in general than anyone else. And when it came time for him to man up and throw the ball well, he sure as hell delivered. I hope he's still pitching for us when he's 58. I truly do.

We also have the news that Dice-K is on the 15-day DL and will likely be replaced by Justin Masterson. Not that I'm happy that Dice-K is down, but I do love me some J.Mast.

An exercise in optimism

The bad news first.

It appears that our worst fears re: the WBC have come to fruition. Dice-K has been sidelined with arm fatigue. Our bullpen looks sooo freakin' good, but they spent themselves last night. Wake has to all but complete the game tonight, or we're out of the frying pan and into the fire. Mazz worries that we might have to use a starter in relief if Wake can't go the distance. Worst case scenerio, we'll be looking at J.D. Drew pitching the ninth tonight, like Nick Swisher had to do with the Yankees on Monday. (Props to Swisher, though. He was actually kind of good.)

The blame right now is falling on the WBC. And yes, we should be plenty angry. We should be rip shit about this. Not just at the managers of the Japanese team, but also at Dice-K himself for allowing his early-season workload to wear him down and put the Red Sox, who are paying him good money, at risk. But right now, there's nothing to be done. Nothing but to sit and wait and see how this plays out.

Now, okay, everyone. Deep breath. One more against the A's tonight, then a day off, then a home series against the always-friendly Orioles. We can do this. The summer is not yet lost.

I say this because, Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the new ace of the staff:

So I have this enormous crush on one of my co-workers right now--you know, one of those situations where you always catch the other person stealing sidelong glances and you do silly little things to make each other laugh, but probably nothing will happen because it's work and it might get complicated and shit like that. But I'll admit it. As of right now, Justin Masterson owns my heart. Pedey will always amaze me, Lester will always inspire me, and Paps will always freak me the heck out. But J.Mast is hands down my favorite Red Sox player this season. Yeah, I know he has a wife. But he's cute, he's goofy, he's sweet, and he is nothing if not grateful for every single day he gets to play baseball. Read his new blog if you want to fall in love, too.

And then, on top of all of that, he's turned into an excellent pitcher as well, going four scoreless innings last night and striking out six. People have been talking about him like he's the second coming of Derek Lowe, but I'd venture that his attitude and his positive lifestyle will make him even greater. Get this man into the rotation, pronto. Even if it means I'll only get to see his shining face every five days instead of every time a starter steps in it big (which is pretty much every other day lately).

On Nick Adenhart

In the past week, I've been reading a lot about Nick Adenhart, the 22-year-old rookie pitcher for the Angels who was killed in a car accident just hours after pitching a brilliant Opening Day. Watching John Lackey and Torii Hunter carry his jersey to the mound last Friday brought tears to my eyes. Doug Glanville wrote a touching retrospective of the losses he's faced over the years as a member of the baseball fraternity and how he's dealt with them. Vin Scully voiced a poignant tribute while calling the Dodgers-Padres game last Thursday. There's really only one appropriate reaction we can all have to this tragedy: such a young kid; such a bright future. Baseball's loss is incredibly great at this moment.

Anytime something like this happens, it gets me on a personal level. It takes me right back to high school. To the cool Spring morning when I was listening to the radio while I got dressed for school, and the morning news brief informed me that my friend Ben was dead.

Most of us heard about it on our way to school or as we entered the auditorium before morning classes began. (These were the days before cell phones and text messages.) We all cut class that day, the entire 10th grade, and cried together. We wandered through the halls, sat on the grass outside, called our parents at work. Just last week, he had distracted me all through study hall with a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life and the possibility that there might not be a God out there at all. A few days later, we would be attending a Catholic funeral mass and praying for his soul.

We prayed for his soul because the car accident that killed Ben didn't kill just him. He had been driving home from a friend's house in his Firebird behind another one of our classmates and decided to race. When he tried to pass his friend's car on a curve, he collided head-on with an oncoming motorcycle, rolling his car over several times in the ditch and killing the motorcycle's driver instantly. We realized that Ben wasn't just dead, he was a killer. It took me years to reconcile my memory of Ben's life with the dreadful incongruity of his death. He wasn't even drunk. He was just a stupid sixteen-year-old kid.

Andrew Gallo, the 22-year-old man who allegedly ran a red light at approximately 70 mph and broadsided the car that Adenhart and his companions were riding in, was both drunk and stupid. He has been charged with three counts of murder. This is all I know about Andrew Gallo, but I can only assume that he has friends too, and a family. And now he's killed three young people with full lives ahead of them, and ruined his own life in the process. He will likely have many, many years of jail time to reconcile his image of himself with the reality that he is now a killer.

Next time, it could be your friend. If you're not paying attention to your own actions, it could be you. Don't drive drunk. Don't drive recklessly. Take responsibility not just for your own life, but for the lives of all other people on the road. Don't become another Ben or another Andrew. That's all I can think to say right now.

The other Opening Day

Aww, boys. What's with the long faces?

You know what's even sweeter than a Red Sox victory on Opening Day? Add to that a Yankees loss.

After spending the hard-earned tax dollars of gullible New Yorkers on a new stadium and on the most expensive free agents in baseball, the Yankees bit the big one yesterday against the Orioles. Yes that's right, the Orioles. C.C. Sabathia faced off against Jeremy Guthrie, and lost. And Mark Texeira went 0-for-4 while leaving five runners on base.

Sabathia got tagged for six runs in just over four innings, leaving the New York Times to remark that Vice President Joe Biden actually had better control over his curveball when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch. Texeira just plain didn't contribute, and the Baltimore crowd wouldn't let him forget how much he hurt his hometown team by refusing to sign with them during the offseason.

And, bonus: the same Baltimore Orioles who have resorted to giving their fans free tickets managed to fill the stadium to capacity yesterday. The fans were loud, they were unruly, and they sure did give the Yankees hell. I hope the pinstripes can look forward to that sort of treatment all season long. As for the O's, they officially just became my second favorite team. Nice to see Camden Yards live up to its potential.

Never seemed so good

Yesterday left me so blue. I turned on my radio promptly at noon, having rearranged my schedule so I wouldn't have to go to either class or work on Opening Day, only to find that the game had been postponed. Oh, woe is me, I said to myself futilely in my best Shakespearean Tragic Damsel voice. We've waited so long for this season to begin, and the moment has been snatched away from us for another day. (Granted, it was a shitty day, and I wouldn't have wanted to play in that mess either.)

So when today came around and word spread that Opening Day would proceed as planned, I found myself (where else?) taking the T to Kenmore Station just so I could soak in the atmosphere. Didn't matter that the sun was nowhere to be seen and the wind was whipping through my measly sweatshirt. As if in a trance, I found myself wandering into the ticket agencies and asking the scalpers what they had. I never intended to actually buy a ticket; I thought I'd probably settle down somewhere with a beer and watch the game on TV. But at 3:55, just $50 later (that scalper never knew what hit him), I was trudging to my seat in the loge box behind home plate, watching Josh Beckett throw the first pitch for a strike. The gravitational pull of the new season was just too strong to resist.

Beckett lit up the mound, tossing ten K's over seven innings. Every time he struck someone out, his pimp walk back to the dugout got just a tiny bit bolder. But you want to see that place go apeshit? Just put a bat in Dustin Pedroia's hands and let him go to work. Pedey crushed the second pitch he saw right into the Monster. I swear, Fenway Park actually shook as he rounded the bases. And from there on out, the Rays never really had a chance. Beckett only gave up two hits, while "Big Game" James Shields got pounded nearly every inning and got yanked in the fifth. Every Red Sox player but Jacoby Ellsbury smacked at least one base hit.

For those of you making your way to Fenway later this season, I have the following to report:
-Big Papi seems to have trimmed down some, and maybe my eyes are lying, but I think he's a bit faster rounding the basepaths. Maybe we should start calling him Medium Papi.
-Jed Lowrie has definitely put on some muscle. His time at API seems to have served him well.
-Mike Lowell has fixed his hip and no longer looks like an old man wielding an unruly cane when he swings a bat.
-Tek seems to have make some adjustments to his batting stance and his left-handed swing (and, good on him, because it resulted in a solo home run in the 6th).
-The new seats in the lower bowl are nice, but they look pretty much the same as they used to. Fans who are willing to pay exorbitant ticket prices for the field box can now take advantage of padded seats. Me, I can bring my own $5 ass cushion and set it wherever I please. But to each his own.
-The new Fenway Franks are indeed better. They're bigger and actually extend quite a ways past the bun. And bonus: they actually look like edible hot dogs, not that funny pale grey color the old ones were.
-I didn't get to check out any of the new goods Theo picked up during the offseason. That is, not a peep from Rocco Baldelli, Ramon Ramirez, or Takashi Saito. Rocco looked mighty fine in the home whites, though.
-Definitely digging the new Congliario's Corner section in right field. Looks a lot nicer than those high school-looking metal bleachers they used to have up there.

You know what makes this day the brightest of all? Not only did the Red Sox win, we can even look forward to baseball again tomorrow. And for nearly every day hereafter until mid-Autumn. Yup, this might be heaven.

Welcome, Rocky Cherry. Now what's your music?

A while back during a series against the Orioles, I mused about what Rocky Cherry's walk-out music might be. Granted, he is not expected to be a super important factor in anyone's season this year, but it is my belief that good walkout music can elevate a mediocre player to cult fan status. (Or alternately, turn a good player into the butt of jokes--for example, did you know that Matt Holliday sometimes walks up to bat to the strains of Madonna's "Holiday?")

Thus, music is an extremely important issue. So what's Rocky's poison? Sweet Cherry Pie? Rocky Raccoon? Smart money is on the theme from Rocky. But now that Cherry is officially a member of the Red Sox, I'd like to lobby for the theme to Rocky and Bullwinkle. It's a little bit unconventional, but admit it...it would be kind of awesome, wouldn't it?

Can you miss something if it's not really gone?

Curt Schilling's retirement is now official. I have a couple of vivid memories from the last year of his pitching career. The bloody sock and the postseason heroics will, of course, live in infamy. But there's also the first game I went to at Fenway AMB (after moving to Boston).* It was the day before the Mothers' Day Miracle game in 2007, the second in a three-game series against the O's. My brother and I thought he looked pretty good when we trotted down to the bullpen to watch him warm up with Tek, but it just wasn't happening for Big Schill that day. He blew two leads and was out after 5 1/3 innings. The Sox ended up coming back to win the game 13-4, so it was still a fun game to watch. This was back when the Sox were on their way to becoming a full-on obsession for me, so I was scouring the internets late that night and happened upon 38 Pitches for the first time. And there's Curt, picking apart his mistakes pitch-by-pitch and crediting the umpire for a well-called game. No bitterness or sour grapes or blame laid on anyone but himself. I said to myself, this guy's a class act.

I also have a pleasant memory of listening to WRKO while sitting in a lawn chair in my dad's garage on a cool summer afternoon, drinking beer and shelling peanuts for the dog, who ate out of my hand. Curt shook off Tek with two outs in the last inning against the A's and came away one pitch short of a no-hitter. Again, he expressed no bitterness or regret in the postgame interview or in his blog--he was nothing but gracious and grateful to his teammates, and even his opponents.

Say what you will about his politics. He's been called a blowhard; he's been called all sorts of things I can't print on this blog. He's quite a name-caller himself, too. But this guy pitched his heart out every single time he was handed the ball. Hell, he pitched his ankle out, and then his shoulder, too. He literally sacrificed his body for the glory of Boston sports. He had his doctor to sew his tendon to his ankle and then pitched brilliantly through the pain not once, but twice, in a postseason situation where nobody would have blamed him for going on the DL immediately. If not for those performances and others over the years, I'm convinced that we'd still be waiting for the curse to be broken, 91 years and counting.

We'll miss him on the field, but the bottom line is, Curt's not gone. His accessibility and his connection to the fans here in Boston has linked him inextricably with Red Sox Nation, and our friends at WEEI are going to make sure he sticks around for a while yet. I'm sure we'll hear from him more than we've bargained for in the years to come. Thanks for all of your contributions, Schill, and best of luck in all of your post-baseball pursuits.

p.s. The picture I posted above was taken by my friend Zach at the beginning of the 2007 Rolling Rally. Schill had just finished posing with Wake, Beckett, and the World Series trophy. Is he waving to us? Probably not, but a girl can dream, right?

*[Interesting side note: the first Red Sox game I ever actually attended was the July 15th, 1998 pitchers' duel between Pedro and Bartolo Colon. Pedro shut out the Indians 1-0 and recorded 9 K's. But being a petulent 16-year-old at the time, I would rather have been anywhere that day besides at the ballpark with my family. I don't remember the damned game at all. What I wouldn't give to get that day back.]

Balex Bondsriguez*

With the delectable new information that A-Rod is a certified juicer, I hereby propose that Red Sox Nation merge the identities of Rodriguez and Barry Bonds and refer to them from now on as one steroid-fueled entity. Because eventually, their names are going to sit atop the all-time home run charts as the consecutive number one and number two, and it's easier to make fun of them with a single, easily condensable moniker. Perhaps someday their record-breaking home run balls will rest side-by-side in the Hall of Fame with identical asterisks. For now at least, the taunts of "A-Fraud" will have a newfound potency.