We're not here to mess around

ALCS! ALCS! ALCS!

What a 9th inning. Holy mother of all that is sweet and buttery, I thought I was going to give myself an arrhythmia, it was so freaking awesome. And we get to have four heroes in Jon Lester, Jason Varitek, Jason Bay, and would you believe it, Jed Lowrie. If your first name begins with a J, I pretty much love you right now. (And I just want to say, I don't care how many times J-Mast screws up, even though he gave up the tying runs tonight, I will still love him and his bald head and his trying-so-hard-to-grow-a-beard babyface forever and ever. I was there for his first callup against the Angels in April, which looked like it was going to be a W until the bullpen blew it, and it was clear even then that the kid's got a future. Keep him around, Theo, please?)

Mike Scioscia is an annoying manager, but fortunately he's annoying in a way that makes his team lose games. He's the kind of guy who will call for a pitchout twice in a row, or try a risky play just because he can. So you just knew he was going to call for a suicide squeeze with Reggie Willits on third, Erick Aybar at the plate, and one out. To be honest, I was actually rooting for the squeeze play because I have never in my baseball-watching life seen it work, and it's more likely to get the runner tagged out than to allow him to score. And guess what, that's what happened: Aybar whiffed, Willits got stuck in a rundown, crisis averted. And let's credit umpire Tim Welke for the correct call. On the replay, Tek clearly had control of the ball and had him out before the ball got knocked out of his glove. So now the Angels fans can start the second-guessing and the postmortems and the chatter about Scioscia's job security. Have fun, guys.

Jed Lowrie has got to be feeling it now. He's a genuine big leaguer. How many times do you think little Jedders got his hair ruffled by his teammates and coaches after he drove in the winning run? Probably his head still smarts. And yeah, Mike Napoli totally stepped on Jason Bay's hand with his cleats as he dove into home plate headfirst. You could see the blood spots on Bay's uniform shirt during the TBS postgame interview. A parting shot? Probably not. Nevertheless, ouch. So when Bay slid in, of course, my first thought was, holy freaking awesome! I love you, Jed Lowrie! But is it bad that my second thought was, Excuse me? You expect me to go a whole four days without baseball until we begin the ALCS on Friday?

Oh yeah...against the Rays. Shit motherf&%#er shit shit f&%k. I know I'm supposed to be all excited about winning the ALDS against the reasonably tough Angels, but I can't be all smiles just yet. Because something is looming ahead of us. We haven't seen the Rays in almost three weeks, and I hope something bad has happened to them since September. Like, maybe Evan Longoria decided he'd rather pursue a career as a male catalog model, or perhaps Ozzie Guillen showed up at Scott Kazmir's home and "accidentally" made his gas grill explode. Or something. A healthy Rays lineup and an ailing Lowell/Beckett/Drew do not make for a good equation.

One more item--somewhere buried in the news was a fluff story about how Manny Ramirez is enjoying watching the Red Sox play while he waits around for the NLCS. "That's right, the Red Sox are paying my salary," he told the media. This is surely not the way to make amends with all those Boston fans you've insulted, Manny. Should Joe Torre and his merry band of AL East exiles (Manny, D-Lowe, Nomar, etc.) show up at Fenway Park for a World Series, I will personally add my voice to the boos directed at Manny (and, for what's it worth, the good-natured cheers directed at Lowe). If I don't have a ticket, I will stand outside on Lansdowne Street and wait for the moment to arrive.