My Red Sox Nation Cit­i­zen­ship pack­age arrived in the mail Sat­ur­day. This year instead of the basic Starter Level pack­age I usu­ally pur­chase for $15, I dou­bled my invest­ment and went for the All Star Level. For the extra dough I got some stuff that was cool, a 12″ x 18″ page full of Red Sox Fat­head decals that I can stick var­i­ous places and a Red Sox Year­book. And some not so cool, a cat­a­log of Red Sox themed mer­chan­dise to buy and a small draw­string bag made sort of like a sweat­shirt or a small sweat­shirt turned into a sort of draw­string bag.

But the real draw was the free hat. Reg­u­lar read­ers who are more obsessed with my life than I am will remem­ber that last year’s Red Sox hat only stayed in the head wear rota­tion until May before being donated to Good­will because the sox were hang­ing crooked. This year’s RSN hat has its socks dan­gling at the proper angle and this sea­son is look­ing good so far.

When I entered the Win/Loss Con­test over on a The Joy of Sox blog I was feel­ing a bit pes­simistic about the Red Sox Chances this year and picked 89 Wins & 73 Losses. The site owner chided me for my dim view, but boy it is look­ing like those totals are now pie in the sky optimistic.

Their cur­rent record is 59W & 65L (not count­ing tonight’s in progress game), so for my pre­dic­tion to be cor­rect the FRS will have to fin­ish the sea­son out by win­ning 30 and only los­ing 8 more games. I’m bet­ting the the odds of that hap­pen­ing are less than 1%!

The worst record picked by any­one was 85 & 77 and if the Sox play the rest of the way at the same win­ning per­cent­age as they have until now, their record will be the inverse of that worst pick and be 77–85.

I was lis­ten­ing to the FRS online for a while and in the fourth inning they were lead­ing 2–0. I went away and when I came back to the Red Sox home page to get Game­day tab, so I could check up on the game with­out lis­ten­ing to it. The first thing you see on the site is a pic­ture of tonight’s pitcher Aron Cook with the head­line, “Cook’s No-Hitter bro­ken in 6th.”

I look down at the line score and it is the Ori­oles lead­ing in the bot­tom of the 6th 5–2. Cooks no-hitter was gone alright, but so was the lead and his tenure on the mound for the evening.