FRS

I don’t know which is worse, watching the Red Sox lose the first two games of the series to the Yankees or watching it on Fox.

Their announcing crew is hurting my ears. Somebody named Joe or Jack Buck sounds like the most intelligent of the three, but he doesn’t have to go far. Tim McCarver doesn’t seem to be watching the same game as I am, he consistently gets names of the players wrong and is out of step with the action. And Al Leiter is so quiet that the only time you know he is there is when they show him on camera explaining how to throw a certain pitch and for a former pitcher he does that badly. They talk when they sound be quiet and when they should be talking there is silence. We see every pitch four times, first when it happens and three replays including one from a camera buried in the dirt near home plate. Please an important pitch in an important situation, but not every single one. The direction is herky-jerky. It is all over the place and makes MTV jump cuts seem sedate. Whenever they switch to the camera down the first base line the sound jumps 10 decibels louder too. They have a very annoying animated baseball that is used once a game to explain some facet of the game, I think, I turn the sound off. Fox is inserting an extra bit of promoing in between innings, we get back to the game just in time to see the pitcher release his first pitch of the inning. No lead in at all, if a pinch hitter is in or a new pitcher, you don’t know until after the action (if they tell you.)

I know this might not be Fox’s fault (although it probably is) but what is up with the ameriquest blimp? We get some nice aerial shots of the stadium and then they flash a little box telling us that it is coming from the ameriquest blimp with a nice illustration of a red, white & blue blimp. We never see the blimp. I’m betting if it is not a helicopter, and in fact a real blimp, it is not painted that way, but something in plain white hired for the occasion from the ACME Blimp Co. in Lakehurst, NJ.

I used to have a team I followed closely in each major sport. Almost all were centered in Boston.

The Bruins lost my love when the Hartford Whalers joined the NHL a lot closer to my home, but now the Whalers are gone from there. Moved to somewhere in North Carolina, possibly Charlotte (ironically closer to my now home), but hockey lost its appeal in it’s ever growing expansion into the southern states in search of the dollar. Plus how can you follow a team you can’t see on TV? The Celtics fell on hard times after Larry Bird left, but I hung in for a few more years. The game has changed from one of finesse to one of in-your-face one upmanship and it lost its appeal to me. Same thing with football where self-congratulations of grandiose proportions now occurs after the routine play. I was a LA Rams fan for some reason, not the Patriots as expected and followed them until they moved to St. Louis.

Maybe it was summer evenings listening to the games on the radio while growing up that has made my affection for baseball last. Well, the real baseball playoffs start in just a few minutes. Red Sox – Yankees and I’ll be glued to the tube hoping that this is the year.

For all you crazy Red Sox fans who wanted to play the Yankees to get to the World Series, you got your wish. NY won tonight beating the Twins 3 games to 1 setting up a rematch of last years American League Championship Series.

Well, I say be careful what you wish for. The Sox won the season series, but in the last 2 weekends of the season they played a home and home set of three games. Each team won 2 of 3 at their home parks. If that holds true, game seven of this series will be in New York and we will have to hope for a win in the Bronx.

Winning 6 to 1 in the 7th and cruising. No, that was not exciting enough, you give up 5 runs to let the Angels tie the game. And then you put me through a couple of innings of struggling relief pitching, before winning it in the bottom of the 10th. I don’t think I can take this for the next 2 weeks…

Please, Chris Berman and any other announcer, don’t ever give me that, “They are only X outs away from winning the series,” shit. Keep your mouth zipped, that phrase is historically the kiss of death for the Red Sox. (As it almost was tonight.)

The Bosox won game one of their 5 game series this afternoon against the Angels. Just ten more wins and the thing that has eluded them since 1918 will be theirs, a World Series victory. It would be sweet if we had to beat the Yankees to get there, but with history solidly on their side, I hope Minnesota knocks the Yanks out first.

Of course 3 losses in the next 4 games and I could very well be saying, again, wait until next year.

The regular season is over and now the nail biting starts:

I was kind of hoping for Oakland because we pretty much owned them during the regular season, but maybe it is a good thing, because my expectations probably would have turned around and bit me on the butt with an Oakland 3 game sweep or something equally horrible. The Sox took the season series 5-4 from the Angels, but if you believe this article, “Clash has the makings of a classic” the series will be exciting. And at least if games 4 and 5 are needed they will be on the weekend, so for this series there is only one late night, Wednesday.

Maybe the Red Sox, after last night’s heroic come from behind victory in NY, went out and caught dinner and a movie staying up into the wee hours of the morning. They certainly played like they didn’t get enough sleep, losing to the Yankees this afternoon 14-4 (and the game wasn’t as close as the score indicates.)

Not knowing they were on FOX this afternoon, I totally didn’t see the game. I guess I got lucky and was saved the agony of watching the massacre. But then if I had watched, could my good vibes have helped them change the outcome of the game?