For once in my lifetime the roles were reversed between these two teams that most sports shows claim to be the best rivalry in baseball, maybe all sports. The Red Sox looked confident in games 6 and 7 in Yankee Stadium. The Yanks looked scared. They made the inopportune errors. The breaks went our way. Has the Curse been reversed?
We’ll see about that starting Saturday in Fenway.
Game seven is tonight. So will this be the last game of the Red Sox 2004 season? If we go by past history, they will lose in some spectacularly unexpected way. If for some miracle the do win, I still won’t able to celebrate because the only possibly reason for advancement would be to lose the World Series to who ever. I know most of you are hoping the Sox lose so I will shut up about them and get back to my usually witty repartee. My wife is hoping they lose so we can get to back going to bed at a normal hour again. Blogging early so I can watch the game on TV. I’m sure I will have something to say either way tomorrow.
I can’t stop rooting for the Red Sox just yet. I listened to the game on MLB.com until the 9th inning last night. Then I watched innings 10 through 13 on Fox. I turned it off about 10:30 thinking that they just might be at it all night. I’m watching or listening as long as it is convenient, I can seem to turn off the game and not worry about the out come. Maybe that is why the Red Sox keep hanging in there, they feel the same way, like they have nothing to lose, so what the heck. Of course it could be their master plan to fight back, forcing a 7th game, just so they can rip my heart out with a tragic loss on a walk-off homer by the unlikeliest Yankee (ala, Bucky Fucking Dent.)
The miserable bastards pulled it off last night by winning on an Ortiz homer in the bottom of the twelfth. I quit listening in the fourth and went to bed. The way I found out they won was when the weather channel OCM this morning gave me a forecast for game five in Boston. Seeing as they are playing this afternoon, I can’t use the going to bed excuse, so I’m listening to it on Internet radio. Once today’s game is over and they have lost, I’ll be able to forget about this painful period in my life…
This is our year. We are going to win the World Series. It just wouldn’t mean as much unless we beat the Yankees to get there. The road to the World Series goes through New York.
It is the top of the 5th in game 3 and the Red Sox are losing 13 to 6. They must have taken a wrong turn trying to get through NY. One time twenty-odd years ago I decided to drive through New York City on I-95 on my way back home to Connecticut from Tennessee. Not smart. Somehow I ended up in Coney Island. In trying to correct my error I some how ended up crossing the George Washington Bridge back into NJ. Ever since that fateful night, I have gone way around the Big Apple to the west on my way home to CT. I learned my lesson, apparently the Red Sox have not.
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.