Red Sox Nation

They Showed Me

I don’t know what has come over me. For the 2 springs I’ve lived here, I have outsourced the weeding and tidying up of the yards surrounding the house. This year I’m doing it myself. Donna was the yard person, and I’d just come in at the end with the whipper-snipper 1 and tidy the edges. Here in Portland, where the winter is nothing but rain, the weeds here are hardy, to say the least. I have spent a couple hours a day starting on Sunday, and I’ve sprayed weed killer over everything that is unsightly and have one half of one side yard done. I’ve yanked out all the dead stuff, and I put down weed-blocking fabric and mulch, so next year it should be easier. The second half is pretty easy because it is more mature; that should be one more day. In the other side yard the previous owners put down a layer of small gravel, which looked really nice, but they didn’t put down any weed block, so it is filled with hundreds of invasive sprouting things. I have got 25 or so thistle plants there. Some are as tall as 4′ high. That side will probably take me all next week…

The Sox did beat the Detroit Tigers today. It’s the first time this year they have won three in a row and swept a series. This weekend is a big test; they are home for a four-game series with the Tampa Bay Rays. Tampa is only a half game behind the Yankees in the division and are 8.5 games ahead of the Sox. The Rays are hot right now; they’ve won 6 in a row and 12 of their last 13 games.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 37.9%

 

On a Roll Now

The Red Sox have now won 2 games in a row and seem like they have righted the ship with the new manager and staff thing. Those wins bring their record all the way up to 15-21, and they are now a mere 10 games behind the dreaded Yankees in the division. Baseball Reference predicts their best record possible is 90-72. I say, “Ha,” they have one more game with Detroit tomorrow, and I’m predicting they lose, and their Wild Card chance will be right back down to 30% again.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 31.7%

 

Going To Be A Long Season

I have sat helpless for the last two afternoons watching the Red Sox lose 2 games to the Evil Empire, aka the New York Yankees. Yesterday they were shut out, and today they managed to score one too-late run in the bottom of the ninth. They currently sit on the bottom of the AL East with 9 wins and 15 losses. In the last 6 games they have scored 1, 1, 2, 8, 0, and 1 runs. I know it’s early and all, but I’d bet that their chances of making the playoffs five months from now are less than 30%.2

Back in the day I would add tidbits of info to the bottom of a post, like convertable top transistions or Moss Motoring Challenge points. Maybe I should add that Wild Card Chance percentage to the bottom of my posts going forward.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 44.2%

 

Quiet Sunday

Watched a couple of car videos on YouTube, watched an episode of The West Wing and then listened to corresponding podcast episode of The West Wing Weekly and then watched a Red Sox spring training game on MLBTV.

After lunch I headed over near the Troutdale Airport where there are some paved and unpaved trails and took a 3 mile saunter. Now, ripping a bunch of Noir Jazz off of YouTube for listening to in the car when I have to drive somewhere and it’s raining.

After dinner I’ll probably watch an episode or two of something called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. It is fifteen roughly one hour long episodes covering film from all over the world. The first couple on the origins of motion pictures was real interesting, but now it is starting to fracture and my interest is wanning, but it kills some time and it is still interesting in spots.

Briefly A Citizen Again

In 2014 I renounced my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. I was going to watch the games on MLBTV instead of listening to them on the radio (which was a perk of RSN membership.) The first year I watched the TV games in between innings they would have silence with a screensaver style image in the background. Coming from radio where you heard the actual WEEI commercials, the lack of that “entertainment” was jarring. It actually bothered me. The quiet made the three minute breaks seem like ten. By year two I was used to it.

During year three they started throwing up random MLBTV highlights in between innings. I now found the sound from these images jarring, especially since the volume level for them was 30% louder than the game audio. Compounding the misery was there were only 4 or 5 “highlights”, so over the course of a nine inning game you’d see them each about 25 times. Up until now I was just listening to the NESN TV broadcasters do the game and while Dave O’Brien was a decent voice, he didn’t have the chemistry with Jerry Remy that the newly departed Don Orsillo had, so I went back to listening to the radio announcer sound over the TV pictures.

Last year, the fourth, the MLBTV highlights were replaced by those annoying Chevrolet “Real People, Not Actors” commercials. They were made even more annoying by the fact that there was just one of them played like three times during each break so you got to see the same thing like 50 times a game. The radio sound with TV picture worked pretty well against it until somewhere in the second half of the season while watching the games on the Roku box they figured out how to override the radio commercials with the audio from the Chevy commercials (along with the typical volume increase.)

This year I decided to to drop MLBTV entirely and go back to the Gameday Audio. I just couldn’t abide by paying $120 and still having to listen commercials. Well why not join the Red Sox Nation again? For the same $20 it costs just for the radio broadcasts I can get that and a few other perks, so I signed up on March 20th. I didn’t get a chance to listen to a broadcast for several days and when I did I could hear it on the radio but, when I tried using the At Bat app on the phone I couldn’t get access. I could hear using the Roku box, but not on the Kindle.

I contacted MLB Customer Service via email to ask what the problem might be. The first email told me to go to settings and login with my credentials – well, no shit Sherlock, already tried that. Next email from them told me to uninstall the app, restart my phone, install the app and sign in. Even though I already done this once, I did it again. Emailed back to tell them that it didn’t help. MLB emailed back with, “We will contact you via phone.”

The actual customer service person I spoke to started to run me through some corrective attempts, but he must have been in training because at nearly every step of the way he would have to put me on hold for a minute to find out what was next. It was an excruciatingly slow process and when I realized we were doing the same two emailed scenarios again I hung up in frustration. While I was on hold with the CSR I went online to the Red Sox Nation web site and found a contact phone number there. It wasn’t an 800 number, the area code was 617 (Boston, MA), so I dialed it and got an answering machine.

I got a call from that same phone number a few minutes later and when I told the woman what my problem was, she explained that the Red Sox Nation Gameday Audio thing only applied to computers, not mobile devices. She could offer me my money back because I was unsatisfied with my membership, so I took it. Then waited a day and purchased the At Bat app on my phone and not only can I use it on the phone, but on both computers, the Roku box and the Kindle too.