Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Mmm. Turtle soup, anyone?
What a win. I mean, it's one thing to win a game. It's another thing to win a game against the Yankees, in New York. And it's another thing ENTIRELY to win a game against the Yankees, in New York, with Randy Johnson stripped impotently from the mound while the entire crowd boos him and his visible salivary glands, and with A-Rod fumbling around the infield like a newborn baby deer.
I mean, come on now. We ALL know what the Sox do with newborn baby deer. Mike Timlin, hello.
The Moment, though, all decisive and whatnot, for all of us I think, was Alex Gonzalez' 3-run homer. It was not just a little pop that stayed up. He, as Remy so eloquently said, "golfed it". The ball was in the park, and then WHAM NO IT IS NOT. Just a tremendously powerful-looking shot, and you could see the same thing when Manny homered to leadoff an inning a bit later. But we expect that out of Manny. Manny and homeruns are hand in hand, skipping through the flowering fields, braiding daisy chains together, making Matt Clement's allergies act up. Gonzo? Gonzo is a GONEB kind of player: Glove Only, No Expected Bat. When he gets an extra base hit it's a marvel to me; this gigantic homerun? Blew a fuse in my brain.
Of course that's assuming my brain fuse hadn't been blown by the stroke commercial. The animation. Where the guy's face freezes and melts down and the woman's arm drifts and oh my god it's all in cartoon form with a song. Please tell me I am not the only one to have seen this and also not the only one to find it to be in incredibly poor taste somehow.
Bernie Williams got tossed from the game. Oh how I chortled. In all fairness, the ump had a very generous strikezone going there, and a lot of guys were obviously not agreeing with him, on both sides. But poor Bernie Ked 3 times, and then as he was walking away from the last one he flipped his batting helmet backwards towards home plate. It was about a ruler's length away from making Bernie the next Delmon Young. If all this had come from, I dunno, Giambi or A-Rod or even one of the kids, Cano or something, it would've been more ho hum, but Bernie's usually so mellow that it was just strange and hilarious.
Mike Lowell. Should just get "doubles" tattooed on his ass by now. Something like his last 8 consecutive hits have been doubles. Remy and Orsillo wondered if there was some kind of record.
The meltdown of Tanyon Sturtze: is there any more enjoyable disintegration to watch in baseball right now? He's been plugging his way towards the minors all season. And he just couldn't stop giving up runs here. At one point I thought they might actually have to dig into their pen and get someone else to finish it out.
And, possibly I'm missing some basic Yankee fact here, but why Melky Cabrera? Is his bat really that much more highly developed than that of Bubba Crosby? Because I know Crosby's deceptively young-looking-- he's actually a few months shy of 30, and therefore not what you'd call much of a prospect anymore. Cabrera is a few months shy of 22. Creepily enough, it turns out they have the same birthday-- and he's pretty much not going to be anything more than AAAA kinda guy, and he had that awful play last season where he, Sheffield, and the wall conspired to badly misplay a ball, but. But. From what I've seen, he's more polished in the field than Cabrera, which isn't HARD because Cabrera appears to SUCK LIKE A LAMPREY in the field, and his bat isn't particularly better or worse.
And they already had Crosby up with the big club. So why Melky, New York? Why?
I'm about to crash, but this story just showed up in my inbox and I can't let it pass.
It absolutely disgusts me to read that. Like the guy says, you sit in the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium in Sox gear, you expect you're gonna hear it. And as many of those commenters say, I'm sure there are Sox fans who are just as bad as all that. But, and perhaps I'm naïve, I have never heard of ENTIRE SECTIONS at Fenway behaving like this. Localized idiots who can be very abusive and can 'detract from enjoyment of the game', the usual fare, yes. But this sounds so far above and away from anything anyone should experience at a ballpark that I half expect it to be written by a Michigan fan who ventured into the Horseshoe for an Ohio State football game.
The alleged behavior of the cops, as he describes it, is disturbing at best. I dearly hope there's some histrionic exaggeration there.
There are people commenting on that story saying, "well, it's the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, if you don't like it don't sit there". Holy freaking cats. What if some family wants to go to a game and all they can afford are bleacher seats? What if they love baseball and don't have the luxury or the choice of sitting somewhere other than in the bleachers? Are they saying kids should be exposed to that kind of behavior just because 'hey, that's where they're sitting, that's how it goes here'? That stuff shouldn't occur in any section of any ballpark. Or maybe the kids just shouldn't go at all, because hey, if you can't afford anything other than bleacher seats, you have no right to expect decent behavior.
I realize in my last post I was extolling the intensity of the rivalry and saying it shouldn't get watered down. But what this guy and his friends experienced is leaving 'intense baseball fan' territory and entering 'psychotic soccer fan' land. Even I get a kick out of some of the verbal taunts launched from the Yankee Stadium bleacher creatures, because hey, right back 'atcha when you're in our house. But this is, to put it simply, fucking ridiculous.
OK. Whatever. We won, we won big. We need to do it a couple more times, and it's the Moose tomorrow. The Moose troubles me. And then we've got Wake going, which is the ultimate baseball crapshoot.
Oh, one more thing. Did anyone else think that, with Beckett on the mound, Schilling looked all lonely standing by himself at the rail? I hardly noticed how inseparable they've become until they had to watch the game from different places.Labels: baseball, MLB, Randy Johnson, Red Sox, rivalry, Yankees
6:48 AM
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