Tuesday, August 01, 2006
That is it. That is IT. The glutes, the elbow however many moons ago, now the knee. It ends here. Varitek is far too important to be left vulnerable to these injuries. Dougie is not a viable longterm backup and who the blibberin' heck else do we have? We traded Shoppach away and tonight he was tagging Dougie out at home (and then forgetting how many outs there were in the inning, much to Don and Remy's amusement). We have nothing*. We need 'Tek.
FROM NOW ON, HE PLAYS IN BUBBLEWRAP.
I know that Kristen will heartily approve of this measure. It is necessary and not in the least bit hysterical. After all, I could be demanding that he swaddle himself in high-impact foam rubber and flak jackets, but I am not. I only wish to see him covered lovingly, head to toe, in bubblewrap. And yes, that's with clothes on underneath, you sick freaks.
Bubblewrap is flexible, so he can move with relative ease. Bubblewrap is tranlucent, so he can see through it. Bubblewrap is fun, so Manny can play with it in the dugout. Bubblewrap protects from damage. It is the solution.
Secure the bubblewrap with duct tape and he'll never break again.
In happier Red Soxish things, Kyle Snyder did valiant battle once again with his inherent Kyle Snyderness, and once again emerged the victor. He's really gutting it out, lately. It must be exhausting to have to continually fight your basic nature of suck, but there's no denying it, he stepped up big today after Boomer did pretty much exactly what we were all expecting him to do. Tito was so proud of him it almost sounded like he was about to cry in the postgame interviews.
And David Ortiz is not human. Seriously, what can you say? WHAT CAN YOU SAY? How do you even begin to quantify what he's doing? And don't tell me it's his 7th walkoff homer or whatever this season, because I know you can quantify things with numbers, and I'm a big fan of the numbers, trust me, so long as I don't have to crunch them and I only ever have to see their delicious, meaty end result stats. I'm a big believer in baseball as logically-run affair and winning as a science and I know that Moneyball is a book about a business scheme and not really about OBP.
But there comes a time when you have to go beyond all that and look at baseball as a human endeavor. And there are some times when baseball as a human endeavor simply cannot be conceived, and it's then that you have to regard baseball as a superhuman endeavor. And then you get someone like David Ortiz who takes it to a level above even that, and you have to just sit back and go, "Holy cats, he did it again."
How does he do it? How? I don't know; none of you know. Ortiz himself may not even know, and maybe that's best, because it might be the sort of thing that, the more its understood, the harder it is to do. For some guys hitting is a very intellectual pursuit but for a lot of them it's like an electron: you can know its location or its directional spin, but you can't know both at once. You can be thinking about hitting or you can actually be hitting, but you can't be doing both at once, the moment you start to do one you have to stop doing the other or it just doesn't work.
I don't believe Papi is thinking very deliberately when he comes up to the plate with a couple men on and a two-run deficit in the bottom of the 9th. If he was he would be paralyzed by the pressure of it all and he'd strike out or lose control of the bat and watch it go flying into the crowd or something. I don't know what he's doing. He doesn't know what he's doing. But everyone hopes he just keeps on doing it.
If he stays on this pace of awesomeity, there can be no sane way to deny him the MVP.
As for the trade deadline, screw that. I never liked trade deadlines anyways.
*Actually, this concerns me. 'Tek is on the wrong side of 30 and not getting any younger, Theo's attempts to find an age-reversing formula fermenting in the bottom of the Atlantic notwithstanding. Who are we grooming as his replacement? Cause I know the market for catchers is thin over all of baseball. I'm not asking for a Joe Mauer or a Brian McCann ('tho that'd be awfully nice and I'd take it in a heartbeat), but we need something going on in the minors.Labels: baseball, David Ortiz, injury, Jason Varitek, MLB, Red Sox
2:11 AM
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