Monday, June 04, 2007
I was commiserating with Beth about this game, and the bloody UNFAIRNESS of it all. "How could this happen?" we sulked. The Red Sox are playing good ball these days! The Yankees are cellar-dwelling gnomes whose supposed savior is an old man with a case of muscular crotch rot! The standings say that this series should have been ouuuuurrrrssss!
Maybe so. But Red Sox/Yankees games exist outside of the "real" world. If the standings represent the space-time continuum, a Red Sox/Yankees series represents a parallel plane of existence where none of the usual physical rules of the universe apply. In the NORMAL world, the Red Sox should have at least taken 2 of 3. But in the RED SOX/YANKEES world, records go out the window and anything at all can happen. In my deranged little Red Sox fan mind, I firmly believe this.
The Nation did its collective best. Chants of "Where is Roger?" and screams of "MINE!" or "HA!" every time a ball came near ARod... blonde wigs and masks, also directed at ARod, and all the usual range of anti-Yankeedom that unites Fenway for such games were out in full force.
There was the usual dash of Sox/Yanks drama. All the hit batsmen in the first game, and then Lowell and Mientkiewicz colliding... Yankees saying Lowell's play was maybe dirty, Lowell immediately snarking back that he learned that sort of thing when he was on the Yankees... just a mess. A glorious, typically frenzied rivalry-fueled mess.
It all came down to those moments of ridiculously perfect drama that characterize Sox/Yanks matchups. Who should hit the game and series winning homerun but ALEX FREAKIN' RODRIGUEZ, the brunt of every joke in both cities for weeks. Of course, right? Like it could come down to anything else. And then Mariano Rivera had to remember that he's Mariano Rivera, and shut us down. The rest of the league has been discovering that he's human, but of course in the strange parallel world that is Sox/Yankees, he has fully regained his alien powers.
It's tiring. It's hard being in an alternate universe where up is down, black is white, and the Yankees are an actual threat. I'm sure everyone will be glad to head to Oakland for some hopefully normalized baseball, even if it does mean Wrong Coast times and prolonged exposure to the sheer horror of Danny Haren's facial hair.Labels: ARod, baseball, loss, Red Sox, rivalry, Yankees
1:05 AM
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