Cursed To First - Sox and Pats forever.

I am saddened to bring you a Josh Beckett Face

...but, alas, it must be done.

Do you recall ever seeing him with such an expression? Me, either. Pissed off, yes. Looking that...defeated? No. Hilg.

About midway through the bottom of the second, as Beckett shook off V-Mart and fussed and fumed at everyone's favorite, CB Bucknor, I wondered how long it would be before he couldn't take it anymore and disappointed his mother by blowing a gasket. Turns out the answer was 6.2 innings.

That's when a pitch slipped from his hand and hit Mike Napoli, who was only too happy to hold his left shoulder out for the incoming ball. And sure enough, with two stolen bases and a run already wearing on his nerves in the inning, there went Beckett, storming from the mound toward the umpire, complaining bitterly.He continued to spit and sputter as V-Mart jogged out toward him for a meeting, and the ministrations of the catcher seemed largely ineffective in calming Beckett.

When Erick Aybar followed with a double over Ellsbury's head in deep center to put the Angels up 4-1, it was clear Beckett was cooked. He was pulled from the game mid-inning, hardly the outcome Red Sox fans had vowed after the Angels and umpiring had gotten to No. 1 starter Jon Lester the night before.

But this was also another night in which unfortunate starting pitching and officiating were overshadowed by an utterly ineffectual Red Sox offense. You could argue that's still a result of the Angels winning the starting pitching matchup, but this is also a Red Sox team that once went approximately a Biblical epoch without being able to buy a bleepin' timely hit back in July and early August, so I'm not sure I buy that. Especially since they had the tying run at the plate against Brian Fuentes in the top of the ninth, and still went quietly into that good night.

That said, this could just be the large amounts of Robitussin I've consumed in the last three days, but I remain surprisingly Zen about this whole thing so far. The Sox can clearly play better than this, and we've been through too many postseasons around here this decade to count the Sox out when their backs are against the wall.

Sunday. Fenway Park. Noon. Be there. And Go Sox.

Not what we had in mind

(Photo by Sam)

It really doesn't matter who the player is -- seeing someone struck on a baseball field by the ball, another person, or a piece of broken bat and go down like a ton of bricks is always a terrible experience. One second, we're all shaking our fists at the television, cursing Lester's slow start at the Stadium, and the next, none of that matters one bit.

It was just yesterday that it was reported Lester will start Game 1 in the playoffs rather than Josh Beckett. Then suddenly, as the replay loop of the ball striking next to Lester's right knee and boomeranging back toward home plate at a sickening angle began to play, all of that seemed in doubt.

But to me, it was more than that. The attachment to Jon Lester is deeper and more personal than for many other players among Sox fans, a feeling embodied perfectly by the way Tito gently touched his head, then shoulders, once Lester was on his feet again, as if he were his own child.

I had tears in my eyes watching Lester roll around next to the mound and grimace in agony, clutching his knee. Nobody wants to see that with any player--but with Lester, our homegrown boy, our survivor, seeing him in that kind of pain was especially cruel.

Thankfully Lester was helped to his feet and was able to limp off the field under his own power, though a trainer kept that symbolic and protective hand on him at all times, and Big Papi immediately abandoned his seat on the bench to follow Lester down the tunnel -- quite literally, the heart and soul of the team left with him.

After that, September callup Hunter Jones was tapped, gulped, and was thrown to the wolves of the Yankees lineup, promptly tacking on two more runs before the inning was even finished. 5-0 Yankees with our starter literally knocked out in the bottom of the third. The rest was a foregone conclusion.

I don't know what it is about the Red Sox and Yankees since the All-Star Break. All I know is, the Sox will seem to get hot elsewhere, and then run into the Yankees like a brick wall, and that trend continued with this game.

Last night, though, it only added insult to a much more important injury. To be honest, once Lester left, I was pretty much shot for the night. It was hard to pay attention after that. And just as well I didn't -- Boston was soundly defeated, 9-5.

Thankfully, it's been reported since that Lester has a deep contusion (bruise) in his right quadriceps, no bone involvement, and may not even miss a start. However, it's not as if his performance hadn't been worrisome before this happened; the moment he got hit, he was standing on the mound down three runs and with the bases loaded. Now he's lucky to have escaped a broken kneecap in his plant leg -- and a thousand new question marks about the 2009 postseason for the Sox just sprang up overnight.

Why are these Jets fans smiling?

God, I hate it when these people are happy.

Post on an EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING Patriots game at MVN.

Tek Message

Tek Message, originally uploaded by ConfessionalPoet.

My favorite memory of Richard Seymour

December 2003:

Of all the images shown on the Jumbo-Tron yesterday--Bruschi on the prowl, men without shirts screaming into the snowstorm, various witty signs held by fans--the one that speaks to this controlled insanity the most was of the face of Richard Seymour.

Seymour was held out of the first quarter because he had arrived late at the stadium after attending his grandfather's funeral the night before. When he came in in the second, he was loaded for bear. And yet as a thumping hip-hop beat blared over the loudspeakers, Richard bobbed his head, smiled, and mumbled the words to himself, a relaxed and focused man in the insular world of his helmet. Later, he caught sight of the cameras on him and smiled out of the giant screen as the crowd drove itself into paroxysms of noise.

As the din swelled, Seymour flapped his arms in the internationally recognized sign for "Yell louder". The yell went off the charts and Seymour stood back and bathed in it, hands in a GQ-pose by his head, nodding and smiling. The crowd kicked it up yet another notch.

At the absolute crescendo, Seymour looked into our collective eyes and brought his right fist to his chest, once, twice, right between the 9 and the 3 on his jersey. Who knows if he was thinking of his grandfather, or the fans, or some combination of both, but it was an incredible lovefest just then between a superstar defenseman and tens of thousands of his closest friends.

Shortly after that, the flakes began blowing in. The Jacksonville Jaguars looked dazed, as if they were just waiting to wake up from the nightmare. The score piled up on them even as the drifts stacked up on the field and in the stands. The snow began flying in time to the stadium music, just as it had in the shutout the previous week against Miami. It was clear that the Jaguars were dead in the water by halfway through the fourth quarter. But the vast majority of the fans stayed, hollering, until the clock on the scoreboard read 00:00.

This morning, it was announced that Richard Seymour has been traded to the Oakland Raiders for a 2011 first-round draft pick. We know we're supposed to root for the laundry, and yet these days, when they come, still feel like a punch in the gut.

Shadows on the Wall

As it turns out, yesterday was only a brief respite from a relentless pounding the Red Sox are taking in the second half vs. the Yankees.

It began with hope after a decent performance the previous time around. A maddening, unreasonable hope; not two days ago I was finally writing the Sox off. For good. Again. Then, the next day they made me look like a fool for doubting.

"That's what baseball fandom's all about," replied Sam when I told her this over text message Saturday night. Maybe, but this season has been particularly frustrating; if you can affect a stoic pessimism or the flaws in your team are minor, it's one thing, but there's nothing that will make you more irritable than hopes dashed repeatedly. Somehow they keep pulling me back in, and that's what I hate most about moments like the first pitch of tonight's game, which went rocketing into the home bullpen as if to say: Ha ha, suckers.

Even as far as 5-3, with the Commander still out there eating up innings and the game within reach, I forbade myself to jump back off the bandwagon (though truth be told I feel more like I've been dragging along behind it for a while).

Not a moment after that decision, Alex Rodriguez smoked one off Beckett, just over the fateful red line on the edge of the Monster. 7-3, Yankees, and a hush settled over Fenway Park.

Some bile has been spewed about the fact that Ortiz sat vs. Sabathia when he's a career .304 with two homers against the big guy, but as Tito explained, those numbers may be, ahem, a little stale. The 2009 Papi has a pretty even lefty / righty split: .229 against lefties and .230 against righties. In other words, he's sucked against both.

There's also the Varitek / Martinez succession controversy, but with Martinez in at first base that debate is moot, as is the Varitek / Martinez / Beckett catching triangle at issue after the series in Toronto, since tonight the Pitcher Whisperer (per Chad Finn) was behind the plate.

Before the game was over, a thread sprang up in the public forums on SoSH entitled, "What the holy hell is wrong with Beckett?" Theories were scattered, and many comments amounted to shrugs. Beckett has said in the past that people forget he is capable of just sucking eggs sometimes. Right now, that seems the most plausible explanation for his recent performances.

Unfortunately, mortality from Beckett is something this year's Sox can ill afford, which is why these smaller arguments, in the end, feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A team built for the long haul can accomodate the fact that its top-of-the-rotation starters are not machines.

Already, scrutiny has increased on the way this team is constructed, and the recent off-season decisions made by the front office. It reminds me of the 2007 Patriots, who went out and got Randy Moss after an attempt Tom Brady to make do with spit and bailing wire at wide receiver went over rather badly in the AFC Championship game.

That debate is for the Hot Stove, though, and right now it remains the dog days of August. This month, the Sox have held their own against weaker teams like the Jays and roughly equivalent teams like the Rangers, but the Yankees have played as if possessed by spirits. The way these teams have matched up before and after the All-Star Break has been ridiculously uneven; before, the Red Sox racked up 8 wins, and after, they've managed only one -- yesterday.

The Sox have Wake and Daisuke returning from injury, which will hopefully mean Brad Penny gets the Matt Clement treatment, and yes, there is a chance they could return as their ideal selves, the offense could heat up to its potential, and then the entire complexion of this thing could change.

And yet even as I write that, feeling just a glimmer of that pain-in-the-ass hope creeping back in, the memory of tonight's fifth inning jumps to mind. Tonight, it's hard to imagine much beyond this malaise until a "hard reboot", as they say in the trades, can happen once the season is over.

The Friday Night...what?

I hate the sound of breaking glass, originally uploaded by Netream

Picture, if you will, a frail and fragile Hope, embodied as a tiny, somewhat amorphous, furry thing, one with gigantic, brown baby-seal eyes that blink at you beseechingly.

That was the Hope I had after the Sox swept a team! on the road!! (even if it was the Blue Jays) and, while they lost the series, still authored that amazing comeback on that Friday night in Texas.

I wasn't thinking this Hope had legs. But there it was, just the same. I wrote a glass half-empty / half-full post. Things had reached...equilibrium.

Picture, if you will, an 18-wheel, tandem, Mack truck, one with a huge NY symbol on the front in Christmas lights. Picture it bearing down on a squealing Hope, then striking, flattening, and obliterating Hope into fragrant road pizza by the side of Rte 128.

That would be my best description of how it felt to watch the first three innings of last night's ball game.

And yes, I only really watched the first three innings. Oh, we were set up at my friend Ryan's house with pizza and bubblies, watching eagerly on his big screen TV as the game began. Our speculation on what would happen in the game, in retrospect, was almost...cute. Ditto the blog previews I read leading up to 7:12 pm, many of whom were caught up in the Tek / Martinez controversy or wondering whether Brad Penny had another start in him like the one he showed against Detroit.

By the third inning that half full / half empty glass, if I may mix my metaphors a bit, had us all a little better acquainted with what it's like to be David Wells.

Back on our couch, we flipped to the Little League playoff game between Peabody, Mass. and San Antonio, TX, which began in a taut pitchers' duel. Sure enough, by the fourth inning of that game the Boston affiliates were getting crushed.

Even our Little League team was losing. And when we found ourselves excoriating 13-year-olds for failing to make catches in the outfield, we decided a switch to Comedy Central stand-up would be best for all involved.

So that's what we did. We watched most of Jim Gaffigan's King Baby on the big screen TV with our pizza. Every so often my cell phone would buzz with text updates. After a while, I kept hoping the next one would be the one that said "You have exceeded your ten messages per day limit."

Eventually it came, but not until after we switched back again just in time to catch a 10-1 score, to which Ryan reacted by dry-heaving. We went back to Gaffigan.

"This is the kind of game that gets a nickname," Ryan finally said. "The Friday Night...something."

"Massacre's already been used. Twice," I replied. "Maybe...the Friday Night Failure?"

"The Friday Night Face-Smashing," he responded miserably.

An hour or so later, we switched with one eye open back to NESN. We were still unprepared for what we'd find. When we saw that impossible "20", Ryan let out an involuntary little shriek, a shriek very much like the one I'd pictured my little Hope making, with his very last breath.

If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have better pitching* in the band

Jon Lester, you're all set. The rest of you...

I'm not sure what to say. Am I off the bandwagon? Well, I'm here, aren't I?

But let's be realistic. The Sox have gone on two road trips in the last several weeks, and during one of them they relinquished most realistic hopes of overtaking the AL East. During this most recent one, they have ceded first place in the AL Wild Card.

This isn't to say they're staring up at a 5.5 - 6.5 game deficit, as they are in the division. But they're now in a position where Tampa Bay is breathing down their neck, and after this weekend, Texas is at least looking like a worthy rival, if not the better team.

The despair would be worse, of course, had Friday night not happened. That night, as with Youkilis's freak-out last week, was easy to envision as the beginning of a 2004-style late-season resurgence. And it could still happen.

It could still happen. Right?
___________________

*And timely hitting. And the ability to prevent eight stolen bases in one game. But that didn't all fit very well.

Big Papi, Where Art Thou? Continued

What I still find a little odd is that it was the only time I sat down to watch sports news during my whole vacation, and I just happened to flip on SportsCenter at the home of a friend I was visiting right at the moment it flashed BREAKING NEWS...

Before yesterday, I was still on hiatus from this site because I still hadn't quite summoned the courage to write the somewhat overdramatic, somewhat maudlin, reaction post to the news about David Ortiz being on the 2003 "steroid list".

Because let's face it, when that news plopped, steaming, into the midst of my vacation, my first gut response was more than a little dramatic and emotional - I retired to the guest room of my friend's house, sat down on the bed, and for the second time in my life, I cried about baseball.

I was crying because I believed this to be the first step in an A-Rod / Andy Pettitte style 'roids scandal, where we had to listen to the one player I've always known I couldn't handle looking at this way tell us in an excruciating press conference how he'd been lying all along, and that he was just as big a juicer, cheater, and worst of all, liar, as the rest of the idols who have tumbled from their pedestals in recent years. I looked at this as the beginning of the end.

Even now, I still feel it's a turning point, and I still feel the sense I had, which filled me with sadness, remains correct. Once this Pandora's box is opened on any slugger, it never fully closes. There are too many people out there who want to believe Papi juiced every bit as much as I don't want to believe it, and the mere allegation is all that's needed to change the discussion around his name, forever.

While turning over that post in my mind, I also made the rounds checking others' reactions. As usual in moments of baseball hell, one of the most comforting things is the realization that you're not alone in your misery. I was surprised that my cousin, a Twins fan, was the only person to even attempt to talk trash with me about it - after fielding an angry nation's reaction to SpyGate over at MVN after Super Bowl XLII, I had been expecting a similar in-your-face experience when the news broke about Ortiz.

Instead, what I saw was depression much like my own, even from people not invested in the Red Sox. 

"A sad day for baseball," texted a friend of mine who's a Yankees fan. SI called Ortiz 'baseball's first cuddly doper' in a surprisingly gentle one-page editorial. Shaughnessy didn't even waste a day, so I heard, disowning the 04 and 07 World Series, but the general reaction seemed to be apathy, tinged with only the faintest traces of malaise, many of those coming from Red Sox fans in anguish about the news and its implications.

Even the normally humorous Surviving Grady showed a grave mood, with a post from Denton that concluded, "I've never felt so disillusioned about something I love as I feel about baseball right now." Really, at that point in time, this did not feel like an overstatement of any kind. (No crying in baseball, my ass).

I may not have written here for even longer than I had planned, but I've spent most of my non-work time in the last week ruminating on this situation, working out the implications, drawing lines for myself in the sand. Discussing and turning this over with anyone I could get to listen, Red Sox fans and non-Red Sox fans alike.

The first thing I determined unequivocally was that, even if David Ortiz were found to have undeniably shot steroids into his ass throughout 2004 (something the league's test results purportedly refute), you can't just disown the World Series. As Joy of Sox put it:

The idea that any team's championship is "tainted" because one or two or seven of the players on the 25-man roster used performance-enhancing drugs is ignorant of history, completely lacking in common sense and has no place in any even semi-intelligent discussion of the issue.

The games were the games. The results and records are final -- and absolutely legitimate. The Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. The Yankees won the 2000 World Series. The Reds won the 1919 World Series.

Even if I were to disown the World Series out of an intellectual sense that it was the right thing to do, it would feel fake. I just can't go there. As I put it the first time people were running around screaming about how the 2004 and 2007 World Series were now (poof!) invalid because Manny was suspended from the Dodgers:

Maybe self-righteous rage is the point of sports for some people. Maybe there are some people who  believe that, through some magical transference, the abilities and, ideally, unimpeachable sportsmanship of athletes reflect on the people who buy a ticket to watch them play.

If that's your cup of tea, so be it. But I don't think there's any point in sucking whatever joy's left out of the game that way.

If I were to insist everything about my pastimes were completely in line with the most exacting moral standards, lest I be called out as a hypocrite by some stranger on the Internet, I'd live a miserable life indeed. It's cliche, but at the end of the day, life is just too friggin' short to imagine burning all my Red Sox memorabilia in the back yard because the New York Times says some unnamed sources say David Ortiz's name is on a list somewhere of people who did banned substances. Who really lives their life that way?

But that all did little to lessen the inherent suckitude of the situation. What still had me tied up in knots was the fact of who it was. Call me naive, in denial, drinking the Kool-Aid, whatever, but even knowing the nature of the era, I had still held out hope that Ortiz would be one of the few MLB star hitters not connected to PEDs in any way, and one of the few Red Sox superstars who finishes his career here on the same glowing terms under which it began. I had held out hope that just once, as cherished a figure as Boston's Big Papi could remain unambiguously loved.

Even after the statements yesterday, which changed the whole picture all over again in my mind, I don't know that I can regain the same hope and trust and personal investment in Papi that I had before this. At the very least, it's going to take quite a while. And that in itself is enough to break my heart, even if it's not as broken as it theoretically could be.

I know he's a professional athlete I've never met. I know that being a fan is really about rooting for the laundry, the Interior Stadium, and all that. But Ortiz had been an exception to that hard-learned rule. I keep a picture of him in each room of my apartment as well as next to my desk at work, because looking at him has always made me smile. What could be bad about something like that? I've reasoned.

Now I know - you leave yourself vulnerable to a week like I've had this last week, a week where it felt like a small but significant light in my day-to-day life had gone out. A week, baseball-wise, worse than any I can remember since October 2003.

Then came yesterday's press conference, and the statement by the MLB Player's Assocation.

***

This is where "Part 2" of this incident begins. Both Papi and the union's statements yesterday surprised me - I was really expecting an A-Rod-style Press Conference of Shame followed by an old-fashioned savaging of everything I hold dear about the Red Sox by the same national audience that brought us SpyGate (and yes, as you can tell, I remain somewhat traumatized by that whole affair).

Instead, yesterday's statements threw me for another loop, making me feel both better and worse at the same time. Better because no previous accused juicer has been backed as strongly, that I can recall, by the players' union. Better, obviously, because between Papi's claim that a legal supplement caused him to test positive and the MLBPA's statement on the testing process, it seems there's more gray area here than the original NYT story and overwrought ESPN follow-up reporting indicated.

But here's where, as Shaughnessy--ever the voice of the Devil on Red Sox Nation's shoulder--rightly points out (and yes, I did give his column my biannual read in my parents' dead-tree copy of the Globe this afternoon) that now, it's become all about what you want to believe.

So it also made me feel worse, because of the way these suspicions and accusations always take on a life of their own, because the mere existence of this question mark means it will hang over Papi's head from now on. And because having gotten a taste of this experience, this feeling of betrayal, this sense of having been made to look like a fool just for loving a player in the Steroid Era...the only thing I can imagine worse than that feeling is having to go through it all over again.

I'd spent the last week sad; I spent yesterday pissed off.

Do I continue to believe in Ortiz, only to eventually -- maybe even probably -- be kicked in the teeth for real? Or do I get a head start now building up some distance, some defense mechanisms, after this week of suspicion, and potentially rob myself of joy for no reason?

Even as I ask myself these questions, as a Red Sox fan, I already know what I will do.

An Open Letter to Dudes In the Front Rows of the Ballpark Concerning Foul Balls

Dudes, 

Nobody really cares at this point about the minutiae of Friday night's game, but some of the events of that night highlighted an ongoing issue that I think needs to be addressed -- namely, the fact that some of you in the front rows seem to be suffering from a strange and increasingly pernicious foul ball fetish.

What is the big deal about foul balls? I understand getting distracted when a screamer comes into your section, or a soaring popup is whistling through the air overhead, seemingly destined for your cranium. I can even get a little healthy competition when a ball is up for grabs, if only to show off your prowess to members of the opposite sex who may be interested.

But lately, it seems like every game I go to, one of you dudes down front insists on making a bigger, scarier deal about a foul ball than I even thought possible.

Personally, I believe that even if you happen to catch a ball "fair and square", if you are a male of drinking age and there are kids nearby, you should give it to them. Trust me when I say this will impress members of the opposite sex more, no matter how deft and athletic you try to be about elbowing old ladies and eight-year-olds out of the way in the process of making a catch.  More often than not, though, you dudes seem to be choosing the souvenir over civility.

Be that as it may, discourtesies toward one's fellow fans are one thing. Interfering with the game is another.

Case in point: the dude down front last Friday night who reached out and snatched a foul ball away from the glove of Kevin Youkilis during the fourth inning, a ball that should've been an out. An out that might have staved off what would turn into a four-run Mariners rally.

I was proud to be among the rest of the fans on the third-base side, who chanted "ALL YOUR FAULT!" repeatedly in his direction as each run scored.

Because, dude. Not cool. At all.

One more thing on the foul ball front. If you must alter the course of the game in your mad pursuit of a dollar's worth of cowhide and cork, please at least try to alter it in your team's favor.

Case in point: the dude on the first base side who failed to snatch a foul popup out of the glove of Russell Branyan in the bottom of the eleventh on Friday night, a foul ball that might've kept the rally alive when instead it fell just one run short.  That dude deserved every second of the "ALL YOUR FAULT" he got from the grandstands, too.

Otherwise, dudes of the ballpark, believe me when I say I wish you, your zeal for the game, and your beer-fueled heckling of opposing players Godspeed. But let's ease off on the foul ball mania just a little bit, for everyone's sake.

Sincerely,

--Beth in Loge Box 150