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The Red Sox are trying to kill my father.
My dad grew up living and dying with the Red Sox, and even though he rooted for the Phillies when I was a kid and he roots for the Twins now, if you open him up and look at his heart, I'm convinced it's got that "B" on it. And every time they play the Yankees in a situation of any significance, he steels himself by telling me in advance how bad it's going to be. "The Red Sox will get killed by the Yankees," he says. Of course, he also likes, "The Twins will get killed by the Yankees." The Yankees loom large in his mind, the same way people who get thrown into lakes as children remain afraid of the bathtub.
In a way, it would have been merciful if they had just been swept. Four up, four down, forget it, and everybody gets to go home. Especially after they lost 19 to 8. NINETEEN TO EIGHT, people. Now that's just plain damn embarrassing. That series, at that point, could not end soon enough for me. Sometimes, it just hurts to look at it, you know?
I wasn't really surprised that they won a game when they were down 3-0, though. First of all, they're a better team than to get swept, and second of all, that's what the Red Sox do. They pump you up with a little hope, the better to rip out your liver with a melon baller. They always find, it seems, the most painful way to lose. The most agonizing way. The way that suggests that they may actually be trying to kill my father. I was a little surprised they won a second game. But that was the part that gave all the sports columnists the opportunity to say, "Don't be fooled -- they still don't have a chance."
I couldn't resist last night's game, even though I knew I shouldn't watch it. I am one of those people who hates the Yankees, for reasons that range from inherited (see: Dad, above) to visceral and mindless (I HATE the uniform, I HATE Derek Jeter, I HATE the fans, I HATE the word "Yankees," I HATE seeing them every goddamn year) to the relatively rational (those of us from small-market towns have every right to resent the way our measly payrolls are dwarfed in the stupidest financing system in sports) to the personally vengeful (see: Twins) to the philosophical (I really do believe having the rest of the American League effectively shut out of the World Series for almost ten years is bad for baseball, not that baseball doesn't shoot itself in the foot in a thousand other ways). I was pretty sure I would see the Yankees wrap up the series last night if I tuned in, because they really wouldn't want to let it go to a Game 7, and some part of my brain believes that the Yankees can do whatever they want to the Red Sox whenever they want to. It's inherited, like I said.
Curt Schilling logged more than eight seasons with my old team, the Phillies. He's 37 years old, and he's been in the major leagues since 1988. I'll put it this way: he's been doing it since I was in high school, and my 15-year reunion is this weekend. It's not OLD old, but . . . it's old. I always feel a sense of ownership with ex-Phillies and ex-Twins. It's not surprising that a guy who played all that time in Philadelphia wouldn't give a crap about his bleeding foot. I was just explaining to LTG last night that the Phillies are notoriously, always, unendingly a mess. Tobacco juice running down their shirts, sloppy hair, big guts . . . come to think of it, having been raised in that baseball environment is probably another reason I don't trust all those neat, perfect little clean-cut Yankees. But anyway, a guy with a bloody foot, with the pain and the oozing sock and everything would probably be the neatest and most put-together guy on the team. A guy coming out of dental surgery would still look better than John Kruk.
And damned if he didn't gut it out. Curt Schilling is a fucking stud. He pitched seven innings and gave up four hits. Yeah, one was a home run, but . . . whatever. The Red Sox didn't even have to think about pulling him until the eighth, and even then, the TV guys were bitching that it was too early.
It is fortunate that the umpires fixed the two calls that they got blatantly wrong. How would you like to have woken up this morning to find the Red Sox out of the series, having been denied the benefit of a home run they should have had? Or having been subjected to that cheap-ass bullshit Alex Rodriguez tried to pull? Dirty little cheater. I loved how he acted surprised in the paper -- not claiming he wasn't trying to slap the ball away, but surprised that he isn't allowed to slap the ball away. That was his argument. He didn't know you weren't allowed to grab at the ball and try to knock it out of the guy's glove. So that's who he is, I guess. Did Mientkiewicz (hi, Dougie! We still love you!) block the base path? I don't think he did on purpose; I think he was trying to cover the base if necessary, but he probably did get in the way. Had Rodriguez run for the bag and been called out because he didn't touch it or called out for being outside the base path, he might have a point. But that's got nothing to do with slapping at the ball, which is, and remains, bullshit.
So it's good they got that one right. And the home run call, which wasn't the Yankees' fault at all. And one other thing -- you know, TV guys, there are a lot of little kids who watch these games, even when they go late. Could you please not say there was nothing wrong with Rodriguez slapping at the ball, because otherwise, he would have been out? It's against the rules, y'all. It's not okay to violate a well-known rule and hope you don't get caught, just because it's your only way to avoid being out. Don't say it is. It isn't. It's described in the rules as "malicious" or "unsportsmanlike" to do that. Is A-Rod going to hell? Oh, of course not. Does everybody do that stuff? Hell, yes. But please don't specifically call out what a perfectly good decision that was on his part. Little League coaches are trying to teach little kids not to be cheater assholes. Please don't undermine the effort.
So now, Game 7. Which, in all likelihood, the Red Sox will lose. (See? Inherited.) There's every reason, based on history, to believe that the Red Sox will have once again found the most painful, most agonizing, most wrenching way to lose -- bringing their fans to the brink of a historic screwing of the team they hate the most, and then doing some ridiculous thing like . . . I don't even want to think about what. Fortunately, the pub quiz is tonight, and I will probably miss most of the game. It's just as well. And I think my father is busy tonight also. That's even better.
I enjoyed the Vikings game yesterday very much. And it's not every day you can honestly say you enjoyed a Vikings game. In fact, after their depressing loss against Philadelphia a week ago, I was beginning to think the entire season was going to look very, very ugly. And it still might. Especially since approximately 90 percent of everyone we have who doesn't suck is injured.
I'm still scratching my head over the Bears touchdown late in the game that, to me, involved the officials deciding on review that as long as your hand is still on top of the ball, you still have possession of the ball, even if you're not actually holding it anymore. I mean, in retrospect, it doesn't matter, but . . . that looked very weird to me. I was prepared for the call to be changed, because the announcer guy kept saying it looked like a touchdown to him, but to me, it looked like the ball, she was already lost.
At any rate, at least we didn't get crushed like bugs, which is a good thing. I have a feeling that we won't be piling up a lot of wins this year, so I'm happy to take anything I can get.
It's very interesting that there's a schoolyard metaphor at the end of this piece.
See, I'm very nostalgic about the issue of the so-called "Dream Team," which got its ass handed to it by Puerto Rico yesterday. As it happens, my life as a writer, in its current form, dates back to my observations about the 1992 "Dream Team."
I was between my junior and senior years in college, and one of my favorite things was the Bulletin Board column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I read it faithfully every day, and it was reliably funny and goofy and entertaining, and I sort of thought from time to time about submitting something to it, but I didn't get around to it until that summer, when I built up a head of steam about the Olympics. I sat down and dashed off a rant about how much I hated the flag-waving and the preening, and I called it in, and it was in the paper. There used to be a teaser on the front page of the section in the upper right hand corner that gave some hint of what the BB was talking about that day, and for years, I had the teaser that said "The bullies (and boneheads) of Barcelona" tacked to my wall. I think my parents had that column on their refrigerator for about eight years, until it turned yellow and fell apart.
I don't have a copy of it anymore, unfortunately, but I remember that I talked about how the whole thing reminded me of . . . I think it was a "sweaty, brooding, pimply tenth-grader going down to the playground to beat up a little kid with the sniffles." Something like that. So I was all over the high school metaphors, too.
Anyway, I sent stuff to Bulletin Board for years -- I even called from college to report certain things, including reflections on the 1992 presidential election coverage in which Dan Rather kept saying it was a "ding-dong race" and so on; wrote extensively about my life as an office temp, including my deep and abiding hatred of office music, which resulted in my very first mad clash with obsessive fandom in the form of a bunch of pissed-off Rod Stewart fans (no, really); suggested the all-infomercial channel in which food dehydrators could go head-to-head with juicers in battles to the death; and gave my favorite ten pieces of advice for kids, in response to that really obnoxious list that runs in various places from time to time that basically says, "Screw you, your life isn't important, get used to it."
Writing for Bulletin Board begat writing movie reviews that I sent by email to a bunch of my friends, one of whom put them on his web site, which begat a site that was first called Ms. Linda's Is-It-Worth-It Movie Reviews and later Popcorn Lobby, which begat writing obsessively about pop culture in general, which begat TWoP, which begat F&D, which brings you up to date.
So as you can see, Puerto Rico whipping the United States gives me lots of very warm feelings about how neat the last twelve years have been.
There is literally not one thing I could find on the sports page that would bother me more than this. I'm not joking. There is not one single thing.
I'm a little disappointed to learn that A-Rod isn't going to hell, but apart from that: man, you're telling me. I may not be your father, but that game (and the previous two) have killed. Me. Dead. I'm not sure I can stand tonight's game, for precisely the reasons you suggest. But of course I will watch, and I will weep like a baby should the other shoe, once again, drop.