Friday, June 01, 2007

I really didn't intend to post tonight. After all, I've been drinking for a long time now, and my drunken posts have been unmitigated disasters. But several things need be said about several topics and if I don't do it, who will? The Coast Guard? And the kick in the ass about blogging whilst somewhat intoxicated is that I do not know where to begin.

I suppose I'll start where I left off last night. I have been reluctant to talk about this particular subject, since I have a way of jinxing players and teams, but in the wake of last night's epic performance, I don't think I can jinx LeBron. Hell, even Bill Simmons is on board, and he's only permitted to notice trends which David Stern and Mark Cuban allow him to notice.

LeBron deserves at this point to hold the title deeds to every team and every property associated with basketball in the NBA's Eastern Conference. Every game he plays is a two-fold kick in the ass to the NBA league offices. First, he is triumphing in the face of the system. The Celtics since the Walker trade should hold themselves fortunate to depend on LeBron's mercy for the right to rebuild.

No one will admit it, but the NBA feeds on its superstars. And yet the league allows manifestly inferior players (like the entire Pistons roster, none of whom is fit to unfasten LeBron's oh so very unMessianic sandals) to flop and hack until the only player worthy of shaking hands with Bird, Russell, Heinshon, Cousy, Havlicheck, Jones, White or Cowens is shut out of the NBA Finals. So there are (and have been) two sets of Jordan rules. Superstars get most of the breaks, but when they don't it's OK to maul them in much the same fashion as a tiger mauls its dinner.

But tonight's was to be a baseball post. After all, the Yankees are back in town. And in my opinion, they should have erased not one but two games from the lead the Red Sox are oh so close to frittering away at this point. You may not have noticed, as it's Friday and all those with social lives were socializing, but the Red Sox managed to lose a game that should have been lost by a much larger margin.

In the early stages of the game, I found myself wondering if Chien Ming Wang had run over the umpire's dog. Red Sox fans might not agree, but Kevin Youkilis struck out in the bottom of the second. There is no way in God's Earth that the 2-2 pitch Youkilis took was a ball. It was at the knees and on the inside corner, a perfect pitch. In a logical world it was strike three.

Hell, Schilling would have thrown a towel over his head and wept as though he were trapped in the Old Testament Book of Lamentations until an ump gave him the call he felt the world owed him on a pitch like that. In a perfect world, some person would have emerged from nothingness to throw an hellacious beating on Youke for no apparent reason before he was called out on strikes.

Then, in the bottom of the fifth, Doug Mirabelli achieved one of the more remarkable feats one could imagine in a professional baseball game. He threw out a runner at third base who could not have done much to be safer. And any one who thinks Abreu was actually out is either a shameless Red Sox fan or a total and complete moron. Although, to be fair and to quote the Sinatra song at the same time, you can't have one without the other.

And there is very little that a Sox fan can do to try to answer my allegations. Not only because the average Red Sox fan barely has the intelligence to invilve him or herself in a "Less Filling" "Tastes Great" debate, but because the Lizard King of Red Sox Nation is on my side. If you watch the footage again, you'll see that the Remdawg agrees with me in both cases. The Sox got all the calls and still lost the game. And that's why I think the Yanks should have picked up an extra game out of this exchange.

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