This post was delayed because of the announcement of Theo's engagement.

MUSINGS ON THE RIVALRY RENEWED

I guess sooner or later everybody who writes about the Red Sox has to write on the Yankees rivalry. I've mentioned it a time or two myself. Unlike most people who comment on this circus, I have no emotional attatchment to either team. I do have a profound antipathy to the Red Sox, as you might have noticed if you'd read any of my earlier posts.

I'm not thrilled about using the word musings, but it seemed like all the good titles were taken. I think only people with multi-colored soul patches feel comfortable using the word musing. Even then, I bet they only feel comfortable using the word when they talk about outsider art, or the one person shows that they produce to show their loser friends that it was truly bleak to go through their puberty in a suburb where they were tortured by jocks, stuffed into lockers and forced to undergo swirlie after swirlie for the heinous crime of having a bohemian soul. A run-on, I know (actually, I think it might even be 2 or 3 run-ons running onto one another), but how do you break up a sentence like that without ruining the insanity. But back to the point, if there is, or ever was, one.

I am not, or at least I was not, a Yankees fan. I've always hated the Red Sox, but for a long time I hated the Yankees too. Their fans are just about as bad as Red Sox fans. I went to school with a lot of Yankees fans, and if I heard one more person talk about the inferiority complex Bostonians feel toward New Yorkers, I was going to start doing backflips and giggling like Woody Woodpecker.

I don't think Bostonians should feel inferior to New Yorkers for any reason. I've been told that New York has the best museums and theater and culture in the country. I don't care. I don't go to museums. If I feel the need to be bored, I have a number of people I can talk to about how Josh Beckett will easily surpass Cy Young's career stats and how Jim Rice's 1978 season can only be compared to DiMaggio in 1941. Plus, how many times can you really go to the same museum? As for the theater and the rest of the things people with too much time and money on their hands and a morbid desire to torture their fellow man consider culture, I am all set with it.

There is one area in which Bostonians (not me, but you know who you are) feel inferiority to New Yorkers is when it comes to baseball. Red Sox fans are jealous of Yankees fans. And they should be. The Yankee organization is a model for how a franchise should operate. I don't mean Big Stein spending 200 or 300 million to buy a title. I mean the little things that people don't necessarily notice at first.

When the Yankees win a game at home, they play Sinatra's version of "New York, New York" over the PA system. That's pretty classy. It's a great song, it celebrates the city and Sinatra is Sinatra. And then there's the Red Sox organization. When the Sox win a game at home, what plays over the PA? Love That Dirty Water by the Standells. The Standells have nothing else of note in their songbook. Not only that, but the song was written by a guy who got mugged on the MIT bridge. To top it all off, the song sucks.

Like I said a few days ago, this blog has been evolving into my own version of the Festivus Airing of Grievances, and like Frank Costanza, I have a lot of problems with you people. The playing of this particular song is one of them. Surely, in the 370 years since Boston was incorporated as a city someone must have done something worthy of commemoration in song beyond show appalling contempt for the cleanliness of our watershed areas.

Much more will be written in this blog about the pathetic fixation Red Sox fans have with the Yankees. Some of the themes will touch on a website devoted to the hatred of the Yankees, and how much of a fraud it is. For the record, there are many reasons it is a fraud, and none of them relate to their attacks on the Yankees. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I am not a Yankee fan, nor have I ever been a Yankee fan. The Yankees are merely a convenient foil to my mortal enemies in Red Sox Nation.

Before I sign off this evening, I have an follow up to my recent post in which I railed against Mark Cuban. I didn't watch tonight's game, there was a movie I'd really wanted to see for a while now on cable. So I watched it, but after the fact, I tuned in to TNT's postgame show because I'm a big fan of Charles Barkley, as you might have noticed if you read my earlier work.

To make a long story short, as it's Memorial Day and I've had a beer or two, I noticed that the Mavs were the benificiaries of at least two missed calls down the stretch. Since I've heard that Mark Cuban has sent game tapes to the NBA offices to highlight missed calls or bad calls that hurt his team, I assume that he will send this particular tape to the commish so that these mistakes do not occur again. Only a colossal fraud would point out the officiating errors (and I admit some mistakes must occur as long as there are human beings officiating games) that hurt his team while remaining silent on the missed calls that benefit the Benefactor.

I wonder though whether I will be disappointed in that afformentioned hope of mine. Perhaps the Benefactor is too busy auditioning for the role of Clyde when the studios remake the Clint Eastwood classics Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. I assume that's what he's doing when he watches a Mavs game. Otherwise I can't come up with a plausible explanation for his behaior in the stands.

There is always the possibility that I, for my part, might have bit off more than I can chew in trying the Benefactor. It will, however, be somewhat difficult for him to have a problem with my calling him a fraud when he doesn't send that game tape to the league office. Good night, and good luck to you, Mark Cuban, if ever you decide that this site might have libelled you in the last week or so.