Tonight looked ever so close to becoming a disaster. The Red Sox managed to mount a disconcerting ninth inning rally, closing a 5-2 deficit to 5-4 and having two runners in scoring position with 1 out in the ninth. It took all of the hidden talents of Jason Varitek and Julio Lugo to kill said rally before it could become a catastrophe.

It got me thinking, though, or more precisely, reminiscing about an event that occurred in Tropicana Field about two years ago now. Tonight, Brandon Moss hit what looked like it was going to be a routine fly ball, albeit one probably deep enough for Mike Lowell to tag and score from 3rd. But the strange configuration of Tropicana Field intervened. The ball hit the catwalk and landed in fair territory. Moss got a double, Lowell scored and Youkilis advanced to third on the play.

Two years ago, during a three game sweep of the Red Sox at the Trop, Kevin Youkilis hit a ball off the catwalk in left. There, the Red Sox were not quite so fortunate. Carl Crawford tracked the ball off the catwalk and caught it before it could hit the ground. Because of the ground rules, Youkilis was called out, causing him to throw a fit. Terry Francona at the time referred to it as "putt-putt golf stuff."

I remember this because I blogged about it at the time, back in the day when Sedition in Red Sox Nation used to blog about baseball from time to time. I ripped Youke and Francona for that at the time. I ripped them because it's beat to whine about something like that when it hurts your team but consider it one of the amusing little novelties of the game when it boosts your team.

Perhaps it is unfair of me to rip Varitek as a rally killer when he did manage to drive in a run with a sac fly in the ninth. That said, I have no real interest in being fair to Varitek, noted archdouche that he is. And had he gotten one of his base hits, which occur about as frequently as papal conclaves these days, he probably would have managed to tie the game. Of course, in order to do that, he would have to stop sucking and/or being a giant douche. And I'm not sure I'm believing in miracles this week.

Before I move on, I do need to rip into the Remdawg and his partner. After Troy Percival came up lame and had to leave the game, they were all excited at Francona's brilliance. Because Terry hadn't announced a pinch hitter to take Lugo's spot in the order, he didn't have to remove that offensive Juggernaut when JP Howell came in to finish the ninth. True, Lugo is a righty and Howell is a lefty, so conventional wisdom says that match up favors Lugo.

However, conventional wisdom would also tell you that Lugo sucks. Better to have any lefty up there than a guy who is a weak hitter to start with and is 0-3 (with one RBI, to be fair) in his career against Howell. I don't know why I'm complaining, after all Francona played the percentages right into a loss which put the team 1 and 1/2 games behind the Rays in the AL East.

Of course there is the possibility that MLB might be looking to overturn the result of the game and award the win to the Red Sox. After all, Papelbon was warming in the pen when the game ended in case the Red Sox managed to take the lead in the top of the ninth. And we all know that Papelbon is the greatest closer of all time, and would have shut the door on the Rays. So by the transitive property, even though the failed to score the amount of runs necessary to win the game outright, the Sox still won, at least by Red Sox fan logic.

Every once in a great while, the devastatingly perceptive announcing tandem of Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo manages to unearth a nugget that almost makes it worth my while to suffer through a game that they're covering. This afternoon was one of those times. Thanks to their stats gurus and fact checkers, I do not have to expend any effort to tell you that the Red Sox are currently 1-28 when trailing after 8 innings.

That news made my weekend considerably brighter. Perhaps, if you are a member or fan of this incarnation of the Boston Red Sox, you can find a reason to dismiss that stat. At that point, you might even be willing to believe that JD Drew, Julio Lugo and Coco Crisp are merely lulling the opposition into a false sense of security with their inferior performance at the plate. And that it's not a bad sign that Texas beat up on Josh Beckett yesterday. Of course, since I am not a Red Sox fan, I am free to look at events as they unfold untainted by a compulsion to whitewash the team's blemishes and imperfections.

Many things will end up haunting the Red Sox when they bow out of the playoffs almost before the postseason has begun. I think the fact that Alex Cora and that kid from Pawtucket whose name I might just learn should he get another start for the Sox were playing in the rubber game of a series whilst a 10 million dollar duo (Crisp and Lugo) warmed the bench should stun and dismay the citizens of Red Sox Nation. But that's just me.

I think what will bother Red Sox fans most about this season is that their team whom they have embraced wholehearedly cannot come from behind. Against the Dodgers or the Giants or another NL West team, it won't matter. The National League West doesn't look like it will turn out a serious contender this season. But against a team like the Tigers or the Twins, I think it will send the Red Sox packing early.

I am, or at least I try to be, a rational man. I don't expect that the Red Sox should come from behind to win every game in the late innings. I would probably be as surprised today if I found that the Sox were 28-1 or even 19-10 in late inning comebacks. That's just the way the world works. The Red Sox should be below .500 in that category, considering that every opponent has a pitcher prepared to enter tight games to preserve a victory. Even a few bad teams can have a closer who should end up with 30 saves. So teams with leads should close the deal in the 8th and 9th innings considerably more often than they fall apart.

But to have only come back once all season when the payroll comes out to be in the $140-$150 million range is disgusting. It tells me that this team has next to no character, nor heart. Good teams come back in the 8th/9th innings to help win games. More importantly, champions have to be able to do it. The Red Sox can front run with the best of them. That much is clear, but if they can't win when they're down in the last half of the 9th in Friendly Fenway more often, I'll be providing Red Sox Nation with the lyrics to the Crowded House opus "Don't Dream It's Over" far sooner than the citizens might hope.

Tonight was another interesting night watching the NESN telecast. At one point in the second or third inning, Don Orsillo brought up a topic for him to discuss with the Remdawg. I forget what it was, but it was significant because it happened with two out, so there was very little time to discuss it. Remy said curtly that he agreed with whatever point that Orsillo had tried to make during the play-by-play call of the final out of the inning. When NESN came back from commercial, Don Orsillo was very apologetic about his lack of professionalism and on went the show.

Now perhaps I'm looking for cracks in the facade that simply aren't there. If that's the case, I hope you forgive me and bear with me since there has been so very little for me to enjoy in this terrible season to date. But I got to wondering what the Remdawg is like off camera. Could it be that he straightened Orsillo out as Moe Green straightened out Fredo Corleone in Vegas in the early 50s?

Hearing Remy's uncharacteristically curt tone in the exchange prior to them cutting to commercial got me thinking about the famous Kasey Kasem rant from back in the old days of American Top Forty. I don't know if you've heard it, I know it has made the rounds of the internet several thousand times by now but in case you did miss it, or want to hear it again...have at it. It's jarringly funny to hear a guy we've always associated with a good natured affability blow his stack over something that seemed fairly trivial. And I found myself wondering whether that was what we had during the TV timeout between Remy and Orsillo.

As I thought about it some more, I started to wonder just what it would be like if some NESN engineer flipped the wrong switch and those of us watching at home got to hear the Remy-Orsillo behind the scenes conversations instead of the one billionth airing of a Wonder of It All spot that makes even the most kind-hearted among us think that Andrew Jackson's grossly inhuman policies toward the Native Americans might have had a method to the madness.

I don't know if you've seen the classic Elia Kazan film A Face In The Crowd. If you're a Sox fan, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you haven't. After all, you might have to miss a few shots of incredibly expensive bad hair day number 2,224 in a row for Hazel Mae to see a movie like that. But the film is about a bum who becomes a megastar in the early days of television through his homespun wit and man-of-the-people charm.

And if I operate under the assumption that those of you who are reading this are Red Sox fans, I must now spoon-feed the logic behind this particular rant. Remy was basically a bum as a player. Look at the Remdawg's career stats, they're not very good.He was a scrapper, a hustler, an overachiever, and kind of a bum. He's Lou Merloni with a damn good sense of timing.

Remy signed on to broadcast Red Sox games in 1988. And it took him until 2003 to become the local celebrity icon that he is to this day. In that time a lot has changed, the die hards were all but priced out of Fenway, leaving it now a place to see and be seen. Since the die hards are now sitting on their couches and watching games at home they needed some one to latch onto and embody their misguided affection for this organization.

But people love the Remdawg. I find it baffling, since I do not find him insightful or interesting. I think in large part it's due to the fact that Remy with a room temperature IQ is just a little bit smarter than the average Red Sox fan. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, as they say.

But that brings me back to my point about the movie A Face In The Crowd. After his meteoric rise to the top of a nationwide broadcasting empire, the lead character is destroyed through his own arrogance. A member of his inner circle becomes alarmed at the influence the lead has acquired over political campaigns, so she switched on the audio feed from the studio during the closing credits to one of the shows. The lead character was sitting talking to his cronies and saying unflattering things about the American public and his audience in particular. Unfortunately for him, the show was going out live coast to coast, so millions heard his insults and it killed his career.

I don't necessarily wish the same fate on Remy. After all, the odds are that the Red Sox and NESN will replace him with a broadcaster I will end up disliking even more than I dislike the Remdawg whenever his reign of terror ends. I just wonder what he's like off the air. Somehow I think that without his audience around him, Remy is not the same down to earth boy from Fall River who lucked his way into his celebrity status. And I'd really like to hear it.

I promised earlier this week that I would go into greater detail on exactly why I think the Bears would be ill-served in trading Lance Briggs for Donovan McNabb as very, very, very vague rumors have proposed. You will have to bear with me, as it is currently just short of 10PM on the East Coast, it's Memorial Day and I am slightly intoxicated and working my way to full-on drunk. So there won't be any links because I am not very motivated to be a responsible blogger.

Donovan McNabb is not the answer to the Bears problems. I don't think that the team would be any better served with him under center than they were/are with Rex Grossman. I am not saying that Rex is a more talented pure passer than McNabb, or a better quarterback. I just don't think McNabb can win a Super Bowl, so to pick up a high profile, expensive, aging player would hurt a team on the brink like the Bears more than it will help.

Yes, McNabb is a Chicago native, but that seems to be the sole virtue he would bring to the table in this equation. The pressure on him to push himself and the team over the threshold will be astronomical. Anything less than a Super Bowl championship would probably close the window for the player and the team.

This is a very difficult situation for a Caucasian blogger to express any negative sentiments about Donovan McNabb. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh's comments, McNabb is essentially untouchable. Since Limbaugh was so wrong, so far behind the times and so out of his element, it has made it nearly impossible to offer any kind of analysis of McNabb's game that does not take on any taint of racism.

The real problem, in my way of thinking, when evaluating McNabb is that no one stops to ask the question what if McNabb were the quarterback of my team? No matter what you might think of him battling through the broken leg and throwing 5 TDs against the Cardinals some years back or tbat famous episode where he scrambled for 15 seconds and cost the Cowboys a playoff spot, one must consider at least one unpleasant fact.

At the end of the day, there is the denouement to the thirty ninth Super Bowl. Donovan McNabb was vomiting and too ill, apparently, to lead the Philadephia Eagles on a drive that could have tied or won the game. If that doesn't alarm the football fans who venture into this space, I wonder what will.

Donovan McNabb is supposed to be a world class athlete. I might be wrong, but I find myself remembering moments of extreme stress which find athletes prevailing against the odds. Montana's game winning drive against the Bengals, Havlichek steals it or Bird's steal and pass to DJ to win Game 5 against the Pistons leap to mind. Then one must consider the varied late game heroics of Michael Jordan.

If one takes the time to do all that thinking, one should realize that there is one common denominator. Never, in any of the instances I have mentioned, has the hero been so wracked by intestinal difficulty that he could not call a play in the huddle. And yet there was more than a minute left on the clock when the Eagles got the ball for the last time in that game against the Patriots, but he couldn't mount any kind of drive. But Donovan McNabb couldn't manage to bring his team to overtime, let alone a win.

Not only did McNabb fail to accomplish that goal, but he failed to do it in any of the three years prior to that when the Eagles made it to the NFC title game, but never reached the Promised Land. When one considers the fact that the Eagles had the best player on the field in that game against the Patriots in Terrell Owens, the ball and time enough to accomplish what they, as a team had presumably been contracted to do, one has to wonder exactly why they lost. And McNabb vomiting and being too ill to call plays in the huddle has to be at the top of the list.

Perhaps I am too much of a pessimist, but I subscribe to the theory on aging first propounded by Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. People age like wine only in so far as they deteriorate and turn into vinegar. The overwhelming majority of athletes fall apart as they get older. The only sport where that seems no longer to apply is baseball, where players can pitch into their 40s. Somehow, if Clemens had to dodge 300 pound lineman, 250 pound linebackers and 200 pound defensive backs each time he threw a pitch, I don't think he'd be back at age 44. But that's just me.

So with his age, his injury history and his lack of performance in big games taken into consideration, I'd rather the Bears played Grossman for another year. Even if the team has to scramble to replace him in the next offseason, he's younger, cheaper and less likely to get hurt than McNabb (I am not overlooking the fact that Grossman has for all intents and purposes played about a season and a half in his 3 seasons to date). The team had a nice run in spite of him killing them in key moments last season. And when you get right down to it, I don't think McNabb is a champion.

On an unrelated note, I turned off the Sox game when it was 2-0, right after the Lowell double that plated the second run. It was too depressing to watch and Die Hard 3 was on one of the Encore channels. So I don't know how it has turned out, and I am afraid to look at the score. There has been so very little for me to be happy about in the baseball season to date that it's really taking a lot away from my favorite holiday weekend pastime (a bender that would kill 4 lesser men).

But tonight, Remy and Orsillo had a bald loser who appears in ads for the new state insurance coverage system. It was inordinately amusing to me, even though I hate the Remdawg. I don't know how many picked up on it, and I'd try to YouTube it if I were more motivated and maybe a bit less buzzed. But Remy had no time for the loser. I can't say I blame him, because the guest of honor was a tool. Absolute tool lacking even the credentials to become a tool of note on this site.

And watching Remy pretend like he gave a damn and wanted to ask the bald dude who called himself an actor despite only appearing in two commercials for the state health insurance program some questions made it slightly less painful to see the Red Sox take yet another early lead. The Remdawg had his hands in his pockets, he only half-looked at Baldie when he and Orsillo were doing the interview. Remy may have even rolled his eyes once or twice. It was probably his finest hour as a Red Sox broadcaster, very nearly reaching the point where he said: "Look, douche, you're a bald waste of space and you have no business appearing in the booth during the damn baseball game." If only he had more balls to tool on the guest for more than an impending marriage that will last a mere six months.

Start spreading the news... the Sox have lost two straight to the Yankees. I wonder now, what the confident Red Sox fan who told me that he'd live with a 12-7 split in the season series will have to say tomorrow. I laughed when he said it to me, and I'm laughing now. Granted, it's still early in the season and two games remain in this series, but the Yanks beat Josh Beckett like he stole something, and they survived a tight game where David Pauley pitched disturbingly well.

One has to wonder what might have been had Manny not been thrown out at second by Johnny Damon of all people. I imagine the Jim Romes and CHBs of the world will have a field day with that one. Of course, Manny was wrong. But at least he was running full speed. I am inclined to sympathize with him when the media attacks him, even though his mistakes and inconsistent behavior is good for the stated purpose of this blog. I just hate the CHB and Jim Rome. Where have you gone, Jim Everrett? Please come back and beat Jim Rome down for auld lang syne.

And if Melky Cabrera didn't make that amazing catch to rob Manny of the game tying home run, would these tools still be sharpening their cleavers for ManRam? I'm sure they would, but even the self-described "hard edged commentator" Jim Rome would have to tone down his burn. Or maybe he wouldn't, since he doesn't seem to be overly concerned with looking ridiculous, sanctimonious and hypocritical all the time.

A while back, I happened to be watching Cold Pizza even though it usually ends up irritating me. They had the frauds from Yankeehater.com on to talk about their site, the Sox Yanks rivalry and the seemingly viable lawsuit against them for trademark infringement. I don't think these guys are frauds because they hate the Yankees, or even because they like the Sox (for the record, some of my best friends are Red Sox fans). I think they're frauds because of their top 3 Yankee haters of all time list they mentioned on the air.

This list is so pathetic that I can't adequitely ridicule it, or even comment on it more fully without descending into profanity, which, to this point, is apparently the only virtue of this blog. Number one on the list is Ben Affleck. This is so obviously an attempt to grandstand and garner attention, not to mention fawn on one of the worst actors of our time. I think Ben Affleck's career was best summed up by the South Park guys in one of the songs from Team America. Since this is a blog, you can Google the lyrics, but if must download the song, please do so legally.

Number two on the list is Larry Lucchino. I don't know Larry Lucchino personally, and God willing, I'll never have the distinct displeasure of making his acquaintance. From the little I know about him, I suspect that he harbors no genuine emotion against the Yankees. I think it's a convenient way to call more attention to himself in an effort to acquire the cult status enjoyed by many associated with the team (mostly without reason or merit, like Jerry Remy).

Number 3 was Carlton Fisk. If even half of the legends told about Fisk are true, he was 3 times the Yankee hater that Affleck and Lucchino would make if they became some sort of Voltron made out of grandstanding, phony Yankee haters. I understand that there was a huge personal and professional rivalry between Fisk and Thurman Munson, and naturally, since Fisk is human, Carlton seems to have downplayed that in the wake of Munson's tragic death. Nevertheless, Fisk was the only legit guy on the list and these frauds had him in third place.

As a concerned citizen, I demand an investigation into Don Orsilo's hairline. What is going on there? Is it human hair, animal, vegetable or mineral? I can't decide myself. Part of me thinks that it is in fact human hair, but some (if not all) was grown on a different head than the one rocking it now. Part of me thinks he was victimized by a bad dye job and insuffienct hair plugs. But I think the most likely explanation is that he gets his hair styled by the guy who used to paint the hair onto the old GI Joe action figures that I had when I was a kid. Perhaps the hair is what makes him think he could hit .260 in the majors (a feat that seems surprisingly difficult for Big Papi so far).