Ladies and gentlemen, I have an intriguing question to pose to you all. At what point in this evening's game did Kevin Youkilis look most ridiculous? Was it the foul ball down the first base line that he turned into a Keystone Kops moment? Or was it when he struggled through the introduction of the lineup, making Rocky's struggles in the commercial taping in Rocky II look like Olivier doing Hamlet on stage in London?

According to Joe Buck, Youkilis manages to look intimidating even when he introduces a lineup. Of course, I think that if you are Joe Buck, even my five year old niece looks intimidating, but that's neither here nor there. I think Youkilis is far from intimidating. Rather, he looks like the type of guy that desperately wanted to be a biker all his life, who gets the bike and the clothes and the look, but still can't make himself look mean. Perhaps Youkilis would have looked meaner in my eyes had he not waited until the team trailed by 7 in the 6th inning to notch his first HR and RBI of the ALCS.

The Youkilis bobble reminded me of a quote from George Orwell which I first applied to Mark Cuban. Orwell described one of England's peers as "looking rather more like a monkey on a stick than I would have thought possible for some one who wasn't actually trying." That sums up how pathetic Youkilis looked in misplaying that ball.

Over the course of the offseason, which now looks like it just might start a lot sooner than Red Sox Nation might desire, a great deal of ink will be spilled on the fact that Francona elected not to start Josh Beckett on three days rest. For my part, I have attacked Francona continually over the 18 months this blog has existed. But I don't think he made the wrong call. And it's not because I wanted the Sox to lose, for a change.

People love to point out that Beckett was lethal on three days rest in the 2003 playoffs. That was then, however, and this is now. Josh Beckett is the cornerstone of this team going forward. Is it, then, better to risk his arm for the sake of tying an ALCS or is it better to take your chances with Wakefield and keep Beckett as healthy as possible to extend the window for this team?

I took a great deal of grim staisfaction in seeing Wakefield, who was so good so long ago in the regular season, fall apart in the fifth inning of this evening's game. But up until this evening, he had never lost an LCS game. And it mattered little that he was pitching on 18 days rest. After all, were you really worried that his arm would be too live in tonight's game if you happen to be a Red Sox fan?

And while we're talking history, if we can remember what Josh Beckett did in 2003 on three days rest, why can't we remember what he did in the last LCS start with his team trailing 3-1 in an elimination game? That was Game 5 of the NLCS in 2003, and I hate to do this to my friend the Cubs fan, but Beckett shut down the Cubs as though it were a moral imperative that the Cubs should score no runs.

He threw a 2 hitter in that game. Not much attention is paid to it, partly because stifling the Dusty Baker-era Cubs wasn't exactly a miracle. And of course being on the wrong end of a 2 hitter in a game where you could have elimated the opponent isn't anywhere near as picturesque as some loser in glasses interfering with a fly ball down the left field line with 5 outs to go and a three run lead.

If Red Sox fans were honest (and let's face it, they aren't), they'd admit that starting Wake over Beckett wasn't exactly reminiscent of Joe McCarthy going with Denny Galehouse in the one game playoff against the Indians in 1948. Of course that presumes Red Sox fans know half as much as they pretend to about their team's history. Perhaps if the CHB gets off his posterior and has his interns burn the midnight oil, then the Nation might remember it as though it were yesterday the day after the column appears. But that's another story.

Before today's game, I got to thinking about that play where Ortiz managed to get in the way of Ramirez grounding out to shortstop. Seeing him run into that out in such surprising fashion reminded me of something at the time. I'm sure all of you good Red Sox fans who worry so much about what might happen to John Henry's ill-gotten gains in his pending divorce own the 2004 postseason DVD, so you can check it out for yourselves.

In case you don't remember, Cardinals pitcher and all-around loser Jeff Suppan managed to get himself trapped in a rundown at third base thanks to indecision on the base paths. I remember being livid with him at the time, not only because it was a momentum killing play that benefited the Red Sox, but because a National League pitcher has to run the bases from time to time and ought to have had better sense than that. To make a long story short, I think Papi might have killed the Sox momentum in this series with that play.

So the Red Sox are now poised on the brink of elimination. I cannot summon up a proper level of excitement about that, though. First, there is, as I keep saying, the lingering memory of 2004's comeback against the Yankees. And as I've said, I still don't like this Indians team. I do find myself wondering whether the layoff while the Rockies await the winner of this series might be the only thing that will kill the roll Colorado is on at the moment.

The home half of the fifth inning of tonight's game did reinforce an impression I've had of the Indians in this postseason. With the way they keep grinding out runs in all kinds of different ways with two outs, they remind me of a football team that simply can't get an opponent off the field on third down, like Notre Dame, or the teams that have fallen victim to Belichick's corrupt legion of minions.

And while I'm on the topic of things that have suddenly become clear to me over the last few days, I have one more this evening thanks to Bill Simmons. For a long time now, basically since the travesty of 2004, or maybe since he went to work for Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Simmons has been evoking an impression of something I couldn't quite explain. Calling him an aggressive sycophant summed up his persona, but it didn't resolve the question of that nagging impression.

Then Bill Simmons wrote this brilliant piece comparing being a Boston fan right now to waking up every day being George Clooney. And it hit me like a thousand of brick, to quote Rooster Cogburn. Bill Simmons reminds me of George Clooney. Not the looks, or the talent, but that vague, smarmy smugness that is all over the Gospel According to Clooney.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, the writers of South Park did an excellent job of satirizing this particular aspect of Clooney's character in the smug epsiode. They got after Clooney for his inexplicable Oscar acceptance speech after he won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana.

In that speech, Clooney gave credit to Hollywood for bringing issues like civil rights and AIDS to public attention when the rest of America was silent. Now, I might be alone in not remembering all those movie and TV stars sprayed by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs in the South in the 50s and 60s, but I am that sort of guy. And it was a blow against racism when Hattie McDaniel won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Gone With the Wind, right up there with the I Have a Dream speech, right?

But that's a long digression to come back to Bill Simmons. He's a fraud, like Clooney. He sets himself up as the voice of the young sports fan from Gen X and beyond, and I wish it weren't true. After all, if he's the voice of that slice of sportsfandom, then sportsfandom must be even dumber than I want to admit.

In other matters, the Yankees brain trust convened in Tampa today to discuss the future of Joe Torre. No announcement was made, so I have tomorrow afternoon to try to squeeze in the analysis of the Yankee management situation before the decision is made.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I apologize for the delay in updating this fevered dream I call Sedition in Red Sox Nation. I do have my reasons. First, this blog was recently subject to review by the site that hosts it. I did not discover that until I tried to post and my computer crashed. I hadn't saved a draft of the post on which I was working at the time, so I was a bit angry. I didn't get around to redoing it as I had more pressing concerns at the time. After that, I went on vacation for a while. I am back now, and ready to get back to subverting the confederacy of dunces that is the Boston Red Sox.

I know I promised a new feature in one of my posts. I was working on it at the time of the computer crash. Unfortunately, anger and laziness have conspired to delay it still further. I simply am not ready to run with it yet. It does exist, at least on a conceptual level, as I write this. However, in my travels, I got the idea for a new segment which strikes me as more interesting at the moment. WIthout further adieu (and with nothing more than a working title at this point), here it is...

RANDOM THING I HATE INSTALLMENT 1:

I hate a great many things. The overwhelming majority of them are, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Among them, you might have noticed (provided, of course, that you have read any of my previous posts) the Boston Red Sox, Red Sox fans and Danny Ainge. That is just the tip of the iceberg. I am a small and petty person, a bastion of negativity seeking to make other people unhappy.

This particular segment exists under the working title "Random Thing I Hate" because I can't come up with something better at the moment. It is random in the sense that it is something I hate that is not related to the stated purpose of this site. Basically, every day in my life is Festivus, this blog is my version of the Festivus Airing of Grievances and this particular segment is my way of telling those outside of Red Sox Nation that, in the immortal words of Frank Costanza: "I have a lot of problems with you people, and you're going to hear about them."

The first grievance I have is with the Benefactor. I cannot stand Mark Cuban. He's a fraud. He sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at just the right time, which was quite lucky for him. I also have to give him credit for that. I will not believe that he's a latter-day JP Morgan until I enter the url for broadcast.com or broadcast.yahoo.com and see something. One cannot help but wonder where he would be if Yahoo held out just a little longer in the wake of the Broadcast.com IP, or he'd played a bit harder to get.

But I must temper my contempt for his business acumen by remembering that he did acquire Antoine Walker from the Celtics for what amounted to magic beans. I imagine that is a little harsh, after all, Raef LaFrentz is probably the best center to hover around the 3 point line and play defense once in a blue moon since Arvydis Sabonis retired. And Jiri Welsch was awesome.

His behavior in the crowd at games bothers me to no end. To put it plainly, I think he looks and acts like a jackass. He runs onto the court after playoff games to criticize officials. He flails and flops around his courtside seat each time a call goes against the Mavericks. For the most part, he conducts himself like a 3 year old in dire need of a time out.

As I watched him in this postseason, I kept remembering something I'd read. It took me a while to dig it up again, but when I did I think the author summed up Mark Cuban quite nicely. The author is George Orwell, and in his essay As I Please 6, he wrote about "the exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed" in the New Year Honours List (which as I understand it is, or was, a document issued in Britain to celebrate people who had recently been endowed with titles).

The particular quote that caught my eye in connection with Mark Cuban reads: "...I saw in Picture Post some 'stills' of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who is not doing it on purpose."

I think that sums up Mark Cuban's deportment. He looks like a monkey on a stick. The question then must be asked: is he doing it on purpose? I think he is. After all, he has managed to become a B list celebrity. He had that awful show that ABC mercifully cancelled. He gets to hang out with George Clooney and produce movies that courageously stand up against McCarthyism 50 years after the fact. He reminds me of the little dog from the cartoons who is always yipping and yapping at the bigger dogs to attract their attention.

Personally, I don't care who is on the A list or the B List. Celebreality, in my way of thinking, is one of the worst TV genres to crop up in the last few years. I do not lose myself from my mundane concerns when I see the rich and famous acting with entitlement and avoiding responsibility. But I must confess, I did laugh like hell when I read that Mark Cuban got shut out of a trendy night club in New York. Apparently he even offered the doorman $1,000. Of course that is 3rd hand gossip, picked up from a New York tabloid via Wikipedia. It's not too hard to imagine the Benefactor trying to pass the bouncer a grand while 18 yr old Jersey girls who were on the list breeze past.

It might be possible for him to get in if his team wins the NBA title, but (as we know if we read his blog) the NBA conspires to deny Cuban the O'Brien Trophy. That is the only possible explanation. If the NBA allowed its officials to call the game as Dr. Naismith intended, Dallas would have 3 or 4 rings by now. Of course, based on the way he behaves in the crowd and "writes" in his blog, it seems to me that the only way to properly officiate a Mavs game is to have every opposing player start the game with 3 fouls. Perhaps the NBA could even work in a power play or two for the Mavericks.

I really don't know what to say about his grand gesture on fan appreciation night. It was awfully sporting of him and American Airlines to give the fans plane tickets. I know times are tough for the airlines, but you'd think the Benefactor could have done a bit better than a roundtrip to San Antonio, Houston, KC or St.Louis. Hell, he could probably have sent them all to Maui and not even have to think twice before asking for extra cheese on his next Texas Double Whopper.

I hate Mark Cuban. I am in a difficult spot, though, because I hate the Pistons and the Suns. For now, I draw some consolation in the fact that Antoine and the Heat are up 1-0 on Detroit who looks amazingly mortal. If Ben Wallace could get called for the occasional over-the-back and pick up a blocking foul when his feet aren't set, who knows what might be. I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that Prince will ever be called for 1 handcheck out of three. But maybe the Pistons will lose. There is always a chance.