Game one, now, game two, 7-ish.

Yanks lost last night in Seattle so we're two up going in.

We were in danger of another frustra-loss, stranding men all over the place down by one, but we finally barely tied it on a would-be double play grounder in the 7th. And after Bailey escapes trouble in the top of the 9th, the fun begins in the bottom half.

Jonny Wad Gomes doubled to start things off. Then the world watched in disbelief as the Rangers opt to intentionally walk [insert any name] to pitch to Papi. When Mr. McFeeley came out to the mound to talk to the pitcher, my imitation of him was: "Look son, we just put you in a horrible spot...uh...but that's for you to deal with, not me. Bye!" I started coming up with new and exciting ways to say "they're gonna pay dearly," such as "they're gonna pay deer-in-the-headlights-ly!" It was the all-time "make them pay" situation, and Papi didn't wait around.

As soon as he hit it, he knew the game was over. Because even if it catches wall out there, the winning run's gonna score from second. But it was a nice bonus that it got over, for the full trot-style funfest.

What an awesome win. We take 2 of 3 from Texas, and hold our 1.5-game lead in the division. As I type, the Yanks are way up on Seattle. So it should stay at 1.5. But they just started a west coast swing. I'd love to see 'em pull a sub-.500 out there.

Here's a video I made about that whole "walk-off" thing I always talk about:

We lose, they win, so it's a 1.5 game lead. 2.5 over Balty, 3 over the Raze.

The umps seemed to be having a contest for who could make the worst call tonight. Joy Boy mentions several, but there was also that really long at bat early on against Lack Attack, where the ump just wouldn't call a strike. The guy ended up doubling, and Lackey did a fine job of getting the next three guys without allowing a run, but it still effed him up and upped his pitch count. And then in the ninth, Nathan (who Don called "Nathanson") threw a strike that was so high, Dennis "I gotta have that" Eckersley said "I wouldn't even want that."

So between that stuff and the closeness and the stranding of runners, this was a tough one. Tougher than most losses this year. It seems like after each one I'm able to say "I'm okay with that loss." Which is a byproduct of being in or close to first place all season long. But it also shows that we're not having the ultra-frustrating type of losses that have been pretty common the last couple of years. So that's a good thing. Tonight I had to have though.

Tomorrow that funny guy goes against Lester in the condom contest.

Remember that ball Salty hit down the line to cut it to 3-2 in the 8th? It got stuck under the padding. The Fenway ground* rules don't say anything about balls stuck in padding. So I guess the umps did the right thing to just let the outfielder play the ball. But I wonder why Don and Eck didn't at least mention it. You could see Beltre holding up both hands on the replay, which to me was clearly the "hands up because somethin' ain't right here" signal, like outfielders do at Wrigley when balls get stuck in the ivy, and not a "throw me the ball and/or hold it" signal. It led me to do some research, and I guess a select few parks have "stuck in padding" rules, but for the most part that's a thing of the past. But at least one member of the defense thought the correct move was to raise the arms and that it should be a dead ball. Good thing it wasn't, woulda cost us a run. Maybe. Who knows. (Bonus thing the announcers missed** on that play: a small splinter broke off from Salty's bat on the hit.) Then on the next play, Drew's inning-ending groundout, it seemed like the first baseman's foot came off the bag way early. No mention from Don/Eck, no replay. I could be way off on that one but I would have liked to have another look.


*Michael Kay always says "grounds rules" and acts really smart about it. I don't know which is right, but it doesn't matter, I'm happy to go the anti-Kay way.

**I think. I didn't bother to rewind that time.

What's wrong with that picture? Come on, you know me. Yup, that's right, Comcast SportsNet is still using the pre-2009 logo! The blue line that splits the seams on the ball--that's red in the current version. They thought they could slip one past me!

In other "old news," if you type MLB standings into Google, they come up right on the search page. They've got the new Marlins logo, the new Blue Jays logo, and the new Astros logo, all made since the Red Sox made their new one, but, of course, they show the old for us. I'd show a screen shot but it comes up pretty small. So go there for the mistake, stay for the awesome standings with us in first place and the Scrappy Rockefellers not.

Laxi/'Lexi, 7:10 p.m.

From right near the 95/4 split yesterday:

A-Rod could be suspended for 100 games. A lot of people use the terms "sad" and "boring" when they hear news like this. I'd just like to say that I'm quite happy and excited.

On the field tonight, we kicked Tex-ass. 17-5. The most exciting part was seeing if we'd join the small club of teams to score in all of the innings they batted in. Allan Wood probably had the celebratory post written already. We had scored in the first seven frames, and who came in to pitch the 8th, but David Murphy! The first batter doubled. So we basically had three chances to hit a single off an outfielder. It was a done deal. Except that it wasn't. Murphy escaped the inning unscathed. Our final linescore: 261 114 20x.

Congrats to Jackie Bradley on his first MLB dong. Over the bullpens! (Did anybody ever figure out if Jenny Dell was on drugs when she said he was Jackie Wilson's grandson? In fact, she also said he was a distant cousin of Michael Jackson, and I see that nowhere online either. Maybe he was just effing around when he filled out his "about me" for NESN....)

The Ortiz hustle-triple followed immediately by a sprint home on a sac fly with bonus mock "I'm really tired" pose and Florida Evans grin was awesome.

When their outfielder went into the bullpen on a dong, Orsillo watched the replay and said how the guy went over "...with it," as if he thought, even that much later, that he actually caught the ball. I'm starting to think he just needs glasses at this point. He also did another classic gun-jump (I've got three of those I'm gonna put up online soon), but, again, it really might be that he just can't see. Don and Sterling should make a co-appointment.

Yanks won. Aviles was pissed about a bad call in the 9th with Cleveland down by one, and got ejected. But the world has decided to focus on the fact that he got ejected after the game ended, instead of showing us the bad call! Even Indians dot com, in its article about the play, only shows the actual ejection and not the thing Aviles was arguing about. So stupid. If anybody finds the vid of the call in question, let me know. Thanks.

So we're still 2.5 up. Only the Rangers (who we beat by 12 tonight, as clearly noted above), Cards, and Braves have a better record than ours.

[Dempster in a USPS hat courtesy NESN.]

Tonight the first-place Red Sox start a homestand with Texas and the LA Angels. Grimm/Dempster, 7:10.

Autograph Alley this homestand*:

Tue 6/4 Rick Miller
Wed 6/5 Jeff Plympton (also player/fan photo day)
Thu 6/6 Chris Howard
Fri 6/7 Sam Horn
Sat 6/8 Oil Can Boyd
Sun 6/9 Billy C

* a service I provide when I think of it

I hate how N3SN doesn't consider throws to first "part of the game." They do know the runner could be tagged out, right? Here's a vid I made about a recent 0-fer they had:

Yanks beat Meryl's hubby, nobody else played.

Us --
O's 2.5
Yanks 2.5
Rays 3
Jays ten point five

From a New York Daily News article about that guy who killed himself on John Henry's boat:

The team has won two World Series during his tenure, the first in 2004 after an 84-year title drought.

You'd think....oh just forget it.

The recap of last night's game started by saying how his recent injury "wasn't nearly enough to derail Clay Buchholz during the most magical run of his career".

Why does everybody forget that in 2010 he was one of the league's best pitchers? Check his gamelogs from that year and you'll find stretches of magic that are definitely comparable to the one he's currently magician-ing. Then he got injured and missed a lot of 2011. Then he had an effed up 2012, sure, and he wasn't the only one. But it's no surprise to me that he's back to Classic HH form.

Completely unrelated note: I kept hearing how the Mets swept four from the Yanks. But shouldn't we be counting those Interleague home-and-homes as two separate series? You could say that they swept the season series, but I think the four games should be counted as two consecutive sweeps, one home series sweep and one away series sweep. Because if you refer to that as a four-game series, do you count it in your home series or your away series? Or a separate category for mixed series? The answer is you don't do any of that, you just consider every group of games against another team in a given ballpark a "series." Plus, it's cooler to think the Mets swept the Yankees twice in a row.

After many delays, the game is called early, but any modern-day Yankee fan can tell you the Red Sox were gonna win anyway. Final: Boston 3, New York (AL) 0. Buchholz gave up nothing, and Iglesias and Ortiz went yaardsma. (ESPN elected not to show a replay of where the Ortiz ball went, instead electing to attempt to stir up fake controversy by showing Papi's swing/bat toss twice in super slo-mo, which to me looked like almost every other home run reaction he's ever done and took up about a second of our valuable time.)

So we took 2 out of 3, and the Yanks have now lost 7 of 8 to fall into a third-place tie with Tamper, 3 out of first. Balty is 2.5 behind.

Earlier in the day, Chan and I went to the Paws game, and saw Rubby give up two solo dongs but not much else over 4.2. Mitch Maier hit a massive dong for the Lil' Red Sox. The attendance was 6902. It could have been a nice even 6900. But we had to ruin it. I'm still pissed that everybody stands for GBA after the 6th, but nobody stretches during TMOTTBG. I don't mean "they don't stand until they're reminded," like at Fenway, I mean they just don't have a "stretch" at all. At least they play the song. Three rounds of it, in fact.

Always good to destroy the Yanks when everyone's watching. And we needed this win to stay in first by ourselves. So now it's a two-game lead, and the Yanks have lost 6 of their last 7. The Napoli grand dong was sweet. And on Nava's dong, listen to Joe Buck call him Nova.

Sunday night at 8 it's Buchholz and Kuroda. Then we finally get a day off before coming home for Texas and the Angels.

What a Channy weekend. He's doing the rare visit to Rhode Island (usually I go to him because New York), and we've been trying to squeeze every drop of fun out of the time. And at the end of a long day, we flip on ESPN and see my school and his school are playing each other in the NCAA women's softball World Series, and it's the 15th inning. My Huskers lost to his Gators as the potential tying run was gunned down at third in the bottom of the 15th.

P.S. I guess this is really old info, but I heard it from Castig tonight for the first time: Phil Hughes's dad is from Lincoln, RI, and despite that Phil was born in California, he grew up rooting for Mo and Nomar and the 90s Red Sox. The dad said that if Phil is ever not on the Yankees anymore, all the Red Sox memorabilia will go back up on his wall. (I don't know about you, but if I ever for some strange reason found myself working for the Yankees in any capacity, and didn't kill myself first, and any of my family members suggested they'd take down their pictures of Ted Williams because of it, I'd insist that they didn't. Terrible job for (I assume) not doing that, Phil Hughes!)