You know how I don't listen to WEEI anymore? Well I still hear snippets, like when I turn the car radio on and it's still on that station from having the game on the night before. Stuff like that. But judging by what I hear every time I catch a listen, I can tell this blog would be an hourly rippage of it if I still tuned in regularly.

So yesterday's random moment was hearing Holley and that new guy giving that age-old crap about how "you haven't paid attention to your team for three months since you're only paying attention to the other sports that are going on." And that was followed by how maybe, just maybe, because they're in first place, you might only now be thinking about putting "both feet in" in regards to your baseball team's season.

Do these people know they're talking about Red Sox fans? How is it that their opinion of us is that we skip the first three months of the season, then check the standings, and, if and only if the team has a chance to succeed, decide to root for them? And don't they know that people who really like basketball and hockey have multiple ways to avidly follow the Red Sox in 2013 while keeping up with those other sports?

Then they went on to talk about the reasons why "we thought they'd be terrible" this year. When Joy of Sox did his annual W-L record prediction contest, 56 people entered. You know how many of those people predicted the Red Sox would have a sub-.500 record? TWO. And these are people who, based on the game-thread board there, aren't exactly sunshine/rainbow types. I think it's a good sample size, showing that Red Sox fans as a whole clearly did not think this team would be "terrible."

So terrible job by the morons at that station. I got all that from hearing about 3 minutes of them.

*****

Good stuff from last night: Drew's brother is knocking the b off the all. .364/.400/.667 over his last nine games. Hope his hamstring is okay.

Allen Emmanuel Lewis is starting to get comfortable. And he looks like my cousin Ethan when he was 12.

I think we showed, like, resiliency or something, the last two nights, staving off comebacks by the potent potable surging TorontOffense.

Good job by Jonny Wad Gomes coming off the bench and delivering the tie-breaking hit late. (Even though it kinda coulda been an inning-ending DP.) I bet he loved Fenway standing and cheering leading up to that pitch. Gotta love those moments.

UE got his third save in as many games. But he's awesome, so why wouldn't he?

Bad stuff:

Don.

Today at 4:05, it's game 3, Fe(nway Park)lix against Rogers (Centre).

More on this tomorrow. For now, look at these awesome standings:

SOX --
O's 3.5
Yanks 5 point freakin' 5
Rays 7
Jays 8.5

The bad way to look at tonight:

I switched out my evening shift so I could see the outdoor movie in Providence tonight, and the idiots in charge of the movies said it was definitely on, so I went, only to find out they had changed their minds. Got home and saw innings 3-9, during which the Red Sox scored 0 runs on 2 hits while the Jays broke up Lester's no-hitter and scored 4 runs on 5 hits. And Lester left with an injury.

The good way:

We'd already scored 7 runs off our old pal Wang, so we took game one, and my shift for tomorrow night got canceled, meaning I'll get to see the movie on the rain date anyway. And Lester's injury wasn't too serious. We stay 3.5 up on Baltimore and go 4.5 up on New York, 6 up on Tampa Bay, and 7.5 up on Toronto. Oh, and I recorded the game so I went back and watched our 7-run second inning.

Finally, a "Blogger" button on YouTube so I can share this stuff with you without going through the cut/paste step. (I'm actually more excited about Blogger getting equal status to the shitty shit like shitbook and shitter. Of course YT and Blogger are both owned by Google, but still.) Anyway, the above video is Don at his finest. He either needs glasses, or just did his gun-jumping and opted not to correct himself. Do you see any "cutoff" being made on this play? No, you don't.

3.5-game lead over Yanks and Balt now. That's the second-biggest division lead in baseball. Lackey was what he isn't, or wasn't what he is, or something, again, and UE got the save to close out our 5-3 win, completing a 2-game sweep of Colorado.

By the runs scored/allowed, our "expected" number is 16 games over .500, while the Yanks' is 1 under. So if you're into that kind of thing, we "should" be much further ahead of them. Hopefully they're truly toast now and quickly fall as far behind as they're supposed to be.

Pittsburgh tied St. Louis for first in the NLC--those two are the only teams with a better record than ours.

Heard Castig tonight say that last night's controversial triple should have been a homer but the umps "missed it." Though I agree that things should have been done long ago to ensure that balls hit to that spot ARE called dongs, I still say the umps did what they had to do.

Thursday night, it's the first of four at Fenway with Toronto.

Regarding Drew's controversial triple at Fenway last night...

Here's a pic I took and posted here (from this gallery) back in 2008:


And here's a diagram using the same pic. Explanation below. Click to enlarge.

Drew's ball landed in the Death Zone and bounced up and left and back onto the field without hitting anything.

To the right, where I wrote "DROP-OFF" is where the wall drops back down to the cross-aisle in front of the bleacher seats. (Note the guy taking a picture.) Any ball that clears my yellow line will land behind the wall for a homer, and any ball that hits my yellow line flush on top of the wall will bounce over it into the seats.

To the left is a netting that goes along the top of the fence leaving open a section of wall-top (roughly) the same width as the wall-top to the right. Any ball that clears my yellow line will hit the net for a homer, and any ball that hits my yellow line flush on top of the wall will bounce into the net for a homer.

As you can see, that little red area is the only place a ball can hit beyond the top of the fence (shaded yellow) and still come back, as the surface is flush with the top of the wall. If this surface was truly level, a ball hitting it would continue over the wall for an obvious home run, barring a miraculous level of backspin or an isolated weather phenomenon the likes of which has never been recorded by humans. But the surface isn't level, it's old and rotting (even in this 5-year old picture), and Drew's ball doinked off it and went back to the field (actually more of a left turn but the fence goes out a little allowing the ball to land on the field-side of the fence).

So while the umps made the right call keeping it as a triple (even with replay showing the ball hitting beyond the imaginary yellow line, there's no ground(s) rule saying that should be called a homer), I think in the future a ball hitting that spot will be a home run, because they'll either cut down that section of the surface, put a ledge there, or extend the netting to the right. Or at the very least paint the top of the wall red or yellow, and flatten it out (duh), so that on replay the umps can see whether it cleared or not. But that shouldn't even come into play since I can't see a ball bouncing like that ever again, especially if they make any of these changes.

At what point in this blog post did you think I'd mention how my 9-3 prediction was really close to the 11-4 final?

A. Right away
B. After the game wrap
C. At the end
D. After a short multiple choice asking when you thought I'd mention it
E. After a multiple choice AND a line that says "If you guessed x, you're x."

If you guessed E, you're wrong! Because the answer is A.

Everybody contributed in our 20-hit attack, and Demp did what he had to do. We take game one and go for the sweep Wednesday night.

MLB.com's box score currently ends at the 7th, with an X in the bottom of the 7th. We're in late June and that bug incredibly isn't fixed yet.

I love how that Rockies player, whose name starts and ends with O, wears #0. And then another guy came into the game, Outman, and his number is 88, which is really four little Os.

Jays were the only A.L. East team to lose, so we're still up 2.5 on NYY and BAL, and 4.5 on TAM. TOR now 6.5 out.

But let's talk about the play of the game! I thought I was a Fenway wall aficionado. I thought I knew all the controversial spots. But somehow I never thought about how the top of the center field fence, in that little spot at the camera well, extends back, and therefore could have a ball hit there and, should it amazingly bounce BACK toward the field, NOT be a home run. But it happened tonight. The reason for the weird bounce was "the junk," aka some bubbling up paint on that crappy surface. Drew's ball came down right there, and came back and to the left, landing on the field for a triple.

Don and Remy predicted the umps, after a really long video replay delay, would say homer. I said no way. Because even though it should* be a homer, how can you call it one when there's no rule regarding that spot? Ball hit top of wall, came back. No dong.

*There's a piece that runs along the top of the wall, and beyond that should be a home run. In that one spot, though, there's a flat surface behind it at the same level. Long ago that should have been either lowered or raised or had the screen extended to cover it up. And something like that will probably happen now. So Drew hit what in the future will be called a dong. But he doesn't get one here. I may have to draw a diagram.... [Update: Diagram.]

Dear Person,

Did I ever tell you about the time Chan and I were watching the credits roll after some movie or show (might have been a Louie episode), and we noticed a typo in the line about the people and events being fictitious? I really should have. But I think I forgot. Anyway, after that we started noticing the same mistake in other movies and shows. The paragraph is obviously getting cut/pasted all over the place, with nobody noticing the error in it.

And I guess it's still "going around," because Kim and I watched a movie called The Words tonight, and here's what we saw:

See the typo?

How about now?

Ficticious! That's not how that word is spelled!

We should make a list of movies with the incorrect spelling. Or you should, or something. Okay fine, me.

To lighten the mood, here's a screenshot of Papi and Victor I got from NESN on Sunday:


Sox/Rox, 7:10. I predict a 9-3 win.

Day starts off with NESN not cutting in time to see first play of game. Martinez makes the play, but we never see how difficult it was. Not even a replay, which should have been mandatory on a play we didn't see live. Announcers talk about how Victor doesn't normally play first and how the first play ends up going his way. Know what a perfect companion visual would have been? The play!

Then Doubront, knowing he's got Cabrera, Fielder, and Martinez at 3-4-5, walks the first two batters he sees. He gets out of it trailing just 2-0 though, and we quickly tie it at 2 against Verlander.

With two outs and two strikes, a passed ball gives the Tigers the lead again in the 2nd.

Again we tie it right away. Pedroia got a gift call on an infield hit, but the inning ends as Drew supposedly tips the ball into the mitt on a check swing. They show a replay as they go to break which doesn't seem to show the bat making contact with the ball. But Don says nothing and we never see another replay or hear anything else about it. (Though they do go on for five minutes about Mike Napoli's likes and dislikes over the course of the next inning.)

We get the go-ahead run in the fourth, and at this point the game is about 16 hours old.

It's 4-3 us 23 hours after that, after 6 innings. We get the first two on in the 7th but don't score.

Bottom 7, for the second time in the game, we give them a gift run to tie the game with two outs and two strikes, this time on a hit-by-pitch. This is after Bailey had come in to start the inning with a one-run lead. I was under the impression we'd removed Bailey from all "we're winning" roles, but incredibly I was wrong. He would give up two hits over three batters, and it was one of those runners who would score to tie the game.

Top 8, Victorino is pinch hit for, and Don acts like nothing's wrong. We (much) later find out it was an injury. Funny, we saw Victorino double over in apparent pain in his previous at bat, but just then they cut away and talked about something else. Anyway, as Nava batted with the go-ahead run at second, I switch to TBS and see Loney get a tie-breaking two-run single against the Yanks. (That 3-1 lead would hold up.) I switched back hoping for a double-dose of awesome, but Nava strikes out.

Now Nava's in right field. The first play goes to him, and he makes the catch and drops it on the transfer, but the ump rules he never had it. All umps gather, and every one of them, apparently, thought this was a dropped ball when it was clearly a catch by a fielder in complete control. Farrell is ejected arguing as NESN botches everything on the coverage.

Miller makes a throwing error on the ensuing sac bunt, and pretty soon the Tigers are taking the lead on a sac fly. Then with a 2-0 count to Cabrera, we go with the intentional walk. Why give Fielder any more motivation? Just throw two more balls. Nope. Breslow then comes in and Price crowns him with a two-run single. 7-4 Detroit.

Those extra runs were big as we'd score one in the ninth and end the game with the tying run up. 7-5 final.

So we lose 3 of 4 in MotorVille. The next two teams in the division lost to the bottom two though, so we stay 2 up on Balty, 2.5 on New York, with Tampa and Toronto closing to 5 back. Going into Detroit, we had a 1.5 game lead (after game one it was down to only 1), and now it's 2. That's all that matters.

Bonus stuff: Nice play by Victor on that "long snap" to the pitcher. (I like how Don said "he nevvver even looked at first," mere seconds after we watched him clearly turn his entire head to look at first before grabbing the ball and making the no-look pass.)

Great job by Dan Petry in the color role. Again, maybe anybody seems amazing considering what we're used to, but he really got the job done and even seemed to be rooting for us, if only slightly.

NESN continues to show the "3 faces" (due up) at the end of some innings, without giving the score. And it would be okay if Don would just say the damn score over it. Instead, he just reads what's on the screen.

NESN's "Xfinity Game Summary" always shows the score and the performances of some players, but doesn't show...the inning! If you're summarizing a game in the middle of it, you better give me two things, score and inning, above all. Terrible job.

Webster did pretty well if you take away that one swing by Victor. But we are not Yankee fans. We can't keep the good and pretend the bad didn't happen. ("Here are the 37 bad months that kept Jeter from being MVP every year of his career!") So we got our asses kicked, 10-3. Today at 1:08 it's Doub against Verl as we try to StS.

Toronto has finally caught somebody. They're now tied for 4th after their 10th straight win. So the division, in losses, goes:

Us 32
Os 33
Hos 33
Ehs 36
Raze 37

We've got a 2-game lead, and still the best record in the A.L.

After today we've got a day off, then we go home for the Rockies, Jays (who should be conveniently cooling off right at that point), and Padres. Both of the N.L. teams are lingering around .500, but are within 4 of the lead in the N.L. West.