Sox/Tex 4:10

Yanks playing now, tied 3-3 in the 4th.

Hilarious Jeter article found by Joy of Sox. Has to be a joke. It's funnier than anything I could come up with in a Jeter parody article. See the genius of it is that his angle is "Jeter doesn't get enough credit." Why didn't I think of that?

I always get so pissed when there's NFL talk during the pennant race (Also, there seems to be a buzz-y movement among baseball fans that the season should end on Labor Day--jeez, guys, as long as you're talking about completely altering a sports season so it doesn't overlap with another, why not just move football back a month? Are you a fucking baseball fan or not?), but of course I am excited about Nebraska football in their first year in the Big Ten. In the past, game one against some patsy wouldn't even be broadcast at all, let alone on the east coast. I'd have to settle for highlights from a sideline cam probably held by someone from the A/V club. But with this whole Big Ten Network thing, I get to watch Nebraska vs. Tennessee-Chattanooga, on a station I already get, in HD. (Between pitches, of course.)

As in kicked, not struck out. Though we were struck out a few times while scoring zero runs on two goddamn hits in a 10-0 Chicagoing at the hands of the Execution Staters.

I had seen the highlight of Gardner hitting a homer into the front row by the Little League fence to tie the Yanks' game. They added one more, and that was it--we fall to second place.

When checking MLB.com's wrap of their game, I saw this as the first line of the article:

Ivan Nova improved to 16-0 lifetime when the Yanks get him a lead to work with

Wow! Is that the most Yankified stat of all time or what? You might as well say "when this guy doesn't lose, he's undefeated!" It's kind of like how every year Michael Kay will say how if you just take away one bad month, Jeter's your AL MVP.

I looked at a few of Nova's games. One time, the Yanks got him a lead, he blew it, then was pulled from the game with the other team winning. Later, the Yanks tied it, before losing in extra innings. So he blew the lead he was given, the team lost the game, but he didn't take the loss! Unde-fucking-feated, and again the Yankees have saved the world.

Another time he gave up two runs in the first, the offense came back to tie it, and then he gave up the game-winning run and took the loss. But his team was never ahead (thanks to his pitching), so in the completely made-up stat no one's ever used before, he remains undefeated.

4:10 game tomorrow will be played for Fox' sake. Stockton and McCarver. Won't that be fun....

So much of what I do online involves searching through old newspapers. Google's archive is still there, but it's only by individual paper now. And there's no more effective search function. Before, I could put a few words in, specify a date range, and it would bring up all the matches from all the archived newspapers. Now all I can do is pick an individual newspaper, specify a date, hope that date's paper is archived, then go through page by page looking for the relevant article. So I could still find what I'm looking for, but it would be a minor miracle and would take an hour instead of a minute.

I looked online for news about the death of the Google News Archive and see that Google did announce in May that it would be going away. So I guess they haven't been adding anything to it since then, and now...it's not even letting you search it in any kind of productive way.

This is so crappy. But maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe there is still a way to do it like I had been. If you know, please help me out here. Thanks.

[3:29 p.m.: I see the "archive" search link is up there currently so that's good--I'm on Firefox now, was on Safari before. Who knows what the hell is going on. I'm worried it could be gone for good, though, any day now.]

Well they took two of three but while the Yanks are raping small children and poodles on their flight out, we'll be sleeping innocently knowing that we're gonna take this division. Provided management lets us try to do so instead "setting up the rotation" or whatever.

Did you see this last night? It's a screen capture of Wakefield handing the plaque to somebody from NESN in a ceremony before the game. The 2011 Jimmy Fund Award was given by the Red Sox to NESN. Notice anything wrong? Here's a closer look:

Old logo! Harder to tell when it's not in color, but the "BOSTON" is clearly in the old, now-officially extinct font. We may have a new worst example of this error. The Red Sox themselves, in awarding a network they partially own for doing the best work toward the charity they're most closely affiliated with, etched the wrong version of their own logo in stone. "How am I supposed to sign the card now, Costanza, it's under glass!" It's one thing for me to have to tell Ford or the Boston Herald or your grandma that they should have known the Red Sox changed their logo in 2008 along with the road uniforms, held a press conference and said in the corresponding press release

The "Circle Sox" logo was further distilled and now the words "BOSTON" and "RED SOX" are in red and appear in the same font as the lettering on the team uniforms. Some additional graphic adjustments were made to the width of the outer circle and the interior baseball to clarify and refine the image.

but it's another thing for the team itself not to be aware of this almost three years later.

Oy.

Onto another one of my pet peeves. It seems like every time a Sox-Yanks series starts up, some fool somewhere (or all of them) will say "the rivalry is dead." And I'm always in such shock because I don't know why this would even be suggested. I can't even figure out the motive--is it just the classic case of people looking for a story when there isn't one? I'm not going to go through, for the millionth time, all the reasons that it's always a special event when the two teams play. I'll just say that every time they play, someone says the rivalry's dead, I tell them they're wrong...and then some incident happens on the field and while I'm out of my seat all fired up ready to run on the field and start physically attacking Yankee players, I imagine the people who wrote their articles going "oh right, THIS is why this rivalry is so completely alive as ever, why do I keep forgetting over and over??"

The worst part is, the media is able to brainwash themselves with this shit! Don Orsillo came right out and said, talking about the Cervelli thing, that "for a couple years, nothing was going on," and Heidi Watney noted that the rivalry just got "turned up a notch" as if it had ever been turned down. Nothing was going on? Did you ever see Adaptation? There was a scene where the Charlie Kaufman character tells the teacher at a screenwriting seminar that he wants his movie to have nothing happen in it, just like in the real world. And the guy says, "Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?" and proceeds to tear him a new one. Well that's how I feel every time somebody casually acts like "nothing's happening" in the greatest rivalry in sports history. It's amazing how if a buzz phrase is going around, people will repeat it (often as if they think they were the first to think of it) as if it were fact when it could be complete bullshit. It's more amazing that the announcers who see every single game can be fooled by it, too. The next series is later this month. And just like in Groundhog Day, I'll have to start from scratch trying to win over the girl, knowing that she will have forgotten everything I'd done the last time.

Again, oy.

That 6th inning was pretty crazy. How often do you see a right fielder and a left fielder let a ball go past them all the way to the wall in one inning at Fenway. With the Yanks down 4-2 (Beckett had been cruising up to that inning) and with two guys on, Chavez hits one right down the right field line. It's rolling toward the hockey boards there. Reddick plays it safe--makes sure it doesn't hop out toward him, sees it's staying along the wall--and even goes all the way down to the ground to make sure he stops the ball from going past. And it still goes past! Three bases, and we're tied. Then a sac fly and suddenly we're losing 5-4.

But incredibly, the left field version of the same play comes back to haunt the Yanks! Tek with a weird swing grounds one right down the line. It's rolling on the ground, but just before it reaches the point where the boxes jut outTM, it bounces up in the air, goes on top of the fence, and continues down the lieft field line to the wall. Gardner had made the right assumption, that it would hit the wall and go out behind short. Had it not hopped up in the air off a rock or something, he would have been right. Instead, it goes down the line and it's too late for him to recover and get over there. Tying run scores.

Then a huge dong for Ellsbury--they say it's the first opposite field homer of his career, an "opposite johnson" as Eck called it--off of Logan made it 7-5, and a Tek blast to the pen made it 9-5. We're one and a half up with 27 left.

Also, great job by the fans on that third base side--they let Tek's ball go down the line. Had they touched it, it may have even been a legal thing to do, since the ball was right above the fence edge, but whether it was called a fan-interference double or a grounds rule double, the runner wouldn't have scored from first. On a later play, they also refrained from reaching out. They were my dream front row--almost like a security force, locking arms holding everybody back so no arms sneak out and screw us.

I've got two more things to say about this game, both in the pet peeve department (one "old logo," one "the media is stupid"), but I'll save those for tomorrow.

Forgot to mention how Mo got his usual fake strike calls against us last night. So horrible how his strike zone is wider than Michael Kay's ego. The league should put an end to that blatant cheating before fixing anything else about the sport.

I noticed that MLB.com's calendar goes all the way through August 275760. If you advance it a month from there, there's no September calendar, and go one more, and you're back to an alternate reality version of the current month. I was looking through future dates to see if they hid anything in there, but then I decided to see just how far it goes (by changing the url, not advancing month by month for thousands of years). With 275 thousand years' worth of pages, if they did hide anything, I'm not gonna find it.

Pat let me know that on My9 (the network station that shows a few Yanks games) last night, during the postgame, on the screen it said "Fenway Stadium." If anybody got a screenshot of that, let me know. Of all the screw-ups we see regularly during broadcasts, that may be the all-time worst.

Beckett/Hughes tonight. Also forgot to mention how the Chid-Snatcher continued to do Joba-pumping even after the incident last night. So Beckett's gotta knock him down. Repeatedly.

That fuckin' douche. From the first moment I saw Cervelli in a Yankee uniform, he struck me as the perfect Yankee. A little smirking evil beetle. Just Bucky Fuckin' Dentish. Born to wear the vertical shit-smears. Always reminded me of both the guy with the racing snail from The Neverending Story and the child-snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Tonight, unlike NESN*, I noticed he did a little dick clap when crossing the plate on his home run. I told Kim that he better watch his head next time he's up, or next time he faces Beckett. Sure enough, Lackey drills him next time up. (Thank you, Lackey--I'd be behind you on this even if he was the go-ahead run in the 9th inning.) And the PRICK gets all mad like he doesn't know he started it.

The home plate clap was his lure. "Lollipops! And allll freeee to-day!"


(The kid going "treacle tarts!" reminds me of the Statue of Liberty tour guide in Splash who upon seeing the naked woman says "bocce bawls!" But that's beside the point.)

Cervelli lured Lackey in, and then when Lackey hit him, giving the Yanks a free baserunner who would later score, that was Lackey rushing out and being captured. He fell for the free ice cream, but, again, I would have too just to be able to drill that piece of crap.

Anyway, we had a lot of chances in this game. CC wasn't exactly his non-Sox self, but he got the win.

A half game up. Win Wednesday. Lester for us, AJ for them, ha. [I was wrong, that's Thursday--Wed. is Beckett/Hughes.]


*They were so clueless on this one. I was waiting for it, and they couldn't figure out why Lackey hit Cervelli until they came back from commercial for the next inning.


Bonus vid I just made:

More great stuff over at the Prime Minister's site, Hauls of Shame.

Sox/Yanks--Lackey/Bathey--7:10--Fenway--Destroy Them

Have you heard the radio ad where they talk about being the parent of a lil' baseball player? The guy says, "of course you wanna teach 'em how to hit the knuckleball...".

What's wrong with this picture?

1. Know any Little Leaguers who throw a knuckler? Most kids will have a knuckleball pitched to them in a game zero times in their lives. Even if you go all the way to the majors, you'll see that pitch less than 1% of the time altogether.

2. If there's one aspect of baseball that even the most skilled coach can't teach and even the most talented hitter can't master, it's "hitting a knuckleball." Hitters have theories on how to hit it but they're pretty much hacking and hoping for the best. Catchers don't even know how to catch a knuckleball. Can you throw hundreds of knucklers to your kid a day so he or she gets a lot of practice facing it? Sure, but you might as well try to teach 'em to roll a 7. A person is as likely to succeed on their first try as they are on their millionth. The first one might not dance while the millionth one merengues around your bat.

It reminds me of that New York Lottery commercial where the guy says if he wins the jackpot, he'll "learn" a crazy dunk that ends with him elbow-deep in the hoop.

Why do I care? I don't know, why do you care about the bullshit you care about?

Yanks beat O's 3-2. Just wanted Balty to get at least one out of those three games during our little break and they did. We'll have to settle for that.

1.5 up with 3 at home against CC, Hughes, and AJ. Anything but a Yankee sweep and we're still in first on September 1 with 26 left. A Sox sweep means we're 4.5 up. We go through this every year, but I always say it--if the Yanks were 1.5 up on us, playing us thrice at home at the cusp of September, the NY papers would say "finish them" and talk about how the Yanks can close the door on us. Whereas the Boston papers, in the current situation, will worry about the Red Sox choking the season away (and then conveniently act like it's the fans who are worried when the only ones who are are the ones they brainwashed). So I'd say I'll see what happens, but...right, I avoid the Boston sports media like Lady Gaga (or whoever the current Lady Gaga is).

Scattered singles but also SRO available for Tuesday/Wednesday vs. Yanks on redsox.com.

Yanks could be without Jeter and A-Rod for the series at Fenway this week.

1. Yanks win game two. We're back to 2 games up.

2. My mom's place is fine, did not get swept to sea.

3. Look at this insanity:

We're gainin' half-games left and right this weekend! Yanks lost game one, so we've got a 2.5 game lead. I think Girardi might just tell his team to lose on purpose for the rest of the year knowing he's got the hurricane/make-up games/doubleheaders excuse ready to pull out. Okay, maybe not, but if they do eff up their playoff chances, you know they'll use that excuse.

The National Guard is going to my mom's neighborhood in CT! She had evacuated, so now she's finally headed over there--I'm assuming her place is still standing--it's raised waaaay up--but we already know some of her neighbors were not so lucky.

Woke up to this tree covering our entire backyard. We knew this was gonna be the next one to go, so now we're down to two left--we're just glad it avoided landing on our house or the neighbors' yard.

Other than that, I guess everything's fine.