Celtics Defeat Yankees, 92-1

As any deluded sports fan knows, the best (irrational) way to cope with one season's team's failure is to carry over the resultant disappointment to the next season's team in the (meaningless) hope that the latter will, in victory, take the sting out of the former's most recent defeat.

When such a victory occurs on the same night as a decisive thumping of your former season's team's archrival...well, that's just Phantastic.

Idiot

Following the (suckass) Generally-Pacific Coast Angels of But Also Maybe Portugal?'s improbable victory over the (suckass) New York Yankees (actually of New York, unlike the NFL's Giants) in Game 5 of the ALCS on Thursday, the Yankees' ballerina-armed centerfielder Johnny Damon--the Judas who conveniently ended his tenure with the Boston Red Sox by grounding into an out that ended the Red Sox's postseason in 2005--was knuckleheaded enough to make the following statement:

"It gives them a couple more days of hope, and hopefully that hope ends on Saturday because anything can happen, especially with as tough of conditions as we’re going to be playing in... They still have to beat us two times at our place, and hopefully that’s going to be tough to do.”

Anything can happen? No shit, Professor Recall.

God, I hate both of these teams so much.

GO--uh...THE RETROACTIVE CANCELLATION OF THE 2009 MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL SEASON?

(Yeah, that works.)

Oh, NOW They 'Bumble'...

Shut up, baseball. I hate you.

Red Suckers

Here's a screenshot of what arrived in my inbox ten minutes before the time of this posting:


Yeah...let me just grab my credit card and do that, billion-dollar franchise made primarily on the backs of the middle- to low-income people whose souls you crushed not 48 hours earlier. Can I throw in an extra few bucks for your thoughtful timing?

Pap Smear

Grrrr...look at me...look at my mean face...

Mean faces count for outs, right?

What? No?

[Ed. note: Fuck you in your stupid fucking face, Papelbon.]

A Case for 'the Providence Red Sox of Boston'

When the Boston Red Sox--despite having been staggeringly incapable during the final few weeks of the 2009 season--managed to stumble ass-backwards into a playoff spot (a break owed entirely to the team's early-season dominance), I was concerned about their chances.

On Thursday night, when the BoSox promptly shit the bed against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim-California-United States of America-Continent of North America-Earth-Earth's Solar System-Milky Way Galaxy in the first game of their division series, my concerns were unfortunately validated.

The question now is: How can the lethargic Red Sox turn the tide against the charged-up (and mathematically due to win the series) Angels?

Get their pitching to not suck? Hogwash. Have their batters hit the ball and reach base safely? Balderdash. Care? Stratego.

There's only one thing the Boston Red Sox can do if they hope to stand a chance a chance against their extraneously-named ALDS rival:

They need to add more cities to their name.

Think about it: in 2002, the first year since 1965 that the (then just "Anaheim") Angels acknowledged their geographical location on their jerseys, the team won its first (and, to date, only) World Series. No one outside of Anaheim gave a hoot (and even the majority of those living in the Anaheim area were only pretending to give hoots in order to hide their shame over having been unaware that their city had housed a professional baseball franchise since 1966); the team went on to suck for the following two seasons, a suckitude made much more embarrassing than its previous incarnation by the fact that the rest of the baseball world was now vaguely aware of the existence of Anaheim in all its irritating worthlessness. (I thought Disneyland was just Disneyland, remarked everyone, oblivious to the trenchant accuracy of that discarded belief.)

Prior to the 2005 season, the Angels ownership--no doubt realizing that the wholly artificial, rapidly decreasing "fan base" that came to exist just three years earlier might soon vanish entirely--struck upon the ingenious idea to rebrand the team to arbitrarily include the name of a city 40 miles away: a city that, importantly, people had actually heard of. And, voila: the [One City] Angels of [Another, Completely Unrelated City] went on to make the playoffs in 4 of the 5 ensuing seasons.

Sure, Providence, Rhode Island, is 45 miles from the city in which the Red Sox actually play--not to mention in a different state--but the Anaheim Angels didn't let silly things like "facts" and "logic" stand in their way en route to their recent postseason-appearance streak; the one thing that has stopped them, time and time again, from advancing beyond the division series is the Boston Red Sox. The hard truth currently facing the Red Sox is that they can't, in all likelihood, keep knocking the Angels out of the postseason forever. [UPDATE (10/11/09): Called it.] For that streak to continue, the Red Sox must take a page from the Angels' book and add a city.

(And though it may be too late for the Red Sox to do so this season, there's always 2010 for the Providence Red Sox of Boston; and if that doesn't work...watch out for the New England Boston Braves-Red Sox of Pennsylvania in 2011.)

ALCS Game 5, Following Three-Day Seventh-Inning Stretch, Concludes in ALCS Game 7

All that excitement of the Boston Red Sox's historic comeback late in Game 5 of the American League Championship and their handy defeat of the Tampa Bay Rays in the next contest to bring the series down to a decisive Game 7?

Never happened.

Steve Harvey Forces ALCS Game 7

Prior to the Boston Red Sox's brain-melting comeback in Game 5 Thursday night, it's fair to say that the American League Championship Series had been the Tampa Bay Rays' to win.

Following Boston's 4-2 victory in Game 6 on Saturday, the series is officially anyone's.

What is it that has changed the face of this year's American League showdown? Is it the Red Sox's tendency to thrive in the face of ALCS elimination--a reputation born in 2004, when they won four straight elimination games to defeat the New York Yankees--and solidified in 2007, when they rallied back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cleveland Indians? Is it the Rays' inexperience? Is it a combination of both?

While many potential explanations hold merit, Metroville happens to believe that the 2008 ALCS has been altered by comedian, actor and radio personality Broderick Steven Harvey--perhaps better known to you as "Steve Harvey".

When baseball fans throughout the country tuned into TBS on Saturday at 8 p.m. EST--the scheduled broadcast start time for Game 6--and found themselves watching an archival "TV Bloopers" special, I'm willing to bet that most of them didn't panic. I, for example--because it was not yet 8:07 EST, the official scheduled start time for the game, when I turned on my television--assumed that, perhaps because of how late in Game 5 had the Sox turned things around, TBS had been unable to put together a pregame show.

When 8:07 EST rolled around and the TBS broadcast switched not to the Red Sox-Rays game but to a syndicated episode of "The Steve Harvey Show", it's fair to assume that most viewers' emotions took a turn. Casual baseball fans probably thought, "Hey, what the hell?"; dedicated fans of the Red Sox or the Rays probably thought, "HEY, WHAT THE HELL?!"; fans of the comedy stylings of Steve Harvey over baseball probably thought, "All right!".

As a Red Sox fan who is also possibly an honest-to-goodness crazy person, my reaction was something else entirely: I immediately feared that Boston's improbable victory on Thursday night was a product of my imagination--that they had actually lost the game and the series; there would be no baseball on TV until the World Series started on Wednesday, and no Red Sox baseball on TV until 2009.

Later, after the technicians at the Atlanta headquarters of TBS (some of whom I hope are no longer employed) had amended their colossal gaffe, my thoughts turned toward the possibility that there existed any Tampa Bay Rays fans (among the few hundred real fans, mind you, that existed prior to the current season) neurotic enough to have experienced a delusional episode similar to mine during the twenty minutes that "The Steve Harvey Show" supplanted the ballgame. What must they have been thinking? Had the Red Sox victory in Game 5 been a product of their imaginations--as I had briefly feared was the case for me--they would not have turned on their televisions on Saturday evening to watch a baseball game: the ALCS would have been over, the Rays would have reached the World Series and wouldn't be playing again until Wednesday. The only possible explanation, in their minds, would have been that...

The Tampa Bay Rays never existed!

Somewhere around 1995 or 1996, they--living lives of total unfulfilment in the farthest corner of the American Southeast and being baseball fans with no interest in the ticky-tacky Florida Marlins--had, in an unconscious preemptive countermeasure against their suicides, withdrawn from reality and conjured the establishment of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, down the very last detail. The twelve-year history of their beloved baseball team WAS NOTHING BUT A FEVER DREAM.

How fucked up must that have been for them during those twenty horrible minutes?

It was likely fucked up enough that, even after TBS had righted its sinking ship Saturday evening, there's no way that the tried-and-true Rays fans dedicated enough to have experienced a psychotic episode of such severity could have completely gotten their heads back in the game before its end. And when a team's most dedicated fans don't have their heads the game...the team doesn't have their heads in the game. The fewer the amount of truly-obsessed fans, the more influential is each individual's karma upon a team's performance. It's superstitious-science. If you don't understand it, you're not a real fan of any professional sports team (which could easily make you a current supporter of the Tampa Bay Rays).

So here we are, heading into a decisive (and--at least as of a few days ago--inconceivable) Game 7. If you think that you can honestly predict which team will win, you're either (A) a member of one of the two opposing clubs (in which case: What up, Youkilis! Sweet beard! (and/or) Hey, Grant! Is it "Balfour" or "Ball Four"? WOOO, go Sox!) or (B) a multi-divorced degenerate gambler whose children won't speak to him (in which case: Sorry Dad keeps intercepting those letters with the checks in them, Biological Dad!). It's anyone's game. Should the Rays win, I will be very, very, very sad, as a Red Sox fan...but also (comparatively much less) happy, as a baseball fan, to see a small-market, low-budget team make it to the World Series. Should the Red Sox win--as I hope they will--I will be very, very, very happy...not just for my team, but for the few Tampa Bay Rays fans who are (relatively) old-school enough to be obsessed enough with their favorite baseball team to occasionally become mental patients. Why?

Because those Tampa Bay Rays fans will finally, through their hard-earned agony, have experienced the rite of passage that is a team curse.

In their case, it would be: "The Curse of Steve Harvey".

Gotta start somewhere.

Red Sox's 'Play Like Complete Dog Shit in Attempt to Reach World Series' Experiment Yields Unsurprising Resul--Wait, WHAT?

The Boston Red Sox were apparently as hurt as I was by their being perceived as the sneering villains of this year's ALCS, but their solution to the problem--to perform so terribly against the upstart Tampa Bay Rays as to reposition themselves as the underdogs they were a scant four years ago and thereby win back the hearts and minds of the general public beyond New England before staging a comeback--has to this point seemed rather dangerous, even to me. By the top half of the seventh inning during Game 5 Thursday night, it seemed downright psychotic.

I was disappointed when the Sox came up short in the marathon Game 2 on Sunday, but no Boston fan could complain too much about gaining a split on the road against a no-joke opponent. When the Red Sox decided to lay down their bats and allow their 2008 postseason ace to get shelled in Game 3, however, I began to grow concerned: wouldn't the Game 4 start of Human Batting Tee Tim Wakefield have been a better opportunity to drop a game at home?

Turns out that it was a spectacular opportunity, as the Rays unloaded for a 13-4 rout on Tuesday. It was at this point that I began to suspect that some of these Red Sox losses weren't intentional. Frankenstein's monster had broken out of the laboratory was wandering the countryside, drowning small children.

Nonetheless, there was a part of me that couldn't help but admire the Boston club's commitment to regaining underdog status by allowing themselves to be put in a 3-1 series hole, just like they were against the Indians last year and against the Yankees three years before that, that would require them to sweep all three remaining games to win the pennant.

That admiration had dissipated into utter disgust long before the middle of the seventh inning on Thursday, when the Red Sox were getting their asses handed to them (yet again), 7-0. Given that I am a Red Sox fan from birth (who is older than 5), I'm no stranger to seeing my team fail miserably...but I could little recall a game or a series when every member of the team looked for all the world like they just didn't give a shit--like failure was inevitable. That's exactly what the Red Sox looked like after the top half of the seventh during the do-or-die Game 5, facing a deficit that had never before been overcome in the history of the American League Championship Series.

And then...

They scored four runs, scored another three in the eighth, and tacked on one more in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, 8-7, and send the series back to Tampa.

So that happened.

Whether or not the Boston Red Sox are able to achieve the still-very-daunting task of winning the pennant, it's nice to once again be rooting for a team that cares...at least for one more game.

Darkness Falls Upon the AL East

What the hell, American League East teams that aren't based in the armpit of America's penis? You all just went ahead and let the Tampa Bay Rays--a team that has existed for barely a decade (although that was just long enough for them to change their name from a stupid one that made geographic sense, the "Devil Rays" (and which would have allowed this post to have a better title: "The AL East Stings"), to one that was just stupid)--win the division?

Shame on you, Baltimore Orioles. Out of all the major league teams that represent America's pastime (and who didn't very recently relocate from Canada), your home field is closest to the capital of our nation. There's an American hero whose heart you continue to break...some call him "Iron Man", some call him "Junior"...and you've got a lot of explaining to do to him. I'm talking, of course, about Robert Downey Jr.

Shame on you, Toronto Blue Jays. You're from Canada, so it was inevitable that you would one day be defeated by even the worst teams from America...but couldn't you have at least shown proper respect to your pseudo-country's big brother actual country--the Gilbert Grape to your Arnie Grape, if you will--by finishing dead last in the division instead of second-to-last?

Shame on you, Boston Red Sox. Yeah, you're in the playoffs...but as the wild card. You're the defending World Series champions, for Yaz's sake, and you've conceded your division title to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of baseball--the Tampa Bay Rays! As both a Red Sox fan and a fan of Major League Baseball as a whole, I find this outcome unacceptable. You have one chance to set things right, Red Sox, and you've got one month in which to do so.

Well, I guess that's everyone.

...Or at least every team who will have a stadium next year that is older than wherever the hell it is that Tampa Bay plays.