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.

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.

If You Can't Decide What City Your Team Plays For...

...you don't get to advance to the ALCS.

Jed Lowrie says so.

The Red Sox Can't Stop Firing Grady Little

A long time ago, when the New York Yankees were a competitive baseball team, Grady Little got himself fired as the manager of the Boston Red Sox when, with his team on the cusp of defeating their aforementioned historic archnemeses in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, he opted not to remove his clearly-out-of-gas starting pitcher Pedro Martinez in the eighth inning with the Red Sox leading 5-3. The Yankees went on to tie the game in that very inning and win it in the eleventh, thus bringing the total number of consecutive years that the Red Sox had gone without winning a World Series to 86. While the Yankees went on to lose in the World Series to Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell and the rest of the Florida Marlins, Grady Little was run out of Boston on a rail.

During the four years since, the dynamic between the Red Sox and the Yankees has, to put it mildly, changed. The Red Sox have won two World Series titles while the Yankees haven't even appeared in one championship contest. The Sox' most recent playoff success was due in large part to the effectiveness of their ace, Josh Beckett, and RBI machine Mike Lowell, who was crowned the 2007 World Series MVP. Meanwhile, the Yankees barely even made the 2007 playoffs (as the Wild Card), in the first round of which they were soundly trounced by the Cleveland Indians 3 games to 1. The responsibility for this unequivocal failure was placed squarely on the shoulders of longtime Yankees manager Joe Torre; as a result (and taking into account the fact that, during his tenure, the Yankees hadn't won a World Series title since the previous century), Torre was essentially fired by means of a deliberately insulting contract renewal offer. (Adding insult to injury for Yankee fans, on the very night that the Boston Red Sox closed out their second world championship in 4 years, the Yankees' star player, Alex Rodriguez, opted out of his contract extension, unceremoniously severing his relationship with the organization.) Given the history between the Red Sox and the Yankees, it can reasonably be inferred that Joe Torre didn't lose his job just because the Yankees had failed to live up to expectations for so many years...but also because the Red Sox--during the same years--had so roundly exceeded their own.

Yesterday it was reported that Joe Torre--the man who lost his job in large part as a result of the success of the Boston Red Sox--is going to be hired as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. And who will he be replacing?

Grady Little. The man whose career is destined to be defined by the failure of the Boston Red Sox under his watch...the man who is now out of a job once again as a result of that very team's performance.

Does all of this amount to a fair shake for Grady Little? I cannot objectively answer that question, for I am a Red Sox fan. As far as I'm concerned, I'd be happy to see Grady Little punished for leaving Pedro in back in 2003 every day for the rest of his life. Two World Series titles since or no two World Series titles since, it doesn't change the fact that that was a completely dumbass decision.

Au revoir once again, Grady. Apparently, you shall never be forgiven.