Sweet Home Chicago

Say it is so, Joe. The White Sox did it - a great 1-0 victory last night, a sweep of the Astros (including two wins against the previously invincible Brad Lidge) and an 11-1 record this postseason. I was rooting for the Astros all the way, but this morning I have to tip my hat to a great baseball team - they proved that they were for real and fully deserve this historic win.

For this Red Sox fan the postseason didn't have quite the same ending as last year, but there is one feeling that remains the same. As Fox ran its World Series montage with the closing credits of its broadcast, I felt the melancholy that others had already started to feel. Baseball's long and intensive schedule means that it's an integral part of your life for almost eight months a year, and then you wake up one October morning and it's gone. As A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote:

The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

The winter months stretch bleakly before us, but I console myself with the fact that spring will roll around and baseball will once more assume its rightful place.

I began the season with Thomas Boswell's "Why Time Begins On Opening Day", and that seems as good a place as any to draw the curtain on the 2005 season:

The ways that baseball insinuates itself into the empty corners, cheering up the odd hour, are almost too ingrained to notice. Tape at eleven, the scores before bed, the Monday and Saturday games of the week. Into how many conversations will Steinbrenner's name creep, so that we may gauge the judgements of our friends, catch a glimpse of their values on the sly? The amateur statistician and the armchair strategist in us is roused. What fan doesn't have a new system for grading relief pitchers, or a theory on why the Expos never win?

Sure, opening day is baseball's bandwagon. Pundits and politicians and every prose poet on the continent jumps on board for a few days. But they're gone soon, off in search of some other windy event worthy of their attention. Then, once more, all those long, slow months of baseball are left to us. And our time can begin again.

Our time begins again on April 3rd in Arlington.

A Well-Deserved Break

I'm looking forward to the beginning of the World Series tomorrow night, but my team not being involved means that I haven't felt a real need to write anything about the build-up. The contrast with last year is quite startling - I'm just as tired, physically, because all the games have been played at ungodly hours of the morning (8:30pm ET starts are the worst possible ones for me - just early enough for me to not get much sleep beforehand, just late enough to not get any sleep afterwards), but I'm not experiencing the mental torture of last year's playoffs. I've become a fan of the game again, happy that the baseball season isn't over yet, content to root for the Astros from afar and hopeful that we get to see some great baseball over the next nine days.

In the absence of any wit and wisdom on the game of baseball, I thought I would use the downtime to point you in the direction of one of my favourite non-baseball blogs. There are certain blogs I read for the content, there are others I read for the writing and then there are the magical few which manage to combine content and style in a way which makes you think: "There is nothing you could do to make this post any better". This is one of those.

Wild Billy's Circus Story

The New York Times has seized the opportunity afforded by a World Series in Chicago (against the Astros, just in case you've spent the last few hours hiding under a rock) to remember one of baseball's more, shall we say, colourful characters.

The baseball purist lurking deep down inside me is sometimes uncomfortable when things stray too far from the norm, but how can you not have some admiration for a man who would be insane enough put his team out on the field dressed like this?

(UPI)

Still, I'll give them this - they might look silly, but at least they were wearing white socks...

History Will Teach Us Nothing

Beth (and Bill Simmons) have a few words of sympathy and encouragement for the Astros' fans. They know how Monday night's defeat felt, because they've been there - Simmons even has a "Levels of Losing" scale he can apply to such games.

I've been rooting for the Astros and against the Cardinals throughout this series, for reasons very similar not only to those of Beth:

For my taste, [the Cardinals are] just...meh. Their fans are...meh. Their soon-to-be-torn-down Stadium is...meh. I just can't get into them.

but also to those of The Sports Guy:

Note: I love rooting against La Russa and have no idea why. Even read Buzz Bissinger's La Russa book just to be annoyed by him some more. I think it's solely because of the announcers and writers who constantly talk about what a genius he is, but it also might be his hair. It's one or the other.

So tonight I'll be rooting once again for Houston. I don't know how the majority of Astros fans feel going into today's game, but they should take heart from their team, who seem - on the surface at least - to have put Monday behind them and are looking forward to sending Roy Oswalt to the mound in Game 6 and Roger Clemens in Game 7.

Thomas Boswell has a great take on how Game 5 shows us once again that you don't never know nothin' in baseball:

Yet, in the span of just eight pitches, baseball proved once again that, just to show off, it can drop a redwood tree on our heads whenever it wants.

Baseball often seems to take on a life of its own in these kinds of situations - as Boswell says, it's almost as if this has to go to a Game 7, with Clemens pitching a do-or-die game for his hometown team. The romantic in me would like to see Brad Lidge close it out against Pujols in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7, but I know that would be like asking the baseball gods to strike me down with lightning, so I'm prepared to settle for a Houston victory in Game 6 and an extra night's rest before the World Series kicks off on Saturday.

Staying Alive

If anyone ever tries to tell you that the greatest sport in the world is something other than baseball, they're lying. In no other sport can the end result of 170 games come down to one moment of glory and anguish.

Was I the only person out there who felt really uncomfortable as FOX started rolling the end-of-Busch-Stadium and birth-of-the-Astros footage in the top of the ninth? I don't believe in curses, but I can imagine that as the first two hitters were retired Houston fans were thinking "Stop showing this stuff - we haven't won anything yet!" and St. Louis fans were thinking "We know all this - what the hell good does it do to show us again?".

So a word to FOX - by all means, put the whole thing in its broader context, but please do it after the fact, and not whilst the crucial top of the ninth is in progress. Moments of pure, undiluted tension such as these are rare and wonderful enough not to need additional commentary. Let them unfold, and history will take care of the rest.

Read 'Em And Weep

Am I seeing things or could this article by Tom Verducci be in the running for the "Worst Proof Reading Of All Time" award?

Orlando Canberra - from Colombia to Australia in one fell swoop.
Erin Santana - throws like a girl.
Ermine Dye - slender body, short legs, long snout.

and my favourite one of the bunch:

Jorge Tostada - Spanish for "toasted". How appropriate...

Last Cheap Shot At The Dream

My mother says that you should never delight in someone's else's misfortune.

Before you ask: no, she's not a Red Sox fan.

Breathless

Just because it's "no-strings-attached" baseball doesn't mean it isn't going to leave you exhausted.

If anybody ever asks me to explain why I love the game of baseball, this game will be vying for a spot as exhibit A. I switched on at 1am ET and switched off at 1am CET - in between times I was privileged to watch ones of the best postseason games of all time. If you're in any doubt, just read the records:

• Longest postseason game in history (18 innings, 5 hours 50 minutes)
• First-ever postseason game with two grand slams
• Most pitches ever thrown in a postseason game (553)
• Most players used in a postseason game (42 - Houston 23, Atlanta 19)

The stats are all impressive (if you're an anal-retentive baseball fan), but what really made the game so riveting is that last statistic. Houston manager Phil Garner used 23 players in the game, including Clemens as a pinch-hitter and relief pitcher. The only two players he didn't use were Andy Pettitte, who was scheduled to start a potential Game 5, and Roy Oswalt, who had pitched the night before. So when Clemens went out there to pitch, he knew that he wasn't going out there to just get one batter out - there was literally nobody else left. You want 'do or die'? You got it...

It was a huge performance, not just by Clemens, but by the whole Astros team. They switched positions out there so often that it started to look like some new ESPN sports-reality show (Major League Musical Chairs?), but they stayed focused, didn't give in to tiredness or frustration and came through big in the end.

Their reward for this heroic peformance? A re-match of last year's NLCS against the Cardinals, who finished 11 games ahead of them in the NL Central. If nothing else, baseball continues to prove that God does indeed have a sense of humour.

Mixed Emotions

Regret:

Yes, I have to admit to feeling some regret – I wish Curt Schilling had been 100% healthy, I wish Keith Foulke could have been the closer he was last year, I wish we hadn't lost so many games to the the Blue Jays and the Orioles, I wish we'd been able to get one lousy run home with the bases loaded and none out in the sixth inning of Friday's game. In other words, I wish a lot of things, but all of them are idle fantasy – the season was what is was, and looking back at a bunch of What if's isn't going to change a damn thing.

At the end of the day, what did we have? A Red Sox team that made the playoffs for an historic third straight year, despite being at times held together by little more than duct tape and fervent prayers. A team that made the playoffs despite having, according to their own center fielder, no legitimate #1 or even #2 starter for the second half of the season.

In the end, it was that which let them down – over a short series you need to be able to limit the damage done by the opposing hitters, and the Sox just couldn't do it. They ran into a White Sox team that proved that their 99 regular-season wins were no fluke. Chicago out-hit, out-pitched and out-fielded the Sox and fully deserved their ALDS win. We continued to believe, to keep the faith, but what we were seeing with our eyes told a different story. We hoped for one of those magical comebacks that were a trademark of the 2004 season, but that little voice of reason inside our head said that if we couldn't get a single run home with the bases loaded and nobody out, then maybe we just weren't supposed to be there.

Sadness:

Not because we didn't repeat our 2004 performance – winning the whole thing just once is hard enough – but because I woke up this morning and realised that for the first time since early March there will be no Red Sox games to watch this week. There has been baseball almost every day for the past seven months, and those games – of which I've seen more this year than ever before – have given my life a bizarre kind of rhythm. There have been days when baseball has driven me crazy and others when it has been the only thing between me and a padded cell, but in both cases it has been there. I've cared about the games, I've cared about the Red Sox, I've felt I was part of Red Sox Nation, and as tiring as that kind of intensity and involvement can be, I will miss it over the winter months.

Relief:

That passion for baseball and the Red Sox sometimes comes at a cost. When you live 4,000 miles and six time-zones away from the team, following games with any regularity becomes a challenge. Those 7:05pm ET starts, where you can roll in from work, pop open a beer and sit down and watch the ballgame on NESN? Well, until around the end of August, the only proof I have of their existence are the box scores on ESPN the following morning. Then September arrives, and suddenly I slip into last-month-of-the-season mode – four or five games a week, at least three of which will involve going to bed at 10pm, getting up at 1am for the game, then grabbing another couple of hours' sleep around 4:30am before heading off to work. It's not a hardship – I really do live for this – but after a month (or two) of that kind of rhythm, I'm glad to get my regular life back. I'll watch the rest of the playoffs and I'll root for the White Sox to go all the way, but there'll be no craziness. I'm looking forward to just sitting back and being a fan of the game for a couple of weeks, with no strings attached.

Hope:

Unless Santa Claus really does exist, we will never see this team play baseball together again. I'm not going to start second-guessing either the players or the front office – news of departures and new contracts elsewhere will come soon enough and we'll deal with them as and when they happen. Every year Red Sox management puts together a group of 25 guys, and we live and die with them for six months of the year. We get to know them – not in a personal sense, but in a baseball sense, recognising at a distance their mannerisms at the plate, on the mound and in the field. We come to care about them, partly because of who they are but mainly because of what they represent: they're our guys, wearing our home whites. When they move on, it feels like something is being taken from us, but one of the beauties of baseball is that that roster number of 25 is sacred – the gaping holes they leave will be filled with other players. They will take time to find their proper place in both the organisation and our own Red Sox world, but they will find that place, and we will come to care about them when April comes around. And although we may not yet know all 25 names on that roster, I would just like to run three names by you, as we reflect on the pitching issues that plagued the Red Sox this season:

Papelbon. Delcarmen. Hansen.

2006? Bring it on...

Oh Bury Me Not

No comment needed.

Under Pressure

There are more than 120,000 square feet of playing surface on a baseball field, but last night's game was decided by a margin of about 1 1/2 inches - that's the distance between Tony Graffanino's glove and the ball that got by him in the fifth inning.

With one man out and a runner on first, Graffanino was thinking double-play, but he got ahead of himself, missed the ball and the runners were safe. Iguchi then hit a three-run home run off David Wells and that, unfortunately, was the ballgame.

So it's back to Fenway Park, 0-2 down in the series. 2003 and 2004 showed that it's not insurmountable, but it is going to take some doing. The strange thing is that I'm not particularly worried, either about the game or indeed the Red Sox' fate. I want them to come back, to thrill us with some of the magic we saw in 2004 - I'll be watching the game tomorrow, trying to invoke some Dave Roberts mojo with my #31 jersey and hoping that the Red Sox can pull off yet another unbelievable comeback.

However, if it doesn't happen, then so be it - I won't be tearing my hair out in frustration or wanting to stick sharp objects in my eye. I know that other Red Sox fans have felt this at different stages of the season, and it generally seems to be ascribed to some kind of grace period following last year's World Series win. I honestly don't know whether it's that, because I'm a recent Red Sox convert and don't have those years or decades of disappointment that haunted the rest of Red Sox Nation.

On balance I think it's probably more likely that it's because the Red Sox proved over 162 regular-season games that they were once again one of the best teams in baseball. And not only that, but they did it in the face of injuries to key players. If you'd said to me at the beginning of the season that the Sox would lose their ace for a good chunk of the season and have their closer disappear off the radar and yet would still make the playoffs, I would have taken that in a heartbeat.

So, I'll be showing a little faith tomorrow, because sometimes there's magic in the night, but if we don't get the fairytale ending between now and Sunday, then so be it. The present will look dim for a few days, but we can smile because the future is bright.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

Well, Clement didn't walk anybody, but that's about as good as it got last night. The fact that Scott Podsednik - he of the 59 regular-season stolen bases, the symbol of the White Sox' vaunted 'small-ball' approach - hit his first home run of the season tells you pretty much all you need to know.

It's always said that good pitching beats good hitting - yesterday's game allows us to add Amendment 1(a) to that particular pearl of wisdom: good pitching beats bad pitching and mediocre hitting. Francona will no doubt be crucified for leaving Clement in too long, but that's only part of the problem - Contreras had the Red Sox' number from the very first inning and they never looked like mounting a serious threat. They could have batted all night and still not scored more than the two runs they got on the board.

The White Sox came into the playoffs looking for some of the respect they felt they hadn't got during the regular season, and they got it. Anyone who was watching will have sat up and taken notice of a team that should be taken seriously. Now it's the Red Sox' turn to show that they're capable of getting up off the floor and putting up a decent fight.

Another Day

Above and beyond wanting to win another championship, this is why we should be grateful that the Red Sox are playing a game today:

2005 is in the books, and as books go, it slants more toward Finnegan’s Wake than, say, A Prayer For Owen Meany – a rich cast, full of hope and promise at the start, that then descends all too quickly into a morass of unintelligible language, nonsensical metaphors, and dead-end premises that never seem to add up to a coherent whole.
[...]
Baseball’s woven tightly into my summer; I can’t imagine not following it every day, not reading as much as I can about it and watching it at every opportunity. I bemoan the fact that I can’t watch more, I talk about it with as many people as I can as much as I can, and I just generally love the fact that something as trivial and insignificant as a sport can have this effect, not just on me but on a lot of the people I know.

We get to play whilst 22 other teams look on in envy.

Bring it on.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

To be filed away in the "I Don't Know Why It Happened But I'm Sure Glad It Did" file (left-hand cabinet, bottom right-hand drawer):

I switched on MLB.com for yesterday's game pretty much resigned to having to watch the game through the, erm, neutral eyes of the YES Network (after a NESN feed on Friday night and the inanity that is Tim McCarver on Fox on Saturday).

Ten smug minutes of Kay, Singleton and Kaat had me reaching for the mute button whilst trying desperately to see if it's possible to get different simultaneous audio / video feeds by using IE for one and Firefox for the other. (It is possible, by the way, but they're simultaneous in a '30-second delay' kind of way, so YES was constantly about a pitch-and-a-half ahead of WEEI).

And then, around the bottom of the second inning, I got up to go and make coffee and when I came back, the feed had magically switched to NESN. It's the first time that I've seen a game where the feed has switched in mid-game, and I still have no idea how or why it happened. It was an unexpected surprise, like finding twenty dollars in the pocket of the britches that you wore last week, but at the same time it was a grim reminder that ahead of me lies a month of Rick Sutcliffe on MLB.com International and Dumb & Dumber on Fox.

Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous...

Three Little Words

In the end, the Red Sox didn't need any help yesterday from the White Sox - they went out and got the job done against the Yankees.

I'm not going to pretend that it hasn't been a stressful ride, but the fact remains that the Red Sox won 95 games, despite having no ace and no closer for a good part of the season, and that - for the first time in club history - they are going to the postseason for the third straight year. If that isn't enough cause to celebrate, then maybe we need a reminder of what's in store for fans of other teams (e.g. the Mariners):

If you came here looking for in-depth analysis of the Sox' postseason chances, then you've come to the wrong place - there are plenty of places where you'll find theories on the Sox' pitching woes. I would just like to point out, though, that these are the same places that were reminding us last October that no team had ever come back from a 0-3 deficit to win a playoff series.

During yesterday's clubhouse celebrations both Curt Schilling and David Wells reminded us that Tuesday sees the start of a new season - the slate is wiped clean and everyone is 0-0. Anything can (and sometimes does) happen, so I'll leave the last word(s) to Manny:

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

So, the three-game sweep wasn't to be.

It just wasn't the Red Sox' day today. However, thanks to a White Sox team that refuses to mail in their last three games of the season, the Sox still have a great shot at a playoff berth, via the Wild Card.

The very best that Cleveland can hope for is to force a one-game playoff against Boston on Monday, which would only happen if they beat the White Sox tomorrow and the Red Sox lost to the Yankees. All the other possible permutations would result in the Red Sox winning the Wild Card.

Once again, the Red Sox control their own destiny - they just need to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go out and win tomorrow. The Sox have a 75% chance of winning the Wild Card tomorrow, a 25% chance of having a one-game playoff Monday and a 0% chance of immediate elimination. If that's the silver lining on today's cloud, I'll take it.

Fade Away

Pretty please? And make it quick, OK?

One Step Up

One down and two to go.

Outside of a shaky first inning, Wells pitched a great game - he kept the Yankees guessing over seven inning with a mixed bag of pitches and great location. The bullpen was lights-out, again - Bradford came in to get Sheffield, Myers had an epic 11-pitch struggle with Matsui, which ended with Matsui striking out, and Timlin struck out three of the last four batters whilst giving up just one hit.

And what about the bats? Well, the bats were occasionally big (Varitek's go-ahead home-run), but mostly they were timely. With a one-run lead going into the sixth the Sox went: single, stolen base, intentional walk, single, walk, error, sac fly to put three runs on the board, and that was pretty much the ballgame.

Tonight the Sox go with Wakefield. If there's one guy you'd want out there with the season on the line, it's Wakefield and his knuckleball. I'll leave the Yankees to ponder the words of famed hitting coach Charlie Lau:

"There are two theories on hitting a knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works."