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I am so tired. I want to make this clear immediately, so you'll know why if I start making with the nonsensical melodrama, or just plain nonsense. No, I mean more so than usual.
Since Sunday night - well, technically Monday morning - I think I've gotten twelve hours sleep. Total.
All I've really done is work and watch baseball.
Since this is hella long:
Remember how I was whining about Saturday's game being a whole four hours and twenty minutes long? Sunday's game? Was five hours and two minutes. I went to bed at, I think, around two, fell asleep probably around three, and woke up at about six for some reason, and blithely trotted off to my first day at my new job on about three hours sleep, lots of caffeine, and an intense Red Sox high. Because they won. They didn't give up, roll over, and let the Yankees stomp on them. They fucking won it.
Best Moments of Game Four:
* Dave Roberts, the fastest runner I have ever seen, comes around to tie the game in the ninth inning.
* David "Who's Your Papi?" Ortiz wins it in the twelfth with a two-run homer.
* Best Non-Play Moment: A-Rod hits a two-run homer. A moment passes. The ball comes flying back into the field. It is not the first Yankee homerun ball to do so in this series. Nonetheless, Johnny Damon picks it up and tosses it back. A moment passes. Play resumes - only to be halted when the ball is thrown back again. This time, an umpire pockets it. Cut to Princess A-Rod. He is so pissed (really, what did he expect?) that it appears as though he might choke to death on his own saliva. He tries desperately to glare, but can manage only a ferocious pout. Sure, I love the amazing plays and dramatically timed runs, but it's stuff like this that'll really stick in my mind.
Rather more on Princess A-Rod's eternal charms in a bit.
I got out of work on Monday an hour after Game Five began. You know how I thought Game Four was really long? Game Five lasted five hours and forty-nine minutes, making it the longest game in run time (as opposed to number of innings) in postseason history.
Game Five is a blur. Again, the Yankees were ahead. The Red Sox tied it up in the eighth, again thanks to Dave Roberts's speed. The game went fourteen innings, stretching out the suspense so long that I couldn't sustain the tension, and just relaxed and talked on the phone with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
manderspander, Amanda, who was quite able to sustain tension and did it enough for the both of us. I mostly remember our agreeing that we had fallen into an alternate universe where the game would simply never end. The Sox won Game Five when Ortiz hit just hard enough to send Johnny Damon home. Yes, that would be the very same Ortiz as the Ortiz who finished off Game Four.
The game ended at eleven, I went to bed at about midnightish. I took forever to wind down enough to fall asleep, and slept poorly, finally giving up at about seven-thirty.
This brings us up to yesterday, when I got go to to work some more. Cumberland Farms, by the way, is much simpler than Lampron's. They've elimated and smoothed out a zillion little tiny complications that made me crazy at Lampron's. It's too early to know if I like it there, but I certainly appreciate making more to do an easier version of my last job.
This time, the game didn't start till eight. (Wait, when did I switch tenses? Oh, well.) I'd been hearing varying reports about the weather, so it was a bit of a relief to hear that it was set to go as planned. A bit of a shock too, because here was the weather at Yankee Stadium: wet, windy, and forty degrees. Not exactly ideal weather anyway, but please remember the state of both teams. They had just played three games in three days, two of which were extraordinarily long with less than half a day to recover between them. Then they got to travel from Boston to New York. The Yankees's bullpen was wiped out in Game Five, Boston's nearly so. And let's not forget how much sleep they must have gotten a situation like this. Okay, now let's have them play the most crucial game yet in the cold and wet. I respect every last one of them for it, Yankee and Red Sox alike.
Except Princess A-Rod. A-Rod can fucking blow me. I know, I promised more. I'll get to it.
Oh, and one last tiny detail: Our starting pitcher, Curt Schilling, was playing with a torn tendon in his ankle. The ankle he uses to push off the mound. It's not enough to know that our team has to has to has to win this game to keep their postseason alive, but we gotta worry about whether our pitcher is as ready as he says he is. Especially since that injury cost him a win in Game One of the series. (Check out this piece for a story written about this prior to the game. It's beautiful. It's almost poetry.)
And he was. And he did it. The way he played last night, you'd never know he was injured. He got on that mound, stitches holding his tendon together, ankle shot up with anesthetic (and only Curt really knows how long it lasted), and blood seeping into his sock, and he pitched like he'd never felt better. For seven innings. He became more and more haggard as the game went on, and between innings sat quietly in the dugout, hunched over, a towel draped over his head. And he only gave the Yankees something like four lousy hits. Afterward, he evaded questions about the pain, but judging from how he looked, he pitched through a damn lot of it. And who knows if that ankle will ever be the same?
There are just no words for what Curt Schilling did last night.
Meanwhile, on the Yankees's side of things . . . we have A-Rod. Oh, boy, do we have A-Rod. Just when I thought we might manage a civilized ALCS this year, too.
Here's the set-up: It was the eighth inning. Bronson Arroyo was pitching relief. (I think it's worth mentioning here it was Bronson who hit A-Rod with that pitch in July, which made A-Rod throw a hissy fit, which made Varitek get right in his face to protect the pitcher, and he ultimately gave A-Rod a well-earned shove in the face, which in turn emptied the benches for a good old-fashioned baseball brawl. So this is the kind of history that Bronson and A-Rod have.) Jeter had gotten up to second base. A-Rod got a hit, which Bronson scooped up and ran to first base to tag A-Rod out. When he gets to A-Rod, A-Rod slaps the ball out of his glove and keeps running. The first base umpire, view blocked by Doug Mientkowicz (or however the fuck it's spelled), our first baseman, fails to see this delightful example of sportsmanship and declares A-Rod safe. This in turn gives Jeter time to get home, bringing the score up to 4-2 Boston.
Absolutely everybody who saw the play (excluding, of course, the Yankees fans in the stands, but surprisingly including the useless FOX commentators) goes, "HELL NO," and Francona hustles out to the field to argue. The umpires huddle to discuss the call, and in the end decide to reverse it, throwing A-Rod out, which in turn takes away Jeter's run and sends him back to second base. A-Rod has the temerity to react with indignant innocence.
I already decided last July that A-Rod, far from being the intelligent and classy guy who came across in the pre-season interviews, was in fact a spoiled little princess. Clearly I was not wrong. Hence, Princess A-Rod.
As if that weren't enough, the retraction of that run caused the Yankees fans in the stands to start throwing shit onto the field, to the point where it got dangerous and cops in full riot gear showed up. The rest of the innings, and the top of the ninth, was played with police lining the field.
I can't help but feel a touch of sympathy for the Yankees fans out there who are smart, decent people. I mean, if one of our boys pulled a stunt like that? If some of our fans in the stands behaved that way? I would be so embarrassed I wouldn't know where to look.
A Couple Other Points About Game Six:
* Ortiz, apparently bored with making the dramatic clinches, and also maybe hoping for a couple hours sleep, opted to hit his home run as the first Red Sox run of the night, rather than the last.
* Mark Bellhorn, he of the sandy curls and insane inconsistency, surfaced from some seriously bad playing this series to add three runs with a home run of his own. Speaking as one who has loved Bellhorn all season no matter what, even when he made that truly awesome error in Game Four (catch the ball; drop it; pick it up; drop it again) that made plenty of fans scream that Francona needed to pull him from the line-up pronto . . . I'm feelin' a bit of a "Told you so!" coming on, mixed with a touch of "I knew it!" Because what have I been saying all season? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Even better, this home run was the subject of the first umpire huddle. What happened was that the ball smacked into some fan in the front row wearing black and dropped back out onto the field, and the nearest umpire thought the ball was still in play and ruled it a two-run double or something. Again, everyone else in the world understood that this was not in fact the case. Out came Francona, the umpires conferred, and the home run was conceded.
* In winning this game, the Red Sox are the first American team in any sport ever (I think) to be down 3-0 in a seven-game series, then come back to force Game Seven.
In conclusion, finally, this series has been incredibly weird. Enough innings have been played for the series to be over already, there's been a heretofore unprecedented comeback, at one point there were cops . . . who knows what tonight's game will bring?
Since Sunday night - well, technically Monday morning - I think I've gotten twelve hours sleep. Total.
All I've really done is work and watch baseball.
Since this is hella long:
Remember how I was whining about Saturday's game being a whole four hours and twenty minutes long? Sunday's game? Was five hours and two minutes. I went to bed at, I think, around two, fell asleep probably around three, and woke up at about six for some reason, and blithely trotted off to my first day at my new job on about three hours sleep, lots of caffeine, and an intense Red Sox high. Because they won. They didn't give up, roll over, and let the Yankees stomp on them. They fucking won it.
Best Moments of Game Four:
* Dave Roberts, the fastest runner I have ever seen, comes around to tie the game in the ninth inning.
* David "Who's Your Papi?" Ortiz wins it in the twelfth with a two-run homer.
* Best Non-Play Moment: A-Rod hits a two-run homer. A moment passes. The ball comes flying back into the field. It is not the first Yankee homerun ball to do so in this series. Nonetheless, Johnny Damon picks it up and tosses it back. A moment passes. Play resumes - only to be halted when the ball is thrown back again. This time, an umpire pockets it. Cut to Princess A-Rod. He is so pissed (really, what did he expect?) that it appears as though he might choke to death on his own saliva. He tries desperately to glare, but can manage only a ferocious pout. Sure, I love the amazing plays and dramatically timed runs, but it's stuff like this that'll really stick in my mind.
Rather more on Princess A-Rod's eternal charms in a bit.
I got out of work on Monday an hour after Game Five began. You know how I thought Game Four was really long? Game Five lasted five hours and forty-nine minutes, making it the longest game in run time (as opposed to number of innings) in postseason history.
Game Five is a blur. Again, the Yankees were ahead. The Red Sox tied it up in the eighth, again thanks to Dave Roberts's speed. The game went fourteen innings, stretching out the suspense so long that I couldn't sustain the tension, and just relaxed and talked on the phone with
manderspander, Amanda, who was quite able to sustain tension and did it enough for the both of us. I mostly remember our agreeing that we had fallen into an alternate universe where the game would simply never end. The Sox won Game Five when Ortiz hit just hard enough to send Johnny Damon home. Yes, that would be the very same Ortiz as the Ortiz who finished off Game Four.The game ended at eleven, I went to bed at about midnightish. I took forever to wind down enough to fall asleep, and slept poorly, finally giving up at about seven-thirty.
This brings us up to yesterday, when I got go to to work some more. Cumberland Farms, by the way, is much simpler than Lampron's. They've elimated and smoothed out a zillion little tiny complications that made me crazy at Lampron's. It's too early to know if I like it there, but I certainly appreciate making more to do an easier version of my last job.
This time, the game didn't start till eight. (Wait, when did I switch tenses? Oh, well.) I'd been hearing varying reports about the weather, so it was a bit of a relief to hear that it was set to go as planned. A bit of a shock too, because here was the weather at Yankee Stadium: wet, windy, and forty degrees. Not exactly ideal weather anyway, but please remember the state of both teams. They had just played three games in three days, two of which were extraordinarily long with less than half a day to recover between them. Then they got to travel from Boston to New York. The Yankees's bullpen was wiped out in Game Five, Boston's nearly so. And let's not forget how much sleep they must have gotten a situation like this. Okay, now let's have them play the most crucial game yet in the cold and wet. I respect every last one of them for it, Yankee and Red Sox alike.
Except Princess A-Rod. A-Rod can fucking blow me. I know, I promised more. I'll get to it.
Oh, and one last tiny detail: Our starting pitcher, Curt Schilling, was playing with a torn tendon in his ankle. The ankle he uses to push off the mound. It's not enough to know that our team has to has to has to win this game to keep their postseason alive, but we gotta worry about whether our pitcher is as ready as he says he is. Especially since that injury cost him a win in Game One of the series. (Check out this piece for a story written about this prior to the game. It's beautiful. It's almost poetry.)
And he was. And he did it. The way he played last night, you'd never know he was injured. He got on that mound, stitches holding his tendon together, ankle shot up with anesthetic (and only Curt really knows how long it lasted), and blood seeping into his sock, and he pitched like he'd never felt better. For seven innings. He became more and more haggard as the game went on, and between innings sat quietly in the dugout, hunched over, a towel draped over his head. And he only gave the Yankees something like four lousy hits. Afterward, he evaded questions about the pain, but judging from how he looked, he pitched through a damn lot of it. And who knows if that ankle will ever be the same?
There are just no words for what Curt Schilling did last night.
Meanwhile, on the Yankees's side of things . . . we have A-Rod. Oh, boy, do we have A-Rod. Just when I thought we might manage a civilized ALCS this year, too.
Here's the set-up: It was the eighth inning. Bronson Arroyo was pitching relief. (I think it's worth mentioning here it was Bronson who hit A-Rod with that pitch in July, which made A-Rod throw a hissy fit, which made Varitek get right in his face to protect the pitcher, and he ultimately gave A-Rod a well-earned shove in the face, which in turn emptied the benches for a good old-fashioned baseball brawl. So this is the kind of history that Bronson and A-Rod have.) Jeter had gotten up to second base. A-Rod got a hit, which Bronson scooped up and ran to first base to tag A-Rod out. When he gets to A-Rod, A-Rod slaps the ball out of his glove and keeps running. The first base umpire, view blocked by Doug Mientkowicz (or however the fuck it's spelled), our first baseman, fails to see this delightful example of sportsmanship and declares A-Rod safe. This in turn gives Jeter time to get home, bringing the score up to 4-2 Boston.
Absolutely everybody who saw the play (excluding, of course, the Yankees fans in the stands, but surprisingly including the useless FOX commentators) goes, "HELL NO," and Francona hustles out to the field to argue. The umpires huddle to discuss the call, and in the end decide to reverse it, throwing A-Rod out, which in turn takes away Jeter's run and sends him back to second base. A-Rod has the temerity to react with indignant innocence.
I already decided last July that A-Rod, far from being the intelligent and classy guy who came across in the pre-season interviews, was in fact a spoiled little princess. Clearly I was not wrong. Hence, Princess A-Rod.
As if that weren't enough, the retraction of that run caused the Yankees fans in the stands to start throwing shit onto the field, to the point where it got dangerous and cops in full riot gear showed up. The rest of the innings, and the top of the ninth, was played with police lining the field.
I can't help but feel a touch of sympathy for the Yankees fans out there who are smart, decent people. I mean, if one of our boys pulled a stunt like that? If some of our fans in the stands behaved that way? I would be so embarrassed I wouldn't know where to look.
A Couple Other Points About Game Six:
* Ortiz, apparently bored with making the dramatic clinches, and also maybe hoping for a couple hours sleep, opted to hit his home run as the first Red Sox run of the night, rather than the last.
* Mark Bellhorn, he of the sandy curls and insane inconsistency, surfaced from some seriously bad playing this series to add three runs with a home run of his own. Speaking as one who has loved Bellhorn all season no matter what, even when he made that truly awesome error in Game Four (catch the ball; drop it; pick it up; drop it again) that made plenty of fans scream that Francona needed to pull him from the line-up pronto . . . I'm feelin' a bit of a "Told you so!" coming on, mixed with a touch of "I knew it!" Because what have I been saying all season? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Even better, this home run was the subject of the first umpire huddle. What happened was that the ball smacked into some fan in the front row wearing black and dropped back out onto the field, and the nearest umpire thought the ball was still in play and ruled it a two-run double or something. Again, everyone else in the world understood that this was not in fact the case. Out came Francona, the umpires conferred, and the home run was conceded.
* In winning this game, the Red Sox are the first American team in any sport ever (I think) to be down 3-0 in a seven-game series, then come back to force Game Seven.
In conclusion, finally, this series has been incredibly weird. Enough innings have been played for the series to be over already, there's been a heretofore unprecedented comeback, at one point there were cops . . . who knows what tonight's game will bring?
