MAY I HAVE THE PLEASURE of introducing you to Clark Griffith, aka "The Old Fox," Major League Baseball Hall of Famer and pioneer of the squeeze play? The 2011 Boston Red Sox, under less fortunate circumstances, already made Mr. Griffith's acquaintance earlier today.

BIG PAPI FINISHED HIS SEASON with a curtain call — following a bunt single. In a (mostly) meaningless final game, it was something to cheer for. Jon Lester finished his season one win shy of 20. The Red Sox finished one win under 90. And, in what was possibly his final at-bat in a Red Sox uniform (the only major league uniform he's ever worn), Jason Varitek drove a ball that was destined for the bullpen, but caught on the warning track. This season, a lot of things came up just a little bit short.

Today, the standings show the Red Sox seven games out of first place in the American League East and six games out of the wild card, with zero games left to play. But back when there were still 130 games left to play, CHB was already on the ledge, just short of declaring the end of everything in early May. "I don’t want to panic or overreact," he wrote, "but is it possible the Red Sox season is already over?" This was the outlook even before Beckett, Matsuzaka, Buchholz, Martinez, Varitek, Pedroia, and Youklis all went down with one kind of injury or another, two of them the season-ending kind.

And, of course, Papi was done for, we all knew that. (Never mind that he was done for last season, as well.) This time it really was the end — it certainly sounded like it: "I miss the old days, too," he said. Yikes. No matter what time of year it is or where the team is in the standings, it's hard not to take a gloomy view of the season when your affable, heroic, universally beloved DH starts talking like this:

"Do you understand that this is killing me?" [Ortiz said]. "Do you know when I'm going good I cannot sleep because I'm trying to remember everything that I did right so I can repeat it the next day and the next? And that's when I'm going good. When I'm going bad, it's even worse because everybody looks to me to be the guy who comes through for this ballclub. It's like I never sleep anymore."

So, the 2010 Red Sox season was ending before the spring would. Not just ending, but scuffling, crashing, breaking its ribs (twice), breaking its foot (also twice), catching mono, and developing mystery infections. And then getting up off the dirt to play again. Because despite the mess, somehow there was still plenty of baseball worth watching, right through the summer and even into the first weeks of fall when playoff chances looked more like lottery odds. As the Boston Globe's Chad Finn said, "Can't think of a Sox team that missed the postseason that I'll remember as well as this one. Call it the D-Mac Effect."

Last year, there was the improbable rise of Nick Green. This year, half the line-up was filled with D-Macs. After being hastily added to the 40-man roster and following a memorable pinch-hitting debut, Darnell McDonald kept showing up to the park and playing major league baseball all season long, even after nearly being designated for assignment halfway through. Daniel Nava, a 27-year-old rookie, played 60 games for the team, hitting exactly one home run. And Bill Hall, a utility player who turned into a 96-game starter, seemed to be everywhere, including the pitching mound, playing every position except catcher and first base.

Hall was also part of one of the most exciting half-innings of the season, in which the Red Sox stole four bases off Mariano Rivera, and rallied to take the lead from the Yankees in the bottom of the 8th. Of course, the Sox went on to lose that pivotal game in the 10th, following their own blown save, because that's just the kind of season it was. Their record was 6-12 in extra innings, and they had 13 walk-off losses on the road — two statistics that add up to a lot of heartbreak and sleepy-eyed muttering. After 149 games, the team had used 133 different batting orders and 43 different starting outfield combinations – often filled with no-name journeymen, rookies, minor league call-ups, and banged up regulars.

In short, a great many things happened in this shortened season, and, as expected, none of it could be expected. That's why they call it baseball. Fifty years ago, Ted Williams hit the very last major league pitch he ever saw for a home run. Fifty years later, Daniel Nava hit the very first major league pitch he ever saw for a grand slam. The very last major league pitch to Mike Lowell was dinged high off the top of the Green Monster, just another long Fenway single. Varitek's last swing was just a loud out. And, Ortiz, he finished his season with a bunt.

But the once beleaguered big guy also ended up with 32 home runs and 102 RBI this season — and he's just three short of the all-time RBI record for a DH (currently held by Edgar Martinez). The informed baseball watcher will tell you that RBI is a meaningless statistic. That may be true, but so was the last game of the season: a surprise bunt single, a frivolous curtain call; a well-struck ball by the team's captain that might have made it out of the park, but didn't; and one more win. None of it really adds up to anything. But just like the statistically meaningless RBI, at least it was still fun to watch.

We'll get 'em next year.

ADDENDUM: Somehow I wrote an entire recap of the 2010 Red Sox season without mentioning how much fun Adrian Beltre was to have on the team.

First, a chart detailing the "Causes of Red Sox Injuries".

Second, one of my favorite Jerry Remy/Don Orsillo on-air exchanges, during a dustup with the Indians:

Orsillo: I tell you, one of the last people I'd throw at is Adrian Beltre.

Remy: The human destroyer.

WHAT'S THIS NOW, it's spring again? Whatever happened to the winter? Not to mention the fall? Let's forget about all that nonsense, and think back on happier times while we wait for a new season to begin.

The good eggs at YFSF.org have set their happy thoughts on October in March — a compilation of the most significant postseason plays ranked by their WPA, or the potential effect the play had on the outcome of the game. The result is a strange combination of analytical and emotional gooeyness that at once fills you with an appreciation for the role of stats in modern day baseball-ing and pure, old-fashioned reverie.

Ranked this way, Game 5 of the 1999 ALDS versus the Indians bubbles up as one of the top three most dramatic games in Red Sox postseason history. Watching the game on iTunes 10 years later, the lineup looks familiar, but any postseason game before 2004 still seems a parallel universe away. Certain scenes stick out as particularly odd/amusing: Pedro throwing to Tek, but with Manny at the plate. Manny sharing the outfield with Dave Roberts, who catches a towering fly off the bat of Trot Nixon. Plus, appearances by good ol' Lou Merloni, Nomar in his prime (intentionally walked twice), and the Derek Lowe Face. The game itself is dramatic and fun; the intervening events since 1999 and the overlapping, wacky "what we know now" quality make it even more enjoyable to watch today.

Regarding events closer to the present, Sox first base coach Ron Johnson got to experience his own personal happy moment during spring training, in the form of an on-field reunion with his son. From the Sox-Astros game update on Boston.com:

Pre-game: The exchange of lineup cards had an interesting twist with Sox first base coach Ron Johnson (coaching third in today's split-squad game) exchanging lineups with son Chris, who will play third base for the Astros today. Umpires seemed to get a big kick out of it.

Seems like simple, father-son baseball fun. But the next day's follow-up by Nick Carfado hints at something a little deeper:

Johnson has been a baseball lifer, which means being away from your family. He probably missed most of Chris’s Little League and high school games. But yesterday he watched him as a major leaguer.

"I’ve been around the game for a long time," said Johnson, "and I’ve seen everything and been around a lot of players, but I almost can’t explain it. It was a strange feeling.

"There were just a lot of things that kept sinking in during the course of the game. I know he’s been doing well, but I’m a developer and an evaluator for the last 20 years, and all of a sudden now I see my son on the major league field.

"I know he came up last year in September, but to see him with my own eyes . . . and I’m in the third base coach’s box . . . and there’s Terry Francona and Brad Mills and Roy Oswalt, Jason Varitek, and Jon Lester is on the mound . . .

"Obviously you’re looking at a guy on the other team who you have emotional ties to, and you realize that he moves around and he looks like he can play here. It was exciting. It was really very exciting."

Baseball's timelessness can also turn into a form of time travel: today's games mingling with the memories of games past. There are always the same nine positions on the field – but it's a little bit strange when you look back and one of them is played by a shortstop whose greatness you'd forgotten or when you look up and third base is occupied by your very own son. It's baseball's ability to keep telling stories across years and generations that lets us appreciate and experience the past and the present in new ways.

But enough of yesterday's happy thoughts. As Cleveland Indians manager Lou Boudreau once said, "On Opening Day, the world is all future and no past." Right now, every team's got a .500 record, and it's anybody's guess what happens next.

Happy Opening Day.

NOMAR GARCIAPARRA RETIRES as a Red Sox.

IT'S BEEN A YEAR-LONG PARADE of underdogs, resurrections, and redemptions, with many a misguided notion reconsidered, revised, and upended in its wake. We accepted Bay would never be Manny (but we didn't know what a blessing that would be). The "faithful" were certain Varitek was done, or at least believed the Sox should be done with him. Nick Green was in AAA hoping to get signed in Japan someday – maybe – if he worked at it hard enough. Wakefield was 41 years old and All-Star-less for every one of them. Brad Penny and John Smoltz weren't even on the radar. And Big Papi was laid to rest. A lot's changed since the previous All-Star Break, and more will change by the next one, making now a good time to savor the standings – which show the Boston Red Sox with the best record in the American League, leading their division by three games over the New York Yankees.

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT, it doesn't sound good at all. Adam Kilgore gives us the rundown on the Nats' season so far:

Plenty of teams lose bundles of games. Only the 2009 Washington Nationals saw their bombastic general manager resign during spring training, played part of one game not televised locally, and sent their franchise player on to the field wearing a uniform with the team name misspelled.

This one is definitely worth reading all the way through, at least for little gems like this:

The twin culprits of Washington’s season have been rotten defense (a league-high 64 errors) and the gas-can bullpen (a league-high 16 blown saves). “We’ve seen a lot of things you’ve never seen in baseball,’’ Acta said.

THE IMPROBABLE RISE OF NICK GREEN is the news of the day. Spring training began with franchise future Jed Lowrie and big contract veteran Julio Lugo battling it out for the starting shortstop position — both eventually ending up on the disabled list. So, in movie plot fashion*, the unknown utility man steps out of the shadows and onto center stage . . . and things go just okay:

“I can’t tell you that on the first day of spring training I envisioned him playing shortstop for us,’’ said Terry Francona. “That’s not the case.’’

Nor would it be the case early in the season, when Green was leading the majors in shortstop errors, including one throw in Seattle that the skipper recalled “went halfway up the bleachers.’’

All season long, fans have been lamenting the black hole in the 6 position. (Actually, it's been like that ever since the team let Orlando Cabrera go after the 2004 championship season.) But Greenie keeps plugging away, and then, in an instant, something crazy happens – a walk-off home run in the most unlikely circumstances – and an underrated player's value to the team takes sudden, perfect form:

As Nick Green pulled around second base, the baseball having tucked itself into the right-field corner behind the Pesky Pole, he noticed a commotion at the plate. Amid the mist and fog and wind that turned a Sunday in June into a day ripped from March, the player doing his best to excise the interim tag from his position had lofted the first pitch he saw from Jeff Bennett into the elements.

He didn’t know that it had the means to get out, at least not off the bat. But the wind was drawing it deeper, the fly ball yielding to Fenway Park’s quirky dimensions and lifting the crowd of 37,243 in celebration.

The home run catches everyone by surprise, including Green:

“To be honest with you, I didn’t realize what was going on,’’ Green said. “I didn’t even comprehend the fact that I had swung at the first pitch and it was a walkoff. I just knew that we still had to hit. When I hit second base, everybody’s standing at home plate, then I realized what was going on . . . ."

The stat-minded fellas at YFSF.org point out that Green didn't even play in the majors last season — he was languishing in the Yankees' AAA affiliate in Scranton all last year. Then they look at his numbers as a member of this year's Red Sox starting nine, and uncover his remarkable contribution:

More than just the surprising turnaround is the timing of his hits.

Entering today's game, Green was hitting .409/.500/.545 with runners in scoring position, .364/.434/.530 with men on, .373/.418/.549 with two outs, .500/.560/.636 with runners in scoring position and two outs, .308/.379/.500 with the game tied and .330/.390/.479 when the game is within two runs.

Following a player's ups and downs over the course of a season is part of what makes watching a baseball team rewarding and fun. On the night of Fenway Park's 500th consecutive sellout, Brad Penny's 100th career win, and the anniversary of Ted Williams' 500th home run, John Henry offered his own appreciation of what makes baseball a uniquely quotidian pursuit:

“It’s remarkable,’’ owner John Henry wrote in an e-mail. “There is a love associated with this franchise that transcends sports. The great thing about following a baseball team very closely is that it’s an everyday pursuit. We follow all of our own personal stories day to day – our kids, our spouses, this baseball team – there is a continuity of hopes, surprises, joy – all the daily ups and downs of the Red Sox provide a backdrop that is often a respite or enhancement for everything in the foreground . . . ."

So Green's dinger isn't just a turning point in an isolated game, it's another twist and turn in a longer story that started in Spring and will hopefully continue into the Fall. But right now, it's just nice to know RemDawg approves.

*For fun, first read Bob Ryan's take on the Nick Green story, and see how many "Blockbuster, I'm tellin' ya's" you can get through without imagining an old-timey huckster chomping on a cigar and twitching his big bushy eyebrows. Then erase that from your mind and go read Amalie Benjamin's game wrap for real baseball poetry.

UPDATE 08/27/09: Nick Green's pitching line: no hits, no runs, three walks, 35 pitches, 13 strikes, one slider, 0.00 ERA.

HOW DOES THE GREEN MONSTER COMPARE in height with the Statue of Liberty? How long did it take for each Major League Baseball team to break the color line? What percentage of the Cleveland population do the Indians really represent? What happens when you mash up seldom considered (and sometimes whimsical) baseball stats with the magic of infographics? You get Flip Flop Fly Ball. From the people (okay, guy) who brought you the wonder of Minipops, now you can really see how much seats at the new Yankee Stadium cost compared to the rest of the league – via the elegance and beauty of bar graphs.

"EVERYTHING ENDS BADLY, otherwise it wouldn't end." Bill Simmons quotes Cocktail as he keeps vigil over the demise of the legend of Big Papi:

The best way I can describe Fenway during any Papi at-bat is this: It's filled with 35,000 parents of the same worst kid in Little League who dread every pitch thrown in the kid's direction. There is constant fear and sadness and helplessness. Nobody knows what to do.

Fans may not know what to do, but they know what not to do:

It's been a sports experience unlike anything I can remember. Red Sox fans refuse to turn against Ortiz. They just can't. They owe him too much for 2004 and 2007. It's like turning on Santa Claus or happy hour. Every Ortiz appearance is greeted with supportive cheers, every Ortiz failure is greeted with awkward silence. The fans are suffering just like he is.

Ortiz's futility has been a terrible thing to watch in the middle of what has been an otherwise promising season. But as gruesome as it's been, it's also somewhat heartening to see the fans stick by him. Luckily, we don't have to make out the lineup card every day. It's probably much more difficult for the Red Sox skipper to stick by him – but stick by him he does:

Francona also took some time yesterday with David Ortiz, who has been a shell of the hitter he has been in the past. Ortiz went into the game with a .208 average, .600 OPS, and zero home runs. So Francona gave him a pep talk of the kind he rarely has had to give in their tenure together.

"I've been standing there for five years patting him on the fanny as he runs by driving in all those runs and winning games for us," Francona said. "Now, when he needs a little help, I don't want to be the one to abandon him."

Sure, we love Papi for all the big hits he made in the past, though it has more to do with the feelings we experienced in those moments rather than the exact number of runs driven in. (Let's also not forget that by all accounts he's a genuinely nice and fun-loving person.) Anyway, you certainly can't boo the man responsible for this kind of joy.

UPDATE: After a month of encouraging swings, YFSF.org takes a look at evidence that suggests previous reports of the death of Big Papi's bat may have been greatly exaggerated.

IT WAS A GOOD NIGHT IN THE FENS, with a Major League record-tying 12 putouts by the center fielder, two home runs by the captain, and four home runs in an inning — including one by the designated hitter:

Before David Ortiz finally ended the longest homerless streak of his career, he got some words of encouragement from his dad.

Sort of.

Enrique Ortiz had flown into town on Tuesday and "told me, `Hey, son, it's not going to get worse than this so go out there, have fun and forget about what happened," Ortiz recalled.

It may be tough to hear your father say you've hit bottom, but Ortiz said he kept that in mind Wednesday night when he hit his first homer in 150 at-bats in the Boston Red Sox's 8-3 win over the Toronto Blue Jays.

"I tried it all. I was about to hit right-handed," the lefty slugger said.

THE AMAZIN' METS seem to be foregoing their traditional season-end implosion by peaking early and putting the suck on well ahead of the All-Star break – all in spectacular fashion, of course. And although I don't usually go for the "bummed out beat reporter's bitter tirade" schtick, Ben Shpigel of the New York Times is penning gloriously dry and downtrodden accounts of the team's most recent woes with fun quips, like: "Making the simple difficult since 1962 — that could be the Mets’ motto." Here's some more from Shpigel's story on a 5-error, 11-inning debacle, which included a runner missing third base on his way home:

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Carlos Beltran said.

And neither had anyone else. To be fair, [Jerry] Manuel said he had seen his former charges, the Chicago White Sox, commit five errors, not that he was boasting of that achievement or anything. But no, he had never seen a player completely miss tagging third base on his way home as [Ryan] Church did in the top of the 11th. That gaffe canceled what would have been the go-ahead run, ended the inning and breathed life into the Dodgers. Not that, on this night, they needed any extra help. The five errors were the Mets’ most since they committed six on Sept. 16, 2007, against Philadelphia.

“The guy missed third base, that’s unbelievable,” Manuel said. “I can’t explain why or how or anything, but he actually missed the base. To me, it’s just hard to miss third base . . . ."

That exceptional display of baseball prowess was immediately followed by another very bad outing the very next day. Shpigel leads the recap with this:

The Mets showed up for work at Dodger Stadium early Tuesday afternoon, eager to give this baseball thing another try. They hit. They caught. They fielded. And they threw a little, too. It all may have helped, as they committed one error instead of five, and managed to touch third base every time on their journeys home.

What they could not do Tuesday night was pitch . . . .

And clearly, the previous day's incredulous loss still stings, as Shpigel throws another jab or two where he can:

Before the game, the Mets refrained from holding tutorials on touching third base, perhaps because the clip of Church stepping over it in the 11th inning Monday night was broadcast roughly 412 times.

The Mets are in no way done for the season — they're just one game out of first in their division, after all. But it's been fun following their hijinks in the paper, even if it's probably painful to witness in person. And, hey, at least they're not the Nats.

EBERT BLOGS ANTICHRIST, another fun-filled romp by Lars von Trier, aka crazy man. (I believe von Trier and Werner Herzog compete for that title year to year.) I only read the beginnings of these Ebert posts, but will return to them if I ever actually get around to seeing the movie, which I've naturally become a teensy bit wary of, considering it's being described as a mildly traumatic life experience. Here's Ebert after the premiere at Cannes:

There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing "That's Entertainment!"

[ . . . . ]

If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now . . . .

And then his follow-up two days later:

Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, "Antichrist" is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere of Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" and its castration scene. I said I was looking forward to von Trier's overnight reviews, and I haven't been disappointed. Those who thought it was good thought it was very very good ("Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect"— Damon Wise, Empire) and those who thought it was bad found it horrid ("Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with 'Antichrist'"— Todd McCarthy, Variety).

[ . . . . ]

Enough time has passed since I saw the film for me to process my visceral reaction, and take a few steps back . . . .

All this before an actual review.

IN THE WAKE OF THE EPIC MANNY BUMMER, let us focus only on the good things. Like, when Ellsbury, in a fit of daring, all of a sudden decided to steal home against the Yankees:

The plate beckoned. Jacoby Ellsbury, creeping farther off third base as Andy Pettitte delivered his second pitch to J.D. Drew, saw the situation clearly. The pitcher was throwing from the windup, the lefthander's back to third base, the third baseman playing off the bag, the bases loaded.

So on the next pitch, Ellsbury was three-quarters of the way down the line before Pettitte noticed him, the pitch coming as fast as he could throw it to catcher Jorge Posada. Ellsbury was coming, too, then sliding, head-first after a brief stumble, as Drew stood watching. Posada's tag was futile.

Ellsbury had stolen home in the fifth inning, the highlight of the Red Sox' 4-1 win last night and a series sweep of the Yankees.

The roar was deafening, even though the crowd of 38,154 at Fenway Park seemingly was having trouble realizing what it had just seen. This was better even than his tear for home from second base on a wild pitch in his rookie season, the one that made them think he was a god on the base paths. It was simply brilliant.

And Pettitte had never even looked over.

Let's just make sure not to dwell too long on the likelihood that steals are becoming a bigger part of the game because teams are compensating for the significant drop in dingers that go along with stringent drug testing. Let's instead look towards the Bronx and the fancy new stadium with its ludicrously overpriced seats, "mallpark" atmosphere, and other fan-unfriendly features, like employees who literally leave paying fans out in the rain. A little schadenfreude goes a long way. But the troubles in the Yankee empire don't just warm the cockles of the heart for their own sake. They also remind us to appreciate an ownership and a franchise that fans can happily get behind — if for no other reason than the invaluable gift of a new old Fenway:

“There are those who want to build the Eighth Wonder of the World,” Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox’ president and chief executive, told me Friday. “We just wanted to preserve a nice little old ballpark.”

So even though the ghosts of ownerships past continue to haunt Yawkey Way, and more upsetting disclosures may be just around the corner, we still get to watch the game at the same address as always. The seats are still cramped (along with necks), pillars still obstruct, and the dented wall standing in left field is still the same shade of green. These things at least are mostly unchanged — ready for a new generation of players to step in and pull off memorable, daring feats, all on their own.

SO, BASICALLY, IN ONE WORD . . . UGH. You could also read Bill Simmons' 2,000-word imaginary conversation with his son regarding the epic Manny bummer, and pretty much arrive at the same conclusion:

We settle into our seats. I point toward the championship banners over the first-base side. They go in order: 1903, 1904, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, 2004, 2007. Ever since Boston won the World Series 10 years ago, I always imagined pointing to that 2004 banner and telling my little boy, "That's the team that changed everything."

So that's what I do. I point at the banner and tell him, "That's the team that changed everything."

"Isn't that the team that cheated?" he asks.

Like I said . . . Ugh.

1B, BB, 2B, BB, 1B, BB, 2B, 1B, 1B, 1B, 1B, HR — yet another strange line involving the Cleveland Indians, only this one's not in their favor:

Twelve batters crossed the plate before Indians pitchers – three of them – could record one out in the sixth.

Or, to put it another way:

Four RBIs make for a decent week. Jason Bay achieved that in one inning, going 2 for 2 with a double and a three-run home run.

BAMARAMARAMAheyhotdogRAMARAMARAMA — also known as the sound of your Football getting in my Baseball:

I went to a Baseball game the other day, and I have a few complaints. First of all, I understand the whole deal of how it (Our National Pastime) is a Business, and an Industry, and how it is Entertainment, so therefore you gotta make it Exciting--as in, way fucking more exciting than Baseball is to people who are not crazy about the Baseball but who end up at a game every now and then. So you gotta wake the motherfuckers up every inning because Baseball can be (get ready for this News Flash), according to some people, kinda Boring, but it's like all this goddamn Intro Music every time somebody from the Home Team steps up to bat, like BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA with whatever fucking shit they got--Metal, Hip-Hop, Country, even Western--it's all this goddamn BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA "BLAHRBLAR NOW STEPINNNN UPTOMRRMPH BALLLH, NUMMMBR PHRM-TNRMZLE BALWRR BLARR BLAHBLAH!!!" and then BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA BRRT-BRRT BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA, goddamn Jesus Fucking Christ, man, every goddamn time one of Your Baltimore Orioles steps up it's gotta be BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA?

Amen.

(via YFSF)

1B, 1B, HR, FO, 2B, 1B, 2B, 2B, 1B, 2B, 2B, BB, 1B, K, HR (GS), HR, K — the top of the 2nd inning today at Yankee Stadium. Yikes. Also, it appears the ball gets a little extra giddy-up in right field at the Yankees' fancy new digs:

In three games at the new Yankee Stadium, there have been 17 homers — 12 to right-center field. The dimensions are the same as they were last year, but in the very early going, all on relatively warm afternoons, the ball seems to jump in that direction.

Ultimately, that could help the Yankees, who have several left-handed or switch-hitters with power, plus right-handers who hit well to the opposite field. But on days when their pitching was so dreadful, it contributed to a historic mess.

The gamer over at YFSF was particularly prescient: "Bring a Glove."

EBERT LOOKS BACK on the early days of a career as a good ol' fashioned newspaperman, and it's right out of All the President's Men or the Daily Planet — except with a bit more booze and a little heavy petting.

Here, he's a wide-eyed kid in the company of a Pulitzer Prize-winner:

I sipped the brandy, and a warm place began to glow in my stomach. I had been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in an eye-opener place. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.

"The Blackhawks are really hot tonight," I observed to Royko.

He studied me. "Where you from, kid? Downstate?"

"Urbana," I said.

"Ever seen a hockey game?"

"No."

"That's what I thought, you asshole. "Those are the game highlights."

Another anecdote ends with free blow jobs. On the eve of the death of newspapers as we know it, the full, romanticized blog post is worth the read.

THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE is a science fiction novel by William F. Sample which was turned into a movie in 1953. And judging by this MovieTome synopsis, it sounds kind of great:

Graduate students Robin Grant (John Van Eyssen) and Bill Leggat (Stephen Murray) have both loved the beautiful Lena (Barbara Payton) since childhood. After years of perseverance by both men, Lena finally chooses Robin, and the two become engaged. Devastated by the news of Lena's plans, Bill uses his latest science experiment, a cloning device that duplicates matter, to create a "new Lena" for himself. Unfortunately, this device performs too well, producing a clone that also loves Robin. Furious and desperate, Bill decieds to use electro-schock to burn the memory of love out of the clone's brain.

(via Roger Ebert's blog)

AS THE NEW YORK TIMES PONDERS the fate of Stan's Sports Bar – the central watering hole around Yankees Stadium for the last 30 years – Joe Mondi, one of the bar's managers, reminisces about the old days:

“I remember we played the Red Sox in ’91,” Mr. Mondi said, “and right in that corner, some guy came in wearing a Red Sox jersey, and they ripped it off his body, they lit it on fire, and they urinated on it. Right here in the bar.”

Now that the stadium itself has moved and Stan's is no longer in a prime location, the bar's future is uncertain. But, oh, the memories!

EVERYONE BEING MANNY, or at least everyone would like to be Manny, according to Jeff Bradley in his ESPN.com article:

Quite simply, he's the most studied, most observed hitter in baseball — and that's just by his peers. They marvel at Manny's ability to translate his prep work into success when the lights come on. They envy the short-term memory deficiency that seemingly allows him to bring the same level of confidence to the plate regardless of whether he struck out or hit a home run his last time up. "If slumps are between a player's ears, which I think they are," says former Boston teammate Sean Casey, "then Manny is slump-proof, because mentally he's always the same."

In the article, teammates and rivals alike heap admiration and awe on the slugger's beguiling hitting prowess. Orlando Hudson, former second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays, says when he played against Manny:

"I'd get so focused on what he did at the plate that I forgot my job was to see the ball coming off his bat and make a play. He can mesmerize you."

His secret seems to be no secret at all – a solid game plan for every at-bat, plenty of hard work and preparation, a keen eye and great mechanics. But even so, Manny's formula for success remains, like the man himself, a mystery. He can try to explain it – as he did for Russell Branyan, a former teammate on the Cleveland Indians – but good luck imitating it:

One time, Ramírez laid it all out for Branyan, gave him the whole hitting equation. "He told me that he put 70 percent of his weight on his back foot and 40 percent of his weight on his front foot. And even though I knew the numbers didn't add up, I thought for a second, I've got to try that."

JAPAN BEATS SOUTH KOREA to win its second World Baseball Classic in a row. The final game between the two rival nations reached its peak with a two-out hit from Ichiro that put Japan back on top for good in extra innings. From Jack Curry in the New York Times:

Ichiro Suzuki lined a two-out, two-strike single to center field off Chang Yong Lim to drive in two runs in the 10th and ignite a celebration from Dodger Stadium to Tokyo. But Suzuki did not immediately celebrate. After he scooted to second on the throw home, he showed no emotion. He calmly lifted his hand to call a timeout.

“I believe that Ichiro’s hit is something I’ll never forget,” said Tatsunori Hara, the Japanese manager. “It’s an image that will forever be imprinted in my mind.”

Amazingly, it was a hit that shouldn't have had a chance to happen in the first place:

The South Koreans decided not to intentionally walk Suzuki, who batted with runners on second and third, and the decision doomed them.

In Sik Kim, the South Korean manager, said the team had signaled to Lim that he was supposed to pitch around Suzuki. If Suzuki did not bite at a bad pitch, Lim was supposed to walk him. But Lim apparently did not get those signs or did not obey them.

“I don’t know why the pitcher tried to pitch directly to Ichiro,” Kim said.

Suzuki diplomatically said that he was not surprised that the South Koreans pitched to him because walking him would have loaded the bases. But even Kim said that he regretted not walking Suzuki. During the memorable at bat, the usually focused Suzuki said his mind was cluttered.

“I really wish I could be in a state of Zen,” Suzuki said. “I kept thinking of all the things I shouldn’t think about. Usually, I cannot hit when I think of all those things. This time I got a hit. Maybe I surpassed myself.”

And despite the emphasis on their cultural rivalries, the two teams seem to share a similar approach to how they play the game – an approach that has proven mostly successful:

The all-Asian championship reiterated that the rest of the world plays excellent baseball, too, and was a credit to the two teams that play in a more disciplined way than the United States. Japan and South Korea feature pitchers who are not immune to throwing strikes and players who are smart and aggressive. Japan was a little smarter, a little more aggressive and a little better.

“They try to play as sound, as errorless and as perfect, that word should be perfect, as perfect baseball as they can,” said Shane Victorino of the United States. “And that’s how you win ball games.”

Good stuff.

ONE DAY, YOU, LIKE ME, WILL DISCOVER TEDTALKS, and, just like me when I was you, you won't know where to begin. If I were you, and you were me, I'd start with these:

• Ze Frank: What's so funny about the Web? (2/04)
• Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature (2/05)
• Scott McCloud: Understanding comics (2/05)
• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen (2/06)
• Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind (3/07)
• Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (3/07)
• Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat (12/07)
• Doris Kearns Goodwin: Learning from past presidents in moments of crisis (2/08)
• John Hodgman: A brief digression on matters of lost time (2/08)
• Paula Scher: Great design is serious (not solemn) (5/08)
• Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food (7/08)
• Ueli Gegenschatz: Fulfilling the dream of flight in a high-tech wingsuit (2/09)
• Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius (2/09)
• Eric Lewis: Striking chords to rock the jazz world (2/09)
• Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes) (3/09)
• Stanley McChrystal: Listen, learn ... then lead (03/11)

Also available on Ye Olde iTunes.

"THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM, but the second mouse gets the cheese." Different circumstances present different risks and opportunities, and in this brave new world of psychobiology and genetics, how and why we respond to any specific circumstance seems to be increasingly explained by what's in our genes rather than what kind of diapers we wore growing up. In other words, nature seems to be edging out nurture as the chief culprit for shaping our behavior and identities. But, of course, the whole story is a little more complicated than that. Steven Pinker talks about the somewhat muddled implications of getting to know your genome in his New York Times Magazine article "My Genome, My Self". Mapping our individuality through our genes at first seems like a straightforward proposition (i.e. this gene makes you fat, this one makes you good at math). But the endeavor quickly becomes a rabbit hole that leads you from piece to piece to piece – all of which refuse to neatly add up and explain a concept like intelligence, let alone demystifying what makes you you:

The search for I.Q. genes calls to mind the cartoon in which a scientist with a smoldering test tube asks a colleague, “What’s the opposite of Eureka?”

REDBELT is an unusual little flick – a samurai/noir/fight film with turn-of-the-screw plotting, some enjoyable martial arts scrapping, trademark Mametian masculinity throughout (for better and for worse), and, yes, a somewhat dopey ending. But I dug it. Every scene contains both surprise and a sense of inevitability, and the characters and themes resonate with a singular, uncomplicated understanding of decency – a notion usually ignored, upstaged, or over-sentimentalized in movies. Here, despite all the twist and turns, decency remains the simple principle on which all the action pivots, and by the end, it becomes a virtue raised almost to the level of nobility.

EBERT LOBS BON MOTS on cinematic bombs:

No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out. (Armageddon)

And a lovely existential one:

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I've seen that doesn't improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. It is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

MIDTOWN HOLIDAYS

Humans
hobbling
along
the
sidewalks —

Some
drunks,
who
fell over
once
too often,
now perpetually stumble
even sober.

Some
just
shopping
and
looking around
but
not at where they're
going.

Bastards!

THE HOT STOVE AIN'T SO HOT these days, as everyone sits around waiting for someone else to blink.

MAN ALLEGEDLY ASSAULTS GIRLFRIEND WITH BURGER, as reported by the Onion. Sorry, I mean, the New York Times.

THERE'S LEX LUTHOR, Auric Goldfinger, Danny Ocean, Bernie Madoff, and Cobra Commander. And then there's Jack Handey:

The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen:

—The door to the vault must have accidentally been left open by the cleaning woman.

—The guard must bend over to tie his shoes and somehow he gets all the shoelaces tied together. He can’t get them apart, so he takes out his gun and shoots all his bullets at the knot. But he misses. Then he just lies down on the floor and goes to sleep.

—Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone. . . .

More criminal genius here.

LET'S WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER — er, I mean, the black dude! Salon takes a peek at the wacky world of "Racists for Obama" – just a little light reading to distract you on the day the nation attempts to save its soul:

Sean Quinn, of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, respected for its obsessiveness and eerie prescience, recently posted a hair-raising story about a pair of Barack Obama supporters. Quinn seems ready to verify its source, but only after the election. At any rate, it goes like this: A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, "We're voting for the nigger!" At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband's declaration.

Ah, racism. It's always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read "Some Black Dude". . . .

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is the kind of weird, mind-bending and heartbreaking movie where you walk out of the movie theatre and don't feel quite right. Like, maybe the sky is the wrong color, or that person across the street can read your mind, or nothing is real and you're actually dead. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Solaris were a little like this for me, too.) It's like Borges, Fellini, Dalí and Willy Loman made a movie together – bizarro, great and kind of a fantastic bummer.

A HIGH-SCHOOL BOY carrying a picture of his crush is badly burned in a fire, and doctors use her photo to reconstruct his face. Now identical to his crush, he moves in with her by pretending to be her long-lost twin sister.

- Plot summary of the manga series Pretty Face (via Comic Foundry)

NINE INNINGS AND THREE DAYS LATER, there's revelry on the streets of Philadelphia:

All around the city and suburbs, fireworks exploded, horns honked and pots and pans banged as if it were New Year's Eve. . . . In Northeast Philadelphia, thousands more gathered at the intersection of Frankford and Cottman Avenues, where city workers had greased the light poles to keep fans from dangerous, inebriated ascents.

There's a city that really knows its fans.

A SWING AND A MISS on ball four turns into a strike 'em out-throw 'em out double play. A take-out slide into second base would have done more good as a regular slide. A check-swing third strike ends the inning with bases loaded. And nearly every player was served at least one fat pitch which escaped unharmed. After all the missed opportunities, time eventually runs out on you. Ms. Benjamin handles the post-mortem for the Globe, and YFSF looks back on a good ride.

ASHES OF TIME (REDUX) is a weird bird, even for Wong Kar Wai. Veering from silly and melodramatic to simple and affecting – almost moment to moment and shot to shot – the movie has over-stylized camera work, preposterous sword-fighting, stirring heroics, over-the-top emotion, specious logic, a scene with a girl getting all sensual with her horse and many more scenes of a different girl standing around with a very sad donkey. Eventually the impulse to guffaw is overcome by the desire to weep, and the movie builds toward an unlikely and surprisingly emotional ending. As the review in the Village Voice puts it:

Wong has a bit of a wink with all of the deadpan death threats and grand allusions — women rake their cheeks along tree bark, limestone, and a horse's neck in fits of longing — before turning mannerism into the very stuff of transcendence, as with Maggie Cheung's penultimate lament. It's a knowing end-run around cliché that seeks to assert the damnable truth of cliché itself. In a move that would become his trademark, Wong rejects the happy ending for the almost ecstatically sad, making your heart soar even as he tells you, essentially, that it's impossible, all of it — that it'll never work.

SURELY, ALL OF THIS EXTRA BASEBALL IS GRAVY, as YFSF puts it. Nevertheless, hopes are high for a final game 7 (which should have been a final game 5), because we've been here before and it usually works out pretty well. But before we lose ourselves too much in anticipation, let's also remember where we came from, and how good it's been since:

It was on the bus the other day, heading from Fenway Park to the airport after their miraculous Game 5 win, that Kevin Youkilis reflected on all that he's been a part of - three comebacks from the depths of elimination - to Varitek, sitting next to him.

"I said, 'We're so spoiled,' " Youkilis said. "It's amazing. It's really amazing the games we play, and how much fun it's been. When we're all old and our children are all grown up, we'll sit around and meet up and talk about games like the game the other day. It's a wild ride, and we're very spoiled."

THE BEST BASEBALL STATISTICS CHART EVER tracks the win probability during the best elimination-game comeback ever. Sure, it seems like the cold, calculated view of a Sabermetrics-loving number cruncher. But when you look at it another way, it's an emotional barometer, as well – illustrating precisely how we felt at each point in the game, from sofa-slumping despair to furtive hopefulness and, finally, the bewildering heights of improbable, undeserved joy.

BEFORE GAME 5 OF THE 2008 ALCS BECAME A MAGIC ACT, while the Rays were still doing the pummeling and the Red Sox were the only ones at Fenway who didn't know the season was over, I averted my eyes from the grim disaster unfolding on TV by reading Bill Simmons thoughts on the season's other great loss:

I still miss Manny. I can't lie. It took me four solid weeks to accept that he was really gone. Three weeks after the trade happened, I flicked on NESN for the opening pitch of a Sox game, noticed the SkyDome and thought, "Yes, Manny loves hitting in the SkyDome!" A second passed. A lightbulb went on. My shoulders slumped. Manny was gone.

All 9,000 words of his story are worth reading (and he even includes one of my favorite Manny anecdotes in a footnote), but here I'll skip to the end:

So, how will this play out? I see Manny leading the Dodgers to the 2008 World Series, breaking their hearts and donning pinstripes next season. He won't feel bad, because he's Manny. The L.A. fans will feel bad. I will feel worse. It will be the single most painful sports transaction of my lifetime. It will make me question why I follow sports at all, why we spend so much time caring about people who don't care about us. I don't want to hear Manny booed at Fenway. I don't want to root against him. I don't want to hold a grudge. I don't want to hear the "Mah-knee! Mah-knee!" chant echoing through the new Stadium. I am not ready for any of it. You love sports most when you're 16, then you love it a little bit less every year. And it happens because of things like this. Like Manny breaking the hearts of everyone in Boston because his agent wanted to get paid, then Manny landing in New York because the Yanks offered the most money.

PHILADELPHIA IS AN EVEN MORE UNFORGIVING baseball town than Boston? I guess, take it from one who knows. Terry Francona managed the Phillies from 1997–2000, with a 285-363 record:

So he was "genuinely happy" to see [the Phillies] experience success of their own. He may not have shared that sentiment for a city that didn't show him a lot of love. In explaining the differences between the fans in the two cities, Francona said, "I think there's more love for their players here. They want [them] to do good so bad that when they don't, it just kills them. In Philadelphia, it turned to hatred in a hurry. Like ball one."

"FENWAY PARK, IN BOSTON, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." The magic of tilt shift photography (click link above) brings to mind John Updike's description of Fenway in his farewell to Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu":

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. . . .

WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and it always feels this horrible. Amalie Benjamin (the shining jewel of the Boston Globe sports section, by the way) assesses the situation:

They have been in this spot before. A tight spot, and an unforgiving one. The Red Sox have been down and have made it out, as recently as last year's American League Championship Series, when they yielded three of the first four games to the Indians, and in the 2004 ALCS, when they lost the first three games to the Yankees. At those points, it did not seem as if the Sox were on the brink of a comeback.

Nor does it seem that way today.

In other words, every time this happens, it feels completely and utterly hopeless.

So that should be comforting, right? Right?

TITO GETS HIGH PRAISE from the media, if not from the fans. First, there's this column on ESPN.com, and then there's this defense by Bill Simmons in his mailbag:

Q: How many more times are we going to be subjected to Tito Francona's bonehead decisions? He is great at managing players' egos and building relationships with them, but please get him a coach to do the X's and O's before he kills us. We can't keep overcoming his major screwups, can we? I've said it since 2004 and it is still true … just amazing we keep winning despite him. I set the over/under of his ALCS miscues at four!

- Randy, Derry, N.H.

SG: You can read more of Randy's work at his "Mr. Ungrateful" blog. Here's my take on Tito: He has never been outmanaged in a playoff series; his players love him and play hard for him; he handles the media as deftly as anyone this side of Doc Rivers; and by all accounts, he's a genuinely good person. You're never going to find a perfect manager or coach. That person just doesn't exist. So if you had your druthers (love that word), you'd want your manager's biggest weakness to be, "makes some occasionally boneheaded decisions that rarely come back to haunt the team because of the horseshoe that was surgically inserted into his rear end during the '04 playoffs." He's certainly the best Red Sox manager of my lifetime. And beyond that, nobody spits sunflower seeds with more grace and precision.

Meanwhile, Tony Massarotti profiles Terry Francona and offers this fun little tidbit to illustrate why he may have the toughest job in baseball:

How in god's name can you justify that??? You are being paid millions of dollars and even my 9 year old son can do a better job than [a] sleep on the wheel manager like you.

- E-mail sent to Francona from Chembur, Mumbai (India)

IS EVERYONE'S FAVORITE DREADLOCKED GOOFBALL actually a bonafide genius? Joe Posnanski of SI.com makes the case:

The following column is dedicated to the admittedly bizarre proposition that one Manuel Aristides (Onelcida) Ramirez, sometimes known as Man-Ram or Manny Being Manny or just plain Manny, is a genius. Now, it's not an easy case to make that a man who tries to run to third on a ground rule double, who sometimes disappeared into the Green Monster during pitching changes, who gets pulled over by police for having overly tinted car windows is a genius.

And he's got some people who might back the theory:

Bill James, a baseball writer (and Boston Red Sox advisor) who has spent much of his life knocking down baseball myths, believes that Manny Ramirez is such a good hitter, he will purposely get into full-counts when there is a runner on first base. The reason? With a full-count, that runner will be running on the pitch and, as such, will become an RBI when Ramirez hits a double into the gap.

"I've seen it too many times to doubt it," Bill says.

Allard Baird, a longtime baseball scout and executive (and Boston Red Sox advisor) believes Manny Ramirez is such a good hitter, he will sometimes swing and miss at a pitch in April so that the pitcher will throw him that same pitch in September. The idea being: He won't miss that pitch in September.

"When it comes to hitting, the guy's mind works on a whole other level," Allard says.

REALLY GREAT COLLECTION OF BASEBALL PARK PICTURES from some famous graffiti artist guy I've never heard of.

DUSTIN PEDROIA IS A MONSTER and no one can stop him. Batting cleanup tonight (protecting Big Papi!), he went 4-for-4 with an intentional walk, scored three times, stole two bases (one with a slick headfirst slide into second) and made a bunch of crazy plays, including a giant leaping grab on a liner.

"A lot of people talk about Manny leaving," Chicago manager Ozzie Guillen said before the game. "I wish Pedroia was leaving."

The gamer at YFSF said it all:

Yes, a four-foot thireen-inch second baseman who weighs about a buck-thirty-five soaking wet is bringing his laser show to the four-slot for Beantown.

UPDATE: Pedroia left a few stranded in yesterday's game, but the romance with Guillen continued:

When Pedroia, who leads the AL in hitting at .326, made his first out of the series with a tapper back to the mound in the third inning, Guillen asked for the ball and held it out for Pedroia motioning like he wanted the All-Star second baseman's autograph. He then gestured to Pedroia again as Pedroia took the field before putting the ball in his back pocket. Eventually, Guillen flipped the ball to a kid in the stands.

Much more on the budding love affair between Ozzie and Pedey.

A WEIRDLY HOMOEROTIC POETRY MASH-UP in which every instance of the word "love" is replaced with "Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Player Carlton Fisk" in this poem:

"And know you not," says Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

(Via kottke)

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Yankees' loss in "The First Game of the Final Series Between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium Ever!!!!", the Boston Globe rounds up the reaction in the New York media. With A-Rod going 0-5 with two strikeouts and two double play balls, including one with the bases loaded, there's this zinger from the New York Post:

We will remember Rodriguez dallied with Boston, didn't go there, came to the Yankees instead in 2004, and in his time here the nature of the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry has reversed to Red Sox champs, Yankees chumps. Rodriguez is the face of that historic flip-flop. He has bought into that role twice now, first when he forced his trade here, then last offseason when he accepted the largest financial package ever to return through the backdoor. He is all outsized. His greed. His lust for attention. His insecurities.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MANNY RAMIREZ, as chronicled in the Boston Globe's blog, includes a bet between Joe Torre and Los Angeles Times columnist T.J. Simers on whether Manny will cut his hair:

As you know, Joe Torre asked Manny Ramirez to cut his hair, but I have this hunch it will never happen.

Torre disagrees, so now one of us will be making a charitable donation.

If Ramirez returns to Dodger Stadium a week from today to open the team's next home stand with all his hair, Torre said he would make a donation to Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA.

As part of the deal, Torre agrees he will say nothing more to Ramirez about his hair, believing Ramirez heard him the first time they talked.

If Ramirez shows up to Dodger Stadium without the dreads, Page 2 will make a donation to the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation.

As part of the deal, of course, I will say nothing more to Ramirez about his hair.

But just between you and me, who is Torre kidding?

You think he's going to bench Ramirez because the guy doesn't get his hair cut?

You think if he fines him it will make a difference, Ramirez knowing he's not getting paid by the Dodgers, so there's no money to take out of his pay?

You think the Red Sox are going to take it out of his pay, and do a favor for the former Yankees manager?

TOM WAITS INTERVIEWS HIMSELF, which is predictably a bit self-involved, but at least it's more interesting than your usual music magazine article.

Q: What's wrong with the world?

A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year . . . and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

IT AIN'T OVER UNTIL IT'S OVER, and then sometimes it's not over even after that. The last two games against the Toronto Blue Jays each had do-overs. The first one featured a walkoff win, complete with dress rehearsal:

Few things are more embarrassing than premature exhilaration. That's what the Red Sox were guilty of last night at the Fens when they came storming out of their dugout to celebrate another apparent walkoff win, only to have plate umpire Sam Holbrook stop them short when he signaled that Jed Lowrie was out at home, the left leg of Toronto catcher Rod Barajas blocking Lowrie from his destination in the bottom of the ninth.

Instead of being in the vortex of a swirling bunch of delirious teammates, Lowrie was staring at a monitor in the runway behind the Sox dugout, watching a replay of the throw from Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells that deprived Brandon Moss of a game-winning hit.

"I got done with my clip, and on live TV [Jason] Varitek was hitting the ball," the Sox rookie said.

The following night was less dramatic, but just as silly:

No ninth-inning thunder last night. . . . But there were fireworks - after an apparent game-ending fly ball by Coco Crisp was nullified by second base umpire Bruce Dreckman, who called a balk on closer B.J. Ryan before he threw the pitch. The umpire ruled that Ryan had not come to a stop before throwing plateward.

"We saw it," Sox manager Terry Francona said of Dreckman's call. "He threw his arms up and we knew it was going to take a second."

With the crowd already headed for the exits and the Jays lining up for postgame high-fives, Jays manager John Gibbons, who had already begun strolling onto the field to slap some hands, flew into a rage when informed of Dreckman's call. He confronted the umpire, and was ejected.

"Their whole team was on the field," Sox catcher Kevin Cash said. "It was kind of like us [Wednesday] night, when we all ran out and Jed [Lowrie] was thrown out at the plate."

AND, OH YEAH, can we have more of these, please?:

The start of the game was delayed 15 minutes by rain but it lasted just two hours, 18 minutes, Boston's shortest game of the year.

"Great pitching on both sides is what it came down to," Toronto manager John Gibbons said.

AS MUCH HARD LUCK AS THE RED SOX recently had with great pitching but tough losses, Roy Halladay had worse:

It was Halladay's fourth straight complete game. He's lost the last three.

But then again, Pedroia was there to make sure everyone knew the Sox earned the win:

Lester allowed just one hit in eight innings, a clean single on Lyle Overbay's liner in the fifth over second baseman Pedroia's head. But Pedroia kept the game scoreless in the ninth when he dove to his right and nabbed Wells' grounder after Scott Rolen had doubled off Jonathan Papelbon (1-0) with two outs.

Pedroia gloved the ball and threw out Wells.

"Anybody's diving for any balls in that situation," Pedroia said. "It definitely got the crowd involved. It's a little bit of momentum. They could have had a run and it gets taken away."

Wells wanted to hit the ball up the middle.

"I saw it get by the mound," he said, "and I saw Superman at second base."

That play also earned Pedroia Baseball Tonight's number one Web Gem, by the way.

THE SCIENCE OF BASEBALL sometimes includes mad scientists. Sure, there's the famous shift – often employed against Big Papi – where the field is stacked on the right, leaving the entire third base side wide open. But then there's craziness like this:

Braves manager Bobby Cox was desperate, and he was plotting an ingenious plan. He was nearly out of right-handed pitchers, and players can't re-enter a game after they've been removed. If Mr. Resop, a righty, could play the outfield, that would allow Mr. Cox to replace him on the mound temporarily — and use a lefty specialist to pitch to Adam LaRoche — without losing him entirely. So after Mr. Resop pitched to three batters in the top of the 10th inning, Mr. Cox had him go to left field. When Mr. Resop returned to the pitcher's mound one batter later, it marked the first time a pitcher had pitched, played the field and pitched again in the same game since Jeff Nelson of the Seattle Mariners in 1993, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

But if Mr. Melvin had his way, the Brewers organization might be even more progressive. He has another counterintuitive idea: using relievers to start the game, and delaying the "starting" pitcher's entrance until the third inning or so. The thinking is that starters are typically among a team's best pitchers, yet nowadays they often pitch only through the fifth or sixth inning, well before many games are decided. By having them pitch later, they'd be around for the higher-leverage innings.

The idea would need to be tested first in the minor leagues, Mr. Melvin says. The only problem, it appears, is that it's too unconventional. "I can't get anybody to do it," he says.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A THEME DEVELOPING on ESPN.com's baseball widget. Today's headline: "Gagne blows save, but Kapler lifts Brewers in 12th." Good news for Gabe, at least.

ON A NIGHT WHEN BECKETT, VARITEK, LOWELL, CORA AND CRISP are all unavailable, this is a pretty great sentence to be able to read:

Jacoby Ellsbury hit two solo homers and Kevin Youkilis added a two-run shot for Boston, while Pedroia went 4-for-5 with three doubles and a single.

It's their sixth straight win and third late-inning comeback.

ESPN.COM WIDGET HEADLINE: "Reds rally off closer Gagne in 10th, stun Brewers." Isn't it more shocking that the Brewers were stunned?

TURNS OUT THE HEX WASN'T A HOAX, but did it actually become a pox on the Sox, and not a prank on the Yanks? It may have seemed like a great idea to bury a Red Sox jersey underneath the new Yankee Stadium as a curse on the Yankees, but the symbolism never really made sense to me. Turns out the jersey buried in concrete bore the name of one Mr. David Ortiz, whose .070 average and 3 for 43 slump definitely borders on the supernatural, but in a bad way. Looks like the construction worker's well-meaning curse may have backfired. Oops. Now that the Yanks have excavated the jersey, let's see if Papi gets his mojo back.

BOSTON.COM'S MOST EMAILED FOR THE DAY includes one notable news item from the Bronx.

BASEBALL PLAYERS MIGHT BE THE FUNNIEST OF PRO ATHLETES — but then again, the only sport I really follow is baseball so my theory might be full of crapola. Still, the personalities that make up, say, the NBA and NFL seem to me mostly humorless and/or too full of themselves to say something actually funny as opposed to just buffoonish-ly funny. Of course, Barry Bonds is pretty much the poster boy for "humorless, hyper-competitive, self-important meathead." But then you also have wiseasses like Kevin Millar, goofballs like Manny, clowns like Big Papi and a bunch of other fun-loving guys trying to keep things light over a long season. An interview with Dustin Pedroia in the Globe, while not hilarious, at least shows these guys aren't totally unimaginative dumbass jocks who take everything too seriously.

GLOBE: No marriage proposals?

PEDROIA: There was yesterday! [A woman held up a sign that said] "Pedroia's future wife" and had an arrow pointing down. I was like, "Jeez. This woman must be blind. Poor thing."

A CAT NAMED OSCAR IS THE HARBINGER OF DEATH in an old person's home, according to articles in the Boston Globe and New England Journal of Medicine:

Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.

That sounds nice and all, but I have an alternate theory: I think the cat is killing off the patients one by one and stealing their souls. Why does no one else suspect this?

WATCHING 23-YEAR-OLD JON LESTER PITCH in his first big league start since being treated for cancer wasn't as interesting as watching his parents watching their 23-year-old son pitch in his first big league start since being treated for cancer:

In the third, Sizemore connected for a two-run homer off Lester, who was in trouble again in the fourth.

The Indians loaded the bases with one out but Lester broke Josh Barfield's bat on a comebacker that he bobbled before throwing home to force Garko. With Sizemore back up, Lester's mom, Kathie, couldn't watch as her son battled Cleveland's leadoff hitter.

When Lester finally blew a fastball past Sizemore for strike three to end the threat, his father, John, and Kathie jumped up and pumped their fists in celebration. However, she quickly sat back down and resumed her doubled-up position, seemingly afraid to watch anymore.

THIS JUST OCCURRED TO ME ABOUT THE HULK — the military was probably right in trying to bring that crazy mofo into custody. I mean, that guy was out of control, a serious threat to public safety. Sure, he was misunderstood. But he was a giant, violent, angry green ball of misunderstanding that could smash buildings and swing tanks over his head. So, yeah, let's get the guy some professional help so he can work out his issues — but for god's sake, let's get him that help under federal custody. I don't know why that didn't occur to me when I was a kid. Or maybe it's yet another sign of being old and fearful now.

ROGER CLEMENS MAKES ANOTHER COMEBACK in the year 2057 — a fun little short film by Michael Barber and Matt Oates.

EVEN WITH THE YANKEES 10.5 GAMES BACK, there are always reasons to keep watching. For one, the return of the Rocket means there's never enough distance between the Sox and the surging Yanks (their pitchers are pitching, their bats are hitting, their runners are stealing, and they've won 8 of their last 10, including a five-game winning streak and a Chien-Ming Wang complete game victory).

But beyond the ever-present fear of a Yankees uprising and Red Sox collapse (once a Red Sox fan always a Red Sox fan), there are also the little rewards that baseball bestows upon those who stick with the long season. Like taking satisfaction in watching wily Julian Tavarez (6 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 1 BB, 5 SO) put up about the same pitching line as Clemens (6 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 2 BB, 7 SO) – for approximately a gazillion dollars less per game.

Or there's Schilling getting one out away from a no-hitter, shaking off Varitek's call for a slider ("He's swinging"), and banking on his fastball instead ("He's taking"), on that fateful (second-to-last) at-bat against Oakland's Shannon Stewart. Or, as Schill himself puts it in his blog:

Now comes the infamous ‘shake’. In talking with Tek after the game it’s clear to me that he was 100% spot on with his thought, and I was completely wrong with mine. Why would he take a strike at this point? I had gone to 1 three ball count all day. I wasn’t going to walk him and the only thing you do at that point, by taking a strike, is allow me freedom to use my split. There was no way in hell he was taking. I was sure otherwise. So I shake off the slider, execute the pitch I want, and he lines it to right.

It was a game of minor statistical importance (hey, we're 10.5 games ahead!) played on a school day, so many of us caught on late that potential history was in the making. But that's because we're cubicle monkeys, checking in on the team between meetings and emails. Big Papi, however, realized what was going on even later than the rest of us, and he was actually there:

It was Red Sox bench coach Brad Mills who alerted the media to the fact David Ortiz was in the dark about Schilling taking a no-hitter into the ninth inning.

"Ortiz came up to me and said, 'I swear on my children, I didn't know it was a no-hitter,' " said Mills, who had the manager's office to himself after the game because Terry Francona decided Mills deserved some attention after his son, Beau, was drafted by Cleveland in the first round (13th overall). "After the game, he came up to us. You can go ask him."

Francona said Ortiz told him the same thing, and the big man owned up to his ignorance.

"I didn't know until after the first out in the last inning," said Ortiz, whose home run in the first inning gave Schilling the run he needed to win his sixth game against two losses. "That's when I got nervous. I looked at the board, saw all the zeroes. [First base coach] Luis Alicea, he asked me, 'What would you do? Would you bring the closer in?'

"He was messing around with me. I was like, 'He's pitching good, why bring in the closer? Later on, I looked at all those zeroes, and I see the zero under 'H,' I go, 'Wait a minute.' I'm looking around and everybody goes, 'Shhhh.' That's when I started getting nervous."

Utility guy Alex Cora had this response:

Sox infielder Alex Cora was dubious of Ortiz's claim. "How many people were at that game?" Cora asked. "Thirty thousand? Twenty-five guys on their side, and 24 [on ours] . . . he was the only guy not watching the game."

And random Red Sox fan Bill Chuck had this:

After reading David Ortiz's claim that he didn't know Curt Schilling had a no-hitter in progress Thursday, reader Bill Chuck e-mailed: "The fact that Big Papi was not aware of Schilling's no-hitter until one down in the ninth can only be attributed to David being Manny."

So there's the painfully close bid at a history-making no-hitter — and then there are the little things, like Julio Lugo's hidden ball trick, which brings its own kind of drama to the June proceedings:

Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell did not see Julio Lugo tag out an unsuspecting Alberto Callaspo Friday night, but he was ready to pronounce judgment on the play.

"That's not a real hidden-ball trick," Lowell said yesterday , "although I'm sure the stats say it is."

Lugo tagged out Callaspo when he strayed off second base, not realizing that Lugo — who had taken a throw from right fielder J.D. Drew — had not returned the ball to pitcher Josh Beckett, even though Beckett said afterward he was calling for the ball.

"I saw it on the replay," Lowell said, "I didn't see it while it was going on."

Lugo said once before he'd executed a similar play, but said the umpire missed it. "I try it all the time," he said. "It just didn't work.

"The umpire [Chris Guccione] was right on top of the play."

Lowell executed a similar play in 2005, when he was with Florida, and it also came against Arizona, when the third baseman tagged out Luis Terrero, who also strayed off the bag with Lowell still in possession of the ball. Why, then, was Lowell's play superior to Lugo's?

"Because [Lugo] didn't have to do anything," Lowell said. "[Pitcher Todd ] Jones had to sell it more than anyone.

"Jonesie, the only reason I didn't get rid of the ball was he was backing up home plate. I wasn't going to throw it to him. So I just waited. Then I glanced over to third and the third base coach and Terrero were both looking down at the time. So I said, I'll just walk over until Jonesie gets to the mound. If he asks for the ball, I'm going to give it to him. But we made eye contact and he saw me, then he walked around the mound, he's at the back, he started stretching. We were, honestly, about three seconds away from just forgetting about it because we couldn't wait anymore. And right there [Terrero] took a step off the bag, and it worked out."

No-hitters and hidden ball tricks both display some of the particular fun of baseball. It's a game with a long memory for little things and big things, each moment adding incrementally to a player's stats while also echoing the accomplishments of games past. So even though it's a long season in a game with a long history, even the smallest things begin to carry strange significance.

One day, Trot Nixon steps into the batter's box as a player for the opposing team, but what takes the stage is appreciation for the 13 seasons he spent as an original dirt dog. And on that same day, Kevin Youkilis has the first inside-the-park home run at Fenway since . . . Trot Nixon.

So, Mother's Day comebacks aside, there are other special moments that have nothing to do with winning and losing that are worth watching.

Or if you don't buy that, then remember this: 10.5 games is nothing when you're talking about the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

Suprisingly, it takes a New York Daily News columnist to remind us of how the tides can turn. After all, when the Red Sox were 8.5 games back on July 1, 2004, everyone began to count them out then, as well.

A COUPLE OF OLD GUYS SUBDUE A CRAZY PASSENGER on a Northwest Airlines flight while all the young dudes on the plane basically acted like weenies and "averted their eyes" to avoid involvement in the coming confrontation. Both of the old guys who stepped up are retired badasses — one is a former police commander, the other is a former marine captain. The best part though is how the wife of one of the geezer's reacted:

Hayden's wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from "The Richest Man in Babylon," the book she was reading.

"The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading," Katie Hayden said. "Bob's been shot at. He's been stabbed. He's taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody's neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn't know how the book would end."

Clearly, all the excitement is gone from this marriage. I mean, what's a guy got to do to impress a lady these days?

WE'RE ALL SICKOS, according to the way it's laid out in this Salon article about Michael Moore's new movie:

When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.

Sounds 'bout right.