Bambino's Curse

"Sign it 'From Kevin Millar's Mom'"

Besides the blissful feeling a Red Sox fan gets after a win like last night's, a night when Cassey Fossum was described as masterful, leaving the Angels hitters befuddled, is the ability to sit back and enjoy bits like this:

… Judy Millar, a slender blonde dressed in a cream-colored sweater and denim slacks, was standing in the front row behind home plate at Edison Field, watching [her son] Kevin Millar and her new favorite team, the Red Sox, take batting practice before last night's game with the Anaheim Angels.

She had just returned from a couple of weeks in her new favorite city, Boston… "Did you know people were asking me to sign stuff, asking me to sign baseballs? I said, 'What should I write?' They said, 'Sign it, 'Kevin Millar's mom.' I love Boston. The energy. The excitement. I want to live there (Edes, Globe).

Read the whole column for yourself. It'll put you in an even better mood. Reminds me I need to thank my own mom for driving me to all those Little League practices and games as a kid… I didn't become a major leaguer like Kevin Millar, but I learned a whole lot on the infield in my Brock's Plywood pinstripes.

Here We Go (Again)

As a Red Sox fan, this is the first of the season's gut checks, the first moment when some of those on the bandwagon will start shifting uncomfortably, looking over the sides and wondering if now might be a good time to jump off.

Let's count off the issues, each of which when viewed individually ain't no big thang, but when taken as a whole do wrench the fan gut a bit.

1. Derek Lowe is struggling big time.
   

   The outing was Lowe's worst in 40 starts since he returned to the rotation in 2001. He was tagged for seven runs on three walks and six hits…
   
   "It was the struggle of all struggles. [Lowe said.] There's something going on. I'm the same guy, but the quality, pitch per pitch, is lacking" (Hohler, Globe).

2. The escalating war of words (or lack thereof).
   
   • Pedro is (still) pissed at the media
   • Team meeting over situation
   • The Herald's Mazz stirs the pot this morning

     … the Sox decided they would heretofore engage reporters only on the topic of baseball. Given those parameters, here is our first baseball question: Why, fellas, did you go out and play the game today as if you had your heads rammed up your butts? (Massarotti).

3. Potential fallout from the Jimmy Kimmel appearance.

   "What was the final?" asks Kimmel. Millar admits "It was 16-5" (crowd ooooh... some Sox sheepishly grin) then… Johnny Damon (remember those initials) steps up and says perfectly "Nothing our friend Jack Daniels can't take care of" (big laughs all around) (via DirtDogs).

Lowe, of course, is the biggest concern. He really hasn't been right since the start of this year. I'd be less worried about this if I we didn't have the history of Lowe "losing it" after a great season. He did have this same pitcher's colic as a closer: All- Star one year, disaster the following year. Hopefully the pattern isn't repeating.

Both #2 and #3 above will pass innocently if the Red Sox go out and take the series from the Angels. If the opposite happens, oh boy. It's going to get nasty. I mention the Jimmy Kimmel appearance only because it's the sort of thing that will foment fan discontent ("How can them baseball-boyz laugh about a loss?" "These guys don't care.") if the team happens to get clobbered on the remainder of the road trip.

Well, everyone's fave street bard the rap phenom 50 Cent says it best,

Sun cant shine all the time, man its gotta rain
That whole loose? is ill
You better crack the whip mang

Uhh…uh… huh…uh…huhh… Or as I like to say, "A playa aint a no playa if his ass 0 fo' 4."

This is a big weekend. Keep your Sox on!

Obatala Ain't Listening

"We couldn't bunch together any more than one hit in an inning and it's tough to score that way." — Grady Little

Not much one can add to that. Again, not the end of the world to lose a game, but the Yankees won yet again, and it's eating away at me.

So much for my Soriano voodoo doll:

Alfonso Soriano led the way with four hits, extending his hitting streak to 11 games with his 14th multi-hit game of the season. He got things going right away, launching a solo shot off Angels starter Mickey Callaway to lead off the game. It was Soriano's eighth homer of the year, and the third time this season he has started a game by going deep (Feinsand, MLB.com).

Time for the chickens?

"Firolo firolo bale fi ro lo ba le abo fi ro lo fi ro lo bale abo fi ro fi ro lo bale" [Translation: Damn Yankees I curse you to hell.]

Back to the Future

I'll take the win, of course, but this is another one that leaves me with a hangover: The bullpen near collapse is the cotton mouth feeling, and Pedro's obvious struggling (walked 6!) is the headache.

Grady Little said his control may have been affected by minor back stiffness. Trainer Jim Rowe, however, insisted nothing was wrong. Martinez' fastball velocity, which peaked at 96 mph, indicated his arm is sound (Horrigan, Herald).

I buy that, though there is precedent of massive, Watergate-style cover-up in the past when Pedro has been hurt. So I'm not going to just shrug it off. Like a mole, this bears medical scrutiny.

"Pedro's oblique muscle is his kryptonite. When he pitches he comes around so hard that each fastball at 96 or over will put a serious strain onto that muscle" (anonymous quote, Boston Dirt Dogs).

I need some aspirin.

Elsewhere … If you can get past Buster Olney calling our Red Sox devotion a sickness and his prediction that the club will never win another World Series, Alex Belth's interview with the New York Times reporter held in the parking lot of Shea Stadium is an illuminating, albeit sobering, read:

You know people by and large think baseball players are jerks. I think they are like any other group of 25 people, in any job: You like fifteen of them, don’t have an opinion of eight of them, and can’t stand two of them. That’s the way it was for me. I found that players 95% of the time were very easy to deal with. I didn’t run into too many difficult players over the years (Bronx Banter).

"I Put a Spell on You"

If you watched either or both of Ken Burns' documentaries on jazz and baseball, you know there is a deep connection between the two. In Burns own words,

… when they study our American civilization 2000 years from now the only thing that we'll be known for is The Constitution, Baseball and Jazz. Those are the three most beautiful things that Americans have ever produced. We then realized half way through "Baseball" that we were actually involved in a trilogy that would require us to spend the six and a half years after "Baseball" to complete it by making the history of Jazz (from an interview with Alex Belth).

Well, last year we lost "the greatest hitter that ever lived" with Ted Williams passing, and yesterday we lost the greatest singer that ever lived with the passing of Nina Simone. She was more than a singer, though, Nina Simone was an American icon and heroine. If you don't own a Nina Simone record, by all means go get yourself one. Today.

It's difficult to pick a favorite Nina Simone song, but her cover of Sceamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" is on my short list. Listening to it last night, I realized it's time to make some new voodoo dolls.

First up is one for Alfonso Soriano, the wielder of grand slam power yesterday.

I know we are not supposed to worry about what the Yankees are doing, but when they, the most successful sports franchise ever, are off to their own best start in Yankees history, how can one not notice?

That the Yankees just don't seem to ever lose, makes the expected, the normal in the course of 162 games losses like the one yesterday seem more important then they should.

It's becoming ever more apparent that it isn't going to be enough for the Red Sox to be good: We also need the Yankees to be bad, or at least just good and certainly not playing on a the pace the Bombers are currently on.

So time to do that voodoo.

You better stop the things you do
I ain’t lyin’
No I ain’t lyin’

Never Say Never

Here's the deal. Yesterday afternoon I'm kicked back in my comfy chair reading the Sunday paper and listening to the game on WEEI� Red Sox have been down all game and in the 6th Toronto gets two more to make it 5 zip � But I don't panic. I don't find an excuse to leave the room. My anxiety meter is, to use the vernacular of NASA, off-scale low� And as everyone knows, my sang-froid was rewarded when the Red Sox rallied back and won the game on a walkoff homer by Nomar.

I'm not sure when is the last time I've felt like that about the Red Sox. '99 maybe? Now I'm not saying that I think everything is going to by hunky dory from this point out. Heck, I'm not even saying I'll have that level of confidence as a fan ever again this season. It very well could have been an anomaly.

Nevertheless, yesterday I had it. I had it, and it felt fricken' wonderful.

While I'm patting myself on the back for my faith, let me draw your attention to this final line from the Tuesday, April 15th posting: "I think the Red Sox are primed to go on a win streak."

Heh heh heh�

Meanwhile, the MLB.TV woes continue. I guess this week I'll go ahead and call my bank and have the $99 charge I put on my debit card reversed as several readers have pointed out I have the ability to do. Funny thing is, I bet that they are so f'ed up over at MLB that they'll never catch up to the fact that the money was taken back from them and I'll continue to get the package for free. Not that its worth anything more than the $11.99 for the audio feeds. The remainder of the broadband content is inaccessible.

Reader Darren Viola sent me this link showing the problems are pandemic:

But if there's a problem, such as the sudden and unexplained removal of Red Sox webcasts from the New York market, don't expect MLB TV to answer its customer service phone number, nor to return the messages one leaves - after a long delay encouraging you to hold on for a service rep - on MLB TV's customer message machine. Subscribers have tried for weeks.

And on weekends - baseball's prime business hours, given that all teams are scheduled to play - the recorded message tells callers to call back, "during normal business hours." Then Monday, the futile process begins anew (Mushnick, New York Post).

Yep. That's it exactly. But why bother with customer service and fan discontent when there are so many more important issues for MLB to deal with?

Little said he also has heard from MLB about other fashion issues, including Ramirez's continuing practice of wearing his pants over his shoetops (Edes).

Thanks, Bud! That'll surely affect what ails the game of baseball. Got to smack down on those long trousers.

What the Gods Know

A reading from the book of Giamatti:

The gods are brought back when the people gather together [at the ballpark]�

� sport is ceremony wherever you find it. It mimics the ritual quality of religious observances even when the sport is no longer, if it ever was, connected to a formal religious act of worship. In that mimesis, however, an experience akin to the religious is engaged in over and over.

� I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instance what the gods know (Take Time for Paradise).

Happy Easter.