Early this morning I got this e-mail from a Red Sox pal of mine:

You’ll get the whole season recap from me tomorrow, but the short story is that I really did stop caring about this team about three weeks ago. In fact, I hate that I actually gave a shit again tonight, for about forty-five minutes. (Great baseball story, though.)

What happened is they stopped being any fun to watch sometime in late August, but I have to say, they weren’t that great to watch in the first place. (Something like 3-57 when trailing in the 8th inning this year.)

They were kind of like the loud guy at the party who’s having a great time, and you sort of keep your distance from him as the night goes on, and suddenly he gets WAY too drunk…a little funny, sure, but mostly pathetic.

Or think of those hammered guys on “Cops” that just got pulled over by the cute little PO-lice lady from Tennessee.

So what you do about it? If you’re at the party, you just get the hell away from that guy, maybe take off. But when it’s on TV? All you have to do is reach for the remote and change the channel…

The Yanks jumped all over David Price last night. Slapped him silly. Mark Teixeira hit two dingers, including a grand slam and the Bombers led 7-0 and were cruising. You could practically hear a pin drop at the Trop. The Rays had nothing, they were done, even though the Yankees trotted out thirty-six pitchers. Then in the eighth, the Rays scored six runs, capped by a three-run shot by Evan Longoria. A final, noble gasp, right?

Cory Wade retired the first two men in the ninth, had pinch-hitter Dan Johnson down to his last strike, and then the sombitch hit a line drive home run to tie it. And that’s the truth.

Enter Scott Proctor. Now, it’s not what you think. Proctor got the final out in the ninth and made it through the tenth and eleventh. The Yanks had runners on first and third with one out in the top of the twelfth and couldn’t score. Then, at 11:59 p.m., after he’d struck out the first two men in the ninth and given up a double, Jonathan Paplebon, one strike away from a win, gave up a game-tying double. That was followed two minutes later by another hit from the man whose name will be burned into Red Sox Nation’s collective memories forever–Robert Andino. Little fly ball to left, Carl Crawford charged, had it, and then it popped out of his glove. And the winning run scored.

The crowd at the Trop went nuts when they heard the news. Proctor had to step off the mound. No matter what happened, there was something noble about the way Proctor performed. He was the last guy out there. Maybe if the Yanks got the lead, someone else would come in but so long as the game remained tied, it was Proctor’s game, Proctor–there to lose it. And he toughed it out. It was his best performance since rejoining the team.

He got the first out and had two strikes on Longoria before the best player on the Rays hit a low line drive down the left field line. Was it fair? It was. And just over the wall. The times was 12:06 a.m.

My goodness. The art of fiction, dead, for sure.

What a finish.

The Tigers won and so did the Rangers so the Yanks will play the ALDS against the Tigers. Tough match-up. Should be fun.

[Photo Credit: Fur Affinity]

Crockett and Tubbs (Mostly Crockett)

By John Schulian

Even though it disappeared from prime time more than 20 years ago, “Miami Vice” still has a hold on people, whether it’s because they dressed like Crockett and Tubbs at a bar mitzvah or they’re looking for cocaine residue on those of us who helped make cultural icons of TV’s hippest cops. Myself, I’ve never looked good in white loafers without socks, and I’ve never done coke. But I didn’t realize I should have said so to Robert Wuhl before I went on his radio show last spring to promote “At the Fights,” the boxing anthology that the sainted George Kimball and I edited. I was primed to talk about everyone from Muhammad Ali and Roberto Duran to Norman Mailer and A.J. Liebling, but as soon as Wuhl saw “Miami Vice” on my resume, he wanted to know about all the coked-out shenanigans on South Beach. When I told him I didn’t know anything, he gave me the kind of look Hillary Clinton must have given Bill the first time she asked him about that Lewinsky woman and he lied his presidential ass off.

I was telling the truth, though. I really didn’t know anything beyond the same rumors everybody else seemed to have heard. When I was on “Vice,” the last thing on my mind was getting high. I wanted to establish myself in Hollywood, and this was my chance to do it. We wrote the scripts at Universal Studios and shot them in Miami, which gave everybody there plenty of chances to go native. The most outrageous behavior I heard of, however, was when Dick Wolf called Don Johnson only to be told that Don had gone skiing in Aspen. I suppose you could excuse him because he’d run off on a Friday when he didn’t have much work to do, just a couple of scenes in which we could shoot his double from behind. Of course his double had the world’s worst wig and looked the way Don would have on a diet of Krispy Kremes, but Don got away with it. It’s good to be the star.

If Don had been anything less, he wouldn’t have directed an episode I’d written called “By Hooker By Crook.” He lobbied for Melanie Griffith, his ex-wife, to play a socialite who moonlights as a madam, and, wonder of wonders, she got the part. In a cast that was magnificently goofy – Captain Lou Albano, the wrestler; Vanity, who had been Prince’s main squeeze; George Takei from “Star Trek” – Melanie was the main attraction. She and Don did a lot of rolling around in bed for the sake of the episode; in dailies she’d pull a sheet tight around her at the end of each take and laughingly tell the crew, “Quit looking at my tits.” Don and Melanie must have done some rolling around off-camera, too, because they wound up giving marriage a second try. That one didn’t work, either.

The fact that Don was directing didn’t mean much to me until I came home one night to my apartment in a complex crawling screenwriters, guys going through divorces (who may have been screenwriters too), stage mothers and their children, strippers, and hookers. The phone was ringing as I opened the door. It was Dick Wolf.

“Don wants you in Miami,” he said.

“I’ll catch the first thing smoking in the morning,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand. Don wants you there now.”

Apparently our star had developed a case of the yips as his first day of directing drew near. So I took the red-eye to Miami, where a driver picked me up and drove me to the art deco hotel where the company was quartered. I slept for a few hours and then went out to the set. The first person I saw coming out of Don’s trailer was Kerry McCluggage, the president of Universal TV. That’s when I knew how big a deal this was, and just how skittish Don was.

As it turned out, he asked very little of me. I expected a demand for major revisions, but all he wanted to do was look out for his character, Sonny Crokett. He combed the script looking for the few good lines I’d given Crockett’s partner, Ricardo Tubbs. Every time he found one, he’d say, “I think Crockett should say that,” and I would dutifully make the change. Poor Philip Michael Thomas. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he was a good enough Tubbs, and here was Don turning him into a nonentity in his one shot at glory. It was as if Phillip didn’t realize what was at stake. Don certainly did. He’d been the king of failed pilots until Kerry McCluggage talked him into doing what Brandon Tartikoff, the wizard who ran NBC, famously called “MTV Cops.” Now that Don had finally found success, he was biting down on it like a pit bull.

Because I was in Miami to aid and abet him, he invited me to dinner at his home on Star Island. It was just Don, his son, and me (and the hired help, of course). He kept calling the boy “son,” as if he couldn’t remember his name. It was all perfectly pleasant, though: a nice meal, a little light conversation. And then Don looked at me very seriously and said, “They tell me you used to be a sportswriter. That’s a strange way to make a living, isn’t it?”

This from a guy who played an undercover cop who wore pastel clothes and sockless white loafers, drove a Ferrari Testarossa, had a pet alligator named Elvis, ran around glorious mansions shooting bad guys, and spent more than a little time staring moodily into the distance while Phil Collins or Simply Red or some other hot music act played in the background.

And he wanted to know if writing sports is a strange way to make a living.

“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose it is.”

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Read anything about “Moneyball” lately?

I haven’t seen the movie yet but I did read this article on Billy Beane in the New York Times Magazine.

And over at The Atlantic, Allen Barra has a critical essay on Michael Lewis’ book.

In the elevator this morning with my neighbor, Bee. She’s a nurse and we sometimes meet on our way to work. She is a zaftig Puerto Rican with a big smile. Got an easy laugh. Bee’s also a huge movie fan so I mention the upcoming George Harrison documentary by Martin Scorsese.

“Oh, I love Rock n Roll,” Bee said. “I was one of the only Latina’s that did back then. You don’t believe me? Inagaddadavida, baby!”

The final day of the regular season. Sox and Rays are tied for the wildcard in the AL; Braves and Cards are tied for the wildcard in the NL.

It’s gunna hoit for someone.

…That the Red Sox and the Rays both won tonight? That Russell Martin hit into a triple play? That Rafael Soriano screwed the pooch and gave up the deciding three-run home run? How about that Boston’s third-string catcher, Ryan Lavarnway (and what a wonderful name that is), hit two home runs? Lavarnway also made a critical play to get the second out in the ninth inning too.

It all happened folks. And so there will be another night of channel-flipping, nail-biting, and general playoff mishegoss. Would you expect anything less at this pernt?

The good news is that Bartolo Colon pitched reasonably well for the Yanks in the 5-3 loss.

Otherwise, the Yankees were a footnote in this drama. Final game of the season. Dig ‘um, smack.

Here’s James Agee on our man Buster:

Very early in [Keaton’s] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

…Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies — the negatives of which have been lost — were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because “dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

Oh, yeah. And Buster loved baseball too.

“Figure in Landscape, No. 2,” By Willem de Kooning (1951)

The de Kooning Retrospective at the Modern is a big show and it is fuggin’ gorgeous. It’s up through the middle of January. Don’t sleep.

From George King in the Post:

Russell Martin was ejected by plate umpire Paul Schrieber in the fifth inning after Hughes believed the ump missed a couple of pitches.

“I said to (the umpire), ‘Did you stretch before the game?’ He said ‘What?’ I asked him again. Then I said, ‘I believe you are kind of tight right now.’ And he threw me out of the game.

“He wanted to hear what I was going to say because why else would he take off his mask and walk around me. I kept my mask on my face, nobody knew what was going on. I thought this was a game it should be fun. I was just trying to loosen things up a bit because he wasn’t having a good time. I didn’t say he sucked, I didn’t say he was the worst umpire in the league, I didn’t say any of that stuff. I just made a joke and he threw me out. No warning. Nothing.

“He said my antics were tired. Me walking to the mound kind of slowly. But it’s frustrating when you are not getting calls. I got thrown out for being funny, I guess. I got thrown out for having a sense of humor. I had Joe [Girardi] laughing. I can’t wait to see the report he is going to write. I felt it was the perfect time to do it. I was just trying to lighten up the mood. It just popped up in my head. I think he took it the wrong way. I just thought of it on the way back from seeing Phil. Phil was getting frustrated. a My standup days are over, shortlived. We can’t talk anymore. I was shocked I got thrown out. I was just trying to get him to laugh.”

Tough room, huh?

[Drawing by the great Drew Friedman]

What do I know from tonight’s games? I don’t know dick, frankly, because The Wife was watching “Dancing with the Stars.” But I followed along on the computer, at least to check the scores, and saw some of the video highlights. What I learned was that Russell Martin was thrown out of the game while behind the plate for arguing balls and strikes. I know that the Yankees caught two runners stealing in one play and that Desmond Jennings made a spectacular catch in left field. Oh, and I learned that aside from Robinson Cano’s two hits, including a first inning home run, James Shield had his way with the Yanks. He lasted until two outs in the ninth, walked Eric Chavez and our old chum Kyle Farmaduke got the final out.

Final Score: Rays 5, Yanks 2.

I also know that Josh Beckett spit the bit, giving up six runs–an inside the park home run was the icing on the gravy–and now the Sox and Rays are tied for the wild card with two games left in the season.

Whoa, Daddy.

Yanks down in Tampa for three to end the season. The Rays are fighting to make the playoffs and they need some help from the Orioles. The Yanks are looking to rest some guys and keep everyone healthy for the ALDS.

Cliff with the preview.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Jorge Posada 1B
Eric Chavez 3B
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez RF
Brett Gardner LF

Never mind the nap:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Krstnn Hrmnsn]

According to Chad Jennings, Phil Hughes will be pitching out of the bullpen come playoff time.

“Pencil drawing of Elaine de Kooning,” by Willem de Kooning (1940)

The Money Trap

By John Schulian

Over the years, as I told other writers how I got into the business, I would hear again and again that it just didn’t happen that way. It was beyond improbable. It was impossible. And these were writers who hadn’t just fallen off a truckload of turkeys. They were good, some were even great, which is to say they were far more accomplished than I ever was at screenwriting. But I was the one who, for reasons I will never understand, caught a break the size of a tidal wave. No, make that a succession of breaks the size of a tidal wave.

Ordinarily, Michael Mann, the executive producer of “Miami Vice,” would have grilled me and probably demanded to see a lot more than my “L.A. Law” script. But “Vice” had consumed him the two previous years, when he was wresting control of it from its creator, Tony Yerkovich, and developing the look that revolutionized TV. Now, he was busy opening the first Hannibal Lechter move, “Manhunter,” which he’d directed, and launching his second TV series, the brilliant but underappreciated “Crime Story.” Dick Wolf, a master at seizing the moment, told him I’d covered the cops in my newspaper days. It wasn’t a lie, really. Almost all the reporters on the Baltimore Evening Sun’s city desk took a turn at police headquarters or covering the districts, and I’d taken mine, too. But I was hardly the street-smart, steely-eyed character Dick described to Mann, who shrugged and said, “Okay, if he’s the guy you want.” I should have known then that Dick would go far.

It turned out that I wouldn’t meet Mann–wouldn’t even lay eyes on him, in fact–until I’d been at “Vice” for six or seven months and had written all or part of six scripts, credited and uncredited. I did, however, have the same agent as Mann and Dick, which may or may not have helped when the time came to negotiate my deal with Universal. Even though I was basically getting on-the-job training as a TV writer, I ended up making twice what I had in my best year in Chicago as one of the country’s top sports columnists.

My agent’s name was Marty. He was soft-spoken, baby-faced, barely 30, if that. Butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth until he was negotiating. Then he turned into a werewolf, or worse. A year or two after he began representing me, he phoned one morning and said, with consummate pride. “At Columbia they’re calling me the anti-Christ.” He’s long out of the business now, and yet he still crosses my mind occasionally. And when he does, I always think of a wonderful riff in John Gregory Dunne’s novel “The Red, White and Blue” about how all agents are Marty and all writers are Mel.

So I, being a perfect Mel, responded to the good news about my fat salary by telling Marty, “I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Dirty?” he said, offended. “Money’s not dirty.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I’m just telling you it’s a lot of money and I appreciate it.”

“Of course it’s a lot of money. I only get to keep 10 percent of it.”

When I told my mother my salary, she said, “Oh, Johnny, why do you want to make so much money?” I wish I could tell you she was kidding. She’d grown up in humble circumstances and had a very specific and deeply held notion of what constituted an obscene amount of money. This was it. I can only imagine what she would have thought about the money I went on to make, even though it was modest compared to what TV’s biggest hitters earned. She was old-fashioned that way.

Actually, she was old-fashioned in a lot of ways. She never learned to drive, for example, just took the bus and walked, which was fine by her, though it certainly limited the size of her world. But she was indomitable. And tough. She wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she thought was right, and if that meant feuding with a neighbor, so be it. I suppose I get my temper from her, though she never came close to blowing up the way I have from time to time. I’ll tell you something else about my mother: she didn’t approve of a lot of what I wrote for TV in the seven years before she died. She didn’t like the violence on “Miami Vice,” or the double entendres on “L.A. Law,” or maybe even the cigar that Dabney Coleman smoked on “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story.” I always felt uncomfortable about that until I read Elmore Leonard’s confession that he took it easy with sex and profanity in his novels until his mother died. Mothers cast a long shadow over a lot of us.

Mine certainly would have been much happier if I’d come home from the Army, moved back into my old bedroom, and spent the rest of my life as a worker bee at the Salt Lake Tribune. I’ve got an old friend from Salt Lake who’s the same way about his kids. Most of them have heeded their father’s wishes and stayed relatively close to home, but one is off working in New York, which is my friend’s idea of the devil’s playground. I tell him the same thing I told my mother: There’s no going back home once you’ve seen the other side of the mountain.

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Check one, two.

It didn’t start well for John Lackey. He allowed a walk and single in the first and had runners on the corners with one out when Mark Teixeira hit a ball to the wall in right center field. It hit the top of the wall, a few inches away from being a home run. Two runs scored and the throw came in to Jason Varitek at home as Teixeira tried for third. Varitek had him easily but airmailed the ball into left field instead and Teixeira scored.

And that’s the way things have been going for the Red Sox.

Except Lackey recovered and pitched well after that. Couple of double plays helped him out and eventually, the Sox put some runs on the board. They scored one in the the fifth, another in the sixth. A wild pitch that bounced right back to Austin Romine at home plate was good enough to end the sixth when he tagged a leaping Dustin Pedrioa on the ass. It was good enough to get Ivan Nova out of trouble but Joe Girardi wouldn’t leave well enough alone, even after Nova’s pitches hung up in the strike zone, and a pair of doubles followed by an RBI single by Varitek gave the Sox a 4-3 in the seventh.

Boone Logan relieved Nova and got Jacoby Ellsbury looking and then picked off pinch-runner Joey Gathwright to end the inning.

Eric Chavez led off the bottom of the seventh with a weak ground ball that snuck into center field for a base hit and Tito Francona walked to the mound to remove his starting pitcher. Lackey moved away shaking his head. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” is what I saw his lips say as he stomped back to the dugout.

Brett Gardner, pinch-running for Chavez stole second on the first pitch Alfredo Aceves threw. The pitch also happened to go wild, so the tying run was at second with nobody out. Jesus Montero fisted a 2-2 pitch to short but it was hit softly enough for Gardner to reach third. The Sox brought their infield in but it didn’t much matter when Chris Dickerson hit a fly ball to center field for the sacrifice fly.

Tie game. Rafael Soriano got ahead of Carl Crawford 0-2 but then left a fastball over the plate and Crawford singled to center. He took off for second on Soriano’s first pitch to Pedrioa, got a good jump too, but Romine made a perfect throw, Cano made a quick tag, and Yankee fans had reason to cheer. They continued to be happy as Pedrioa and Ortiz grounded out to end the inning.

Aceves got the first two men out in the bottom of the eighth and then Josh Bard retired Robinson Cano on a grounder to second.

Mariano replaced Soriano and served-up an opposite field base hit to Adrain Gonzalez to start the ninth (fastball on the outside part of the plate but way up in the zone). Lars Anderson pinch-ran for Gonzalez and Mike Aviles sacrificed him to second. J.D. Drew, making his first start since Christ was a Cowboy, grounded out to first, pushing Anderson to third. Girardi walked to the mound and the infielders joined him. Mariano smiled because Marco Scutaro was coming to bat and the sombitch has a happy history against Rivera. That brought up Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who took a fastball right down Broadway for a strike. Then he took a fastball on the outside corner for strike two. Took anther fastball, just off the outside corner for a ball. A pitch Rivera usually gets. And then the unfair one: a cutter, low and inside, breaking late, almost at Salty’s ankles. He swung right over it for the third out.

Teixeira battled Bard to led off the bottom of the inning and after twelve pitches drew a walk. Greg Golson came in to run and Swisher came to bat as Jonathan Paplebon quickly warmed-up in the bullpen. A throw to first, a strike, then Bard stepped off the rubber before throwing a pitch in the dirt. Another throw to first, this one Anderson had to scoop to keep from going past him. A fastball just under Swisher’s armpits for ball two. A bigger lead for Golson and a throw to first. Paplebon almost ready. Golson ran and Swisher hit a ground ball to first, one out.

Gardner–0-5 lifetime against Bard–took a fastball for a strike and then tapped out weakly to first, Golson to third. And then, an intentional walk to The Jesus. The young Brandon Laird up, but what’s this? Jorge Posada. Pinch hitter. The old man. Believe it.

Fastball, way outside for a ball. Another heater, again, way out of the strike zone, ball two. Another heater missed so they walked him intentionally.

Enter Paplebon. Mr. Romine, this is your life, son.

Slider, up, hanging, fouled off. Fastball, low and inside. Fastball, right there, fouled back. Had a good swing, too. Fastball, in, 97mph, fouled back. Then a breaking pitch in the dirt, swung on and missed. He had his chances, had some good pitches, but he got beat.

Raul Valdes came in for Mo and the deflated sound you heard was the commenters on the Banter. You know how it goes. Ellsbury blooped a single over Nunez’s head but was cut down at second when Crawford tried to sacrifice him over. Crawford reached first and Cory Wade replaced Valdes. Crawford did not run and it took seven pitches for Wade to strike Pedrioa out. Then Ortiz flew out to left to end the inning.

Paplebon tossed a scoreless frame and then Wade did the same so Paps did it again. Wade got one out in the 12th and then gave way to Aaron Laffey. And now the Banter Crew was just plain annoyed. Even more so when Salty lined a single to left. But then Ellsbury hit into a 4-6-3 double play. Go figure, indeed.

Franklin Morales, a lefty, was Boston’s new pitcher in the bottom of the inning. He threw stack cheddar and The Jesus got some good hacks in, fouling pitches off, and he laid off a 2-2 curve ball before blooping a single to left. Ramiro Pena, in his first time hitting, stabbed at the first pitch and popped it foul, just out of Salty’s reach. Morales slung a pick off throw to first that Anderson grabbed, saving another potential throwing error. Then Pena bunted a ball right at Morales, who bobbled it, but still had plenty of time to nail Montero at second for the first out. Romine had a good pass at a fastball but struck out looking at a high slider and Nunez, hacking wildly, popped up to Pedrioa.

Unlucky 13.

I mean, Aaron Laffey, right? He got Crawford to line out to third and then Pedrioa had one of those Kevin Youkilis at bats, 9 pitches, hits a soft ground ball to third, Pena fired it to first, Pedrioa did his best Pete Rose and dove to the bag. The throw beat him, easily, but Tim McClelland called him safe. Unlucky 13, it was nothing short of a horrible call. Swisher yelled and Girardi got thrown out of the game. Ortiz flew out just shy of the warning track in left. Pedrioa led off first, unable to get a good break. Laffey threw over, fell behind Anderson but then regrouped and struck out the first baseman for the third out.

Pedrioa made a slick play, picking a hard-hit ball by Granderson for the first out in the bottom of the inning. Morales still in there. Cano walked and Andruw Jones stayed on the bench as Golson came to hit. And Golson worked the count full, fouled off a fastball and took a curve ball with no bite for ball four.

Swisher. 0-5 Swisher. Called out at first earlier in the game at first when he was safe. Playing first when Pedrioa was called safe. So Swisher hit a fly ball to right for the second out, Cano moved to third. And Gardner whiffed.

Unlucky 13.

How long could Laffey hang in there, tempting fate? Really, now. But he got an out and then Tony Pena took him out in favor of the human white flag, none other than our old pal Scott Proctor. Now, I’m sure Proctor is a decent guy. He once burned his glove on the field after a bad game in the old Stadium. And he’s a recovering alcoholic who sat alone in the player’s lounge a few days ago when the Yanks clinched the AL East. Sympathetic guy. But not the guy who is going to get outs before he gives up hits and runs anymore.

Darnell McDonald, pinch-hitting for Drew, singled to left. Scutaro walked. Do you want to know more? Isn’t it obvious where this is going? Okay, we’ve come this far, I won’t leave you hanging. Salty hit a ball a long way, in the park, but far enough to chase Granderson to the warning track in center field, far enough to allow McDonald to tag to third. And then Ellsbury. You know, the MVP candidate. Maybe he’ll win the award after hitting a ball over the fence in right center field for a three run homer.

Yeah, the Rays won’t be sending Scott Proctor a Christmas present. And I suppose ol’ Scott won’t make the playoff roster, not that he would have if he’d pitched well here.

You can’t blame Proctor for being himself. Jones, Rodriguez, Martin and Jeter never got off the bench and while the Yanks would have liked to win this one, it was clear that Girardi did not want to win at all costs. He’s got more pressing matters than the Red Sox. For Boston, however, a long day’s journey into night, ended with a sigh of relief. They remain a game ahead of Tampa. Ellsbury gets their biggest hit of the year and as I’ve said all week, I’d be surprised if they don’t make the playoffs.

Final Score: Sox 7, Yanks 4. 

[Photo Credit: Alex Duprey]

It’s Ivan Nova vs. John Lackey tonight.

I went shopping at Fairway this morning and talked tough with the Yankee fans I encountered. Smiles all around. Then an older guy comes up to me and says, “I’ve been rooting for the Red Sox for over sixty years. They are going to blow this.”

Who was I to tell him he was wrong? But I still say the Sox make the playoffs. And I’m not just trying to reverse jinx it–I’d be as happy as the next Yankee fan if the Sox find a way to blow it–I just don’t see it happening. I’ve got a bet with a friend who is a Sox fan–he buys me dinner if the Sox make it to the playoffs, I buy him dinner if they blow it. That’s a win, win for me.

It was supposed to rain all day but the sun is peaking out now. Double-header at the Stadium.

Here’s the Game 1 fun:

Brett Gardner CF
Derek Jeter SS
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Jorge Posada DH
Andruw Jones LF
Russell Martin C
Chris Dickerson RF
Brandon Laird 1B
Ramiro Pena 2B

Against…

Ellsbury CF
Crawford LF
Pedroia 2B
Ortiz DH
Gonzalez 1B
Aviles 3B
Scutaro SS
Reddick RF
Saltalamacchia C

Never mind coasting:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Food Addict]

Yanks, Sox: Fox.

Make it count, boys.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!