This past Thursday the wife and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married, just the two of us, in the Bahamas. After the ceremony and the pictures, we returned to our hotel room. It was a Thursday afternoon. The wife went into the bathroom to wash up and I clicked the TV on and saw on the ESPN ticker that the Yankees were losing to the Indians. I turned the TV off and after the wife and I consummated the marriage we later turned the TV back on and saw that the Yanks had won, and that Alex Rodriguez hit a game-ending grand slam.

This afternoon the wife and I went downtown to enjoy massages. I e-mailed a Red Sox pal of mine and predicted one thing–that Freddy Garcia would get his tits lit, which was precisely what happened. I saw that the Sox scored twice in the first on my phone just as we arrived at the spa. Bad enough there was troubling news about Michael Pineda before the game. Dammit. I turned the phone off and didn’t turn it back on until we left a good while later. Score was 9-5. Swisher had just hit a grand slam after the Yanks trailed 9-0. Predictable, I thought. Well, at least they are making it respectable.

Little did I know that the White Sox pitcher Phillip–Don’t Call Me Humbert–Humber was on his way to completing a perfect game against the Mariners in Seattle. The Yanks were down 9-1 in the 7th, with one out and Russell Martin on first when Fox cut away to the White Sox game. By the time Humber had his perfecto and was interviewed for TV and Fox returned to Boston, Swisher’s grand slam got the Yanks back in the game. Runners were on the corners and Mark Teixeira was at the plate. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were excited. Tex already had a solo homer and now, batting left-handed, he popped a three-run dinger over the Green Monster. Most of the damage was not televised.

The score stood at 9-8 when the wife and I got to the restaurant for dinner. The game was on the TV at the bar and so I stayed at the bar, with the wife’s blessing–she sat in our booth following on the phone–as we waited for our food. That’s where I saw the Yanks take the lead. And then some. The Bombers scored 7 in the 7th and 7 more in the 8th on their way to a ball-busting win that will not soon be forgotten. Games like this, even in April, are memorable. It was a rousing win for the Yanks and a punch-in-the-face loss for the Sox, “rock bottom,” according to Bobby Valentine.

Final Score: Yanks 15, Sox 9.

I couldn’t think of a sweeter anniversary gift from the so-called Baseball Gods.

Thank you. And the wife thanks you, too.

 [Photo Credit: Corey Sipkin/N.Y. Daily News]