"What's not been a factor has been the Red Sox offense so far."

When they said that, in the bottom of the 8th, I was really hoping it would come back to bite them. But unfortunately, the comment remained terribly true.

But there was a bit more vintage Boston. You know, the tantalizing loss. Mike being the tying run at the plate and dashing all of our hopes just as they were starting to gain strength. It's coming back.

Now I want some 1999 vintage Boston, as in Boston losing Games 1 and 2 to Cleveland and then coming back to win 3 and advance. Or even 2003 Boston.

Plus, it's all in the patterns, and this one's worked out great:
2004: we beat the Angels in 3.
2007: we beat the Angels in 4.

So obviously it's gotta take all 5 games in 2009!

Postscript: Yet another complaint about Angels fans - today I saw one wearing what had to be an Angels golfing hat. With a diamond pattern.
And we complain about pink-hat fans? Evidently, it can be much worse.

A Whole Lotta Ugly

What an ugly game.

I think the best word to describe Game 1 of the Sox-Angels ALDS is FAIL.

Above all, this game was a prime example of the Umpire Fail. The umpiring was a joke, reminiscent of the 1999 ALCS. What baseball fan, who saw those plays, could actually believe that C.B. Bucknor missed the call?

Not the people who know that he's a horrible umpire. Major League players voted him the worst umpire in 2003. He was awarded the title again in 2006. Wikipedia isn't letting "new or unregistered users" work on his wikipedia page... because of vandalism.

After today's game, I can't blame anyone who would try it. (Whether editing wikipedia is a form of vandalism is another issue for a different blog...)

Then there's the Broadcasting Fail. Considering that this was TBS, it could have been much, much worse. But, after acknowledging that two LA baserunners were out by a long shot, though Bucknor called them safe, they had the nerve to say that "Red Sox defense has been good, but they have three errors."

Without any mention to questionable calls. Come on! Why point that out, if you know that two of those errors should go to Bucknor for Ugly Umpiring?

And, last but not least - rather, worst of all - the Red Sox Fail.

Because we can complain about the horrible calls all we want, but none of them prevented our scoring runs. That was all Boston.

Pitching was fine - Jon Lester allowed a few too many walks for comfort, and obviously Torii Hunter's home run was the key to the game, but he did very well. (Especially considering the two 4-out innings he had to play...) 3 runs should not be enough to beat the Red Sox.

But it was. With only four hits, and these scattered across the innings, the offense was practically nonexistent. No one even made it passed second!

Papi struck out three times! He, along with Jacoby and Youk, went 0 for 4!

This is not the Red Sox I know and love.

Luckily, Beckett is pitching tomorrow. Here's hoping he can get something going, and inspire some offense from his teammates.

The Angels deserve to lose if only for introducing that horrid eye- and earsore, the thunderstick. Call me a baseball snob if you want to, but those things are ugly. They deserve to be banished to the NBA. (I'm ashamed to read that they first broke onto the U.S. scene in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, but that was at a soccer game so I don't really care.) Dear Korea, next time you want to export some fan fun, please send us the singing!

Go Sox!

Hometown Hero

Today, during the first game of the Red Sox's double header against the Rays, the broadcasters were talking about the emails they had received at Soxbooth. People from South Dakota and Wyoming invited them out to visit. They had heard from The Dakotas, Utah, Tacoma... even Portland, Oregon! "Of course," they added, "the fans in Portland are mighty proud of Jacoby Ellsbury."

True story! We ARE proud of our Jacoby! Of course, he isn't really a Portlander, seeing as he grew up in the town of Madras. But Oregon is small enough - and has produced so few Major Leaguers - that any connection with the state will do.

And Jacoby is Oregonian in a big way: Oregon-born, Oregon-raised - even Oregon-educated, as he stayed in-state for college (OSU). He's probably even more Oregonian than I am.

Oh, yes, we love him. Some members of my family - namely, the other "contributors" to this blog - went to Jacoby's welcome home parade in Madras in 2007.

Francesca took this picture. She was actually that close to Jacoby.

Apparently it really was a hometown affair; F and G say they felt a little out of place, like intruders. But what an experience.

Anyway, I thought it was time for a tribute to the guy who means so much to Massachusetts and Oregon - and all of Red Sox Nation. After all, he just had a birthday on Friday - he's 26 now.

So, Jacoby, this one's for you. Hope you have many, many more years of excellent baseball in your future.

And I hope they're in Boston.

Baseball on the Radio

Tonight, I'm listening to the Sox game. (As opposed to watching it.)

I used to listen to games all the time. That was mainly out of necessity: In Portland, before mlb.tv, there was only Gameday Audio and the occasional national broadcast. Other than that, if you were out of area, the Red Sox were not available on television. You could only listen to it over the radio.

In 2000, I spent summer afternoons, from 4 until dinnertime, upstairs in the stuffy study with a scorecard or my journal, listening to the Red Sox. Okay, not every afternoon, but a huge amount of them. It's a very pleasant memory. Sleepy warmth and good baseball - I especially remember a come-from-behind win on a double off the Monster by Nomar against the Texas Rangers. It was a sweet summer, except for all of the drama with Carl Everett and Pedro getting punched by Gerald Williams of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and barely missing a no-hitter against them.

Lately, though, I've been watching a lot more games. It gets cheaper every year on mlb.com, and it's nice to know what players look like, to see how they run, how they catch, what their wind-up or batting stance looks like. I heard about Jacoby Ellsbury scoring from 2nd on a wild pitch, but didn't see it - didn't see him play - until months after it had happened. Since then, I've preferred watching to listening.

But there are other benefits to listening to the games. For one thing, I like the announcers better. For another thing, you learn more. The announcers talk more - there's more color commentary and therefore more background information. And I like the commercials, because they're local - to Boston. It makes me feel closer.

Coincidentally, I was surfing the web today, looking for updates about the Portland Beavers, and found this Dwight Jaynes post about building a casino by the Rose Quarter. At first I shuddered. Can you think how horrific that would be? Whenever there's a concert at the RQ the traffic is insane. Imagine having concerts at the RQ AND a casino? And those horrible lights? And the very idea... I kind of agreed with Gov. Kulongoski when he refused to let a casino in Portland to fund MLB, even though I really wanted an MLB team. He was right: baseball and gambling don't mix, as Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose know too well. It was... in bad taste.

But then, while thinking about baseball on the radio, I remembered my favorite commercial: The Foxwood's Casino jingle. "Take a chance, make it happen/roll the dice, fingers snapping/Spin the wheel, round and round we go-o/life is short, life is sweet/grab yourself a front-row seat/and let's meet, and have a ba-all/at the wonder of it all" and then the background people chant, "Meet me at FOXwoods."

Scary, the things we remember, but I loved that jingle, and I was sad when they changed it. I would pick that to sing in a karaoke bar for sure.

And then I realized: there's one casino-baseball connection that isn't so horrible.

Kind of tacky, and really not something you want to associate with baseball.

But I think I'd rather have a casino and baseball than no baseball at all.

On the Bright (Orange) Side...

When your team loses, it never looks good - no matter which way you look at it.

But it doesn't have to look bad.

Here's what I have to say about the Dutch national team in the 2009 World Baseball Classic: They played really well.

You've heard it all by now - they were the "Darlings" of the Classic, the underdogs, the team everyone expected to lose every game they played - even after they had proven themselves with two wins against the superpower Dominican Republic and a close loss to Puerto Rico.

Even in Sunday's game, I couldn't believe how quick the announcers were to dismiss the Netherlands. For example, "Japan is scouting whoever they might play next, and in this case it would be the US". In only the 5th inning. And this, just after they had credited the Dutch team with never giving up.

The Brian Roberts story didn’t help – it’s a very dubious situation. The rules surrounding last-minute roster changes such as these are apparently very vague. What it all boils down to is when the second-round pool actually started: when the Netherlands played Venezuela on Saturday, or when the US played Puerto Rico seven hours later. Either way, I think that it is inexcusable that Netherlands manager Rod Delmonico was not informed of the change until the last minute.

I won’t try to displace the blame - the Netherlands lost, fair and square. The pitching, which had been their strength all along, really fell apart. These guys like Rick van den Hurk, Juan Carlos Sulbaran, and to a lesser extent Dennis Bergman and Leon Boyd, who had given stellar clutch performances throughout the first round, were totally inconsistent. Van den Hurk and Sulbaran had a combined 6 runs (4 of them earned).

But the Dutch offense really pulled it together. The Netherlands matched the US in hits with 12 – a huge feat for a team who had been pretty weak offensively, and beat the Dominican Republic in their first game on only three hits (with the help of a few errors).

And besides the fact that they played so well in Round 1 and shocked the baseball world by advancing to Round 2, there’s a second element of pride to their success: They never gave up. Even against the US, when they were down 8-0, they played the full nine innings and went out there swinging, right down to the last out. No matter how well or badly the US does from here on out, I will take considerable comfort in the fact that Team Nederland gave the powerful Puerto Ricans a run for their money, twice, and was never mercy-ruled into a shortened loss.

That’s more than Team USA can say.

Broadcasting Bloopers, part 2

Unbelievable. Since the last game, they've managed to mess up even the pronunciation of Schoop's name, making him sound like an ice cream serving. So much for the broadcasting I was so impressed by in the first Pool.

Broadcasting Bloopers

The broadcast of a baseball game can, at times, be very annoying. I've written about this before. Sometimes the announcers share fascinating bits of information and talk about very interesting aspects of the game. Other times, they say ridiculous, boring, or totally outlandish things that drive the viewers (or maybe it's just me?) crazy.

So far, in the World Baseball Classic, I've been rather impressed with the announcers of the Dutch games. I mean, there have been some exaggerations - for example, an announcer saying that Eugene Kingsale or Sidney de Jong is a household name in the Netherlands. Most of the Dutch people I've met don't even know that the Dutch play professional baseball, let alone thenames of these players.

Really, though, I've learned a lot about the Dutch professional baseball league - the Hoofdklasse - from the commentary, the training camps in the Netherlands and the MLB organizations that have interests in the Netherlands Antilles, and about the multi-national backgrounds of various players and coaches on the national team (including as it does players from the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and people like Leon Boyd, who has dual Canadian-Dutch citizenship). I've even been impressed with the pronunciation of Dutch names.

Until Saturday's game against Venezuela. The announcers changed, and so did the quality - it sank, just a little. Previously, they had pronounced "Jansen" - and indeed, most Dutch names - the Dutch way. (In this case, "Yahnsun"). But on Saturday they went with what sounded like "Jantzen". The only exception was Sharlon Schoop, whose name has been pronounced more or less accurately, as "scope" - about as good as one can expect from an American broadcast, as the [ch] sound (the phoneme /x/, a voiceless velar fricative, for any fellow linguists out there) doesn't really exist in the English language.

But the highlight of this reel of broadcasting bloopers?

That came when one of the announcers referred to the Netherlands as a central European country.

The Netherlands has a sea coast. The Netherlands is in Western Europe, in both the geographical and socio-economical senses of the term. Do a quick google search for "central Europe", and you'll find a few images of maps, none of which include the Netherlands. Even the wikipedia article on the subject doesn't mention the Netherlands, except in one rather unrelated parenthetical note about a hundred-year-old military conquest.

Get with the program, guys. There are tons of people compiling background information for you. Maybe, since it's the World Baseball Classic, you should ask for a world map, too.

"Upset" is an Understatement

Yes, this is what I call passion, too, Mr. Ponson.

I am so happy that baseball is back. It's like a time machine. Seeing Pedro on the mound sends me back to 1999 when I first got into the Red Sox and baseball. Seeing the Netherlands come up and beat the mighty Dominicans is the perfect way to think of the future of baseball. During tonight's DR game, the announcers said the Canada-US game was like an MLB game. Which is exactly what I don't want, at least not in the Classic. This is when we get to see the different styles, all of the different approaches to the game.

And I'm getting that out of Pool D.

Totally Banal Sportscasting

I was pretty thrilled about the Sox turning it around and coming back to win Game 5 of the ALCS for a lot of obvious reasons. But I was also pretty happy because it meant the announcers would have to change their repeating loop of commentary on how Papi is 0-for-682 or how the Red Sox have never lost three consecutive games in the playoffs at Fenway Park or how B.J. Upton is so friggin’ great.

Unfortunately, they've just switched tracks and are now playing a different repetitive loop: How Boston came from behind the Yankees 3-0, and last year they came back against the Indians 3-1, and how much Papi has done, and how great Drew was in June… these are repetitions that I very much prefer to the earlier variety, but you’d think they could come up with something a little more insightful.

I used to listen to the postseason games on the radio. I don’t like not being able to see the action – I didn’t see Jacoby Ellsbury run until last winter when I got to see clips of his playoff speed on playoff DVDs and the like. I don’t want to miss any more of that. I like seeing the managers send out signs and watching the movement of the pitches and reading the lips of the players in the clubhouse. But I miss the bias of the broadcasters and the more obscure stats that they share with the fans.

And I was pretty thrown off by one of their closing lines, "Do you believe in miracles... because the Red Sox believe tonight".

Because the Red Sox always believe.