Mikey Lowell named series MVP!

Sox rookies make Rockies look like rookies, outscorin'em 29-10 in four game series sweep!

The Boston Red Sox won the 103rd Major League Baseball World Series last night in Denver, Colorado, sweeping the Rockies 4-games-to-nothing ... For stats, score, etc. check out boston.com ... I had a whole speech layed out in my mind on the train to work today, but now I'm sort of drawing an emotional blank.  From game one this season, it was a complete effort from the whole staff:

like when Julian Tavarez saved our pitching rotation (& won some key games for us earlier in the season),

or when Jacoby and Dustin stepped up & became an unstoppable tandem over the last four games of the World Series, knocking in a ton a runs,

or Bobby Kielty's (essentially) game-winning pinch-hit home run last night,

or Julio Lugo's excellent defense,

or Jon Lester coming back from Lymphoma to pitch lights out last night 

& the obvious players who are not to go unmentioned - Papi, Manny, Beckett, Mikey Lowell, Papelbon, Coco, Dice-K, Okijima, Veritek, Youkilis (I might as well put up a list oft he 25-man roster) ... & of course, Terry Francona and the most-underrated coaching staff in the Majors.  This team lived up to all the hype and expectation this year - hype and expectation that came from the most unlikely place, from the Nation itself.

Missy and I stuck with this team all season - from our dominating start (you know, the back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs at home against the Yankees), to a decent summer, to when it looked like we were going to cough it up at the end of September, to being a game away from elimination in the ALCS (Cleveland who?), to out utter domination of the Rockies on both ends of the game - she maintained she was good luck & how can I not believe her?  This was a great season & a great end to the season.  Let's enjoy this for a little while ...

(I also reserve the right to write a more measured entry but for now, this will do.  GO SOX!) 
   (Globe Staff Photo / Stan Grossfeld)
(Reuters Photo)

(Getty Images Photo / Jamie Squire)

(Getty Images Photo / Jed Jacobsohn)

(AP Photo)

Our heroes dominated the series opener at Fenway last night, putting up record numbers in a myriad of catergories (both offensive and defensive) and devastating the Colorado Rockies, 13 - 1.  Josh Beckett was lights out, striking out his first 4 batters, finishing with 9 strikeouts and, most importantly, the "W".  Dustin Pedroia led-off the bottom of the first (his first World Series at-bat) with a home run over the Green Monster and from there, I could feel the momentum continue from our 3-game assault of the Indians. (I know, Cleveland who?) Everyone contributed a played well, and for that I'm very very proud!
 

(Globe Staff Photo / Barry Chin)

So, let's just run-down the records tied or broken last night by our Red Sox:

• Largest margin of victory for a World Series opener - 12
• Most runs by one team in a World Series opener - 13
• First teams to score 10+ runs in three straight postseason games ...
• 9 extra-base hits, tying a World Series record set by the 1927 Pittsburgh Pirates, including:
• 8 doubles ...
• & my favorite: 3 consecutive Red Sox walked home in the fifth inning ...

The Sox have scored 43 runs in their last four games, kepping their opponents to 6 runs total.  This is excellent baseball - Let's keep this up & win this thing!

Here are a few choice Sox quotes I lifted from Tim Brown's sports column on "Yahoo! Sports" , complete with Brown's sometimes (most times?) snarky commentary:

" ... So David Ortiz commandeered a newsman's microphone, pushed it close to Ramirez's face and shouted, 'Hey, Manny, one more question. Everybody wants to know, when's the funeral?'  Ramirez grinned and flipped at his neckwear, the shade of a grape Popsicle.  'I want to take this tie to Colorado,' he said ... Afterward, Ramirez went to repetitive lengths to clarify his 'Who cares?' remark from the previous day.  'We leave everything out there, and whatever happens, happens,' he said. Later, he added, 'No pressure. As long as you leave everything on the field, that's it.'  Nearby, Ortiz saw Ramirez getting dangerously close to another seismic misstatement, grabbed his talented and flighty teammate by the arm and gave it a heavy tug.  'OK, that's it,' Ortiz roared. 'Come here. I don't want you to fuck up. Come here. We don't need any more of that bullshit.' ... [Josh Beckett] threw a fastball straight over Franklin Gutierrez 's head in the second inning, then nearly started a fistfight with Kenny Lofton in the fifth inning.  He stood through his ex-girlfriend, country artist Danielle Peck, singing the national anthem before the first inning, then stood while she belted out "God Bless America" in the seventh.  On that, Beckett was especially colorful.  'I don't get paid to make those (expletive) decisions,' he said, typically unyielding. 'She's a friend of mine. That doesn't bother me at all. Thanks for flying one of my friends to the game so she could watch it for free.'  The result of those 3 ½ hours: A win the Red Sox had to have, a ridiculous 1.17 ERA in the playoffs, a more pleasant flight to Boston, and a Curt Schilling - Fausto Carmona rematch Saturday at Fenway.  'We're excited to get back to Boston," Beckett said. 'It's going to be a great flight. Better than if we would have went down losing. This is not where we want to be. But, obviously, we're inching closer to where we want to be. Kind of the motto in the clubhouse right now is, 'It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees.'"  Nobody's dead yet, even if Manny's dressed for it."

I don't really know what Brown meant by that last statement about dressing for a funeral.  His whole column is laced with Anti-sox bigotry, which I've noticed all over the place.  My feeling is, we're not the underdog anymore and, maybe, non-members of RSN aren't as quick to support us ... Oh, hell, I don't know & I don't care.  I love my team, the Sox are my team & to hell with people who can't respect that ... and since we're still behind 3-games-to-2, I think it's important to load some inspirational montages from sports movies ... now:
 

Président Nicolas Sarkozy et son épouse élégante mais énigmatique, Cécilia, ont divorcé après des mois des questions au sujet de leur rapport, un premier pour la France qui a heurté un coup profond et personnel à sa jeune présidence ... Er, I mean ... "President Nicolas Sarkozy and wife, Cecilia, have divorced after months of questions about their relationship ..."  Angela Charlton of the Associate Press characterizes this as "a deep, personal blow to his young presidency".  Compounding this personal issue, is the very public, nation-wide transportation strike that has "bus, train and subway service ... ground to a halt across France". 

(photo: EFE)

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Le Président Français, though, honestly, I'm interested to see what his economic and social reforms end up looking like.  I think mostly I just liked his opposition in the general election, Ségolène Royal , better.  My politics are probably evenly between them; it must be my psuedo-puritanical American impulse to be slightly repulsed by a male leader who have such (open & public) indiscretions .  (Note: that I do NOT make an exception for Bill Clinton, though I do not condone the neoconservative attacks on his Presidency  ...)

On an unrelated note, there seems to be some scandal about statement Manny Ramiréz made yesterday in Cleveland.  Here's an excerpt from Susan Slusser's San Francisco Chronicle article about it:

"With his team on the brink of elimination, Boston outfielder Manny Ramirez was the focus Wednesday at Jacobs Field, both for his unusual comments during his first interview session of the ALCS and for his overly exuberant celebration after a solo homer the previous night.

Ramirez, in quintessential Manny-being-Manny mode, downplayed the Red Sox's plight, down three games to one with Game 5 tonight in Cleveland.  "Why panic?" Ramirez said. "If we don't do it, we'll come back next year and try again."  Ramirez reiterated the sentiment later, saying, "If it doesn't happen, who cares? There's always next year. It's not the end of the world."

In Game 4, Ramirez smacked the third of Boston's back-to-back-to-back shots, and after connecting, he raised his arms in triumph and stood at the plate so long that Cleveland catcher Kelly Shoppach had to tell him to get moving ... The sixth-inning blast was Ramirez's record 24th in postseason play, but he wasn't placing a lot of importance on that.

"If I knew I'd be in the World Series and didn't have the record, I'd take it," Ramirez said. "Who cares about the records? We just want to go out and win."

Remember '04: The rallying cry in the Boston clubhouse is obvious. Everyone knows that the Red Sox were down 0-3 to the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS, took the next four games, then went on to win the World Series for the first time since 1918.

"It just took one spark, and that's what we're looking for now," said backup catcher Doug Mirabelli, who was part of that 2004 team. "Experience always helps," catcher Jason Varitek said. "Having done something before, we believe in ourselves, we know what we're doing. ... The reality is that we're not done playing. It's not over."

Ramirez bucked the trend, saying, "We're not thinking about '04. Anything is possible. We're just thinking about Thursday. Let's see what the future is going to bring."

I fail to see what is new or offensive about any of this.  Manny is, to quote a co-worker of mine, "in his own world" - we've all heard it, "Manny being Manny".  Seneca, the Roman philosopher, talked about anger (and by extension, the act of being offended) as springing from our sense of surprise.  He argued that we compound our anger by acting surprised by transgressions.  If you're surprised by this, my feeling is you are simply not being honest with yourself, or your standards maybe either too high or slightly incongruous.  Personally, I find the diversity of opinion/coping mechanisms coming from the Sox clubhouse perfectly fine.  I also know that most commentators never had us getting this far & a lot of this is frosting to me.  Remember, we've gone farther than all but two teams this year.  If we happen to pull off a major upset, win three straight against Cleveland & get to the World Series, then defy the odds and beat what seems to be an unbeatable Colorado Rockies team, awesome - Missy and I will dance in the streets of Stamford, Connecticut.  But if we fall short, as the French say, c'est la vie.

So last night our heroes feel behind in their series against the Cleveland Indians (whom I find very hard to hate) 2 games to 1.  I did not have the opportunity to comment on the 5-hour-plus game 2 on Saturday night, and, well, I don't really feel like it now.  Last night wasn't a blow out, so I don't feel too bad about our chances really, it just would have been nice to make a statement in our first game at "the Jake" ... Anyhow, game 4 is tonight, we have Wakefield going and hopefully the weather will favor the knuckleball - and we need to get runs early, score first & make the Tribe play catch-up against us.  Also, it'd be nice if Wakefield could go 8 innings so we don't have to eat into our bullpen. 

I plan to grill chicken tonight on our George Foreman grill while Missy convinces the Coco Crisp and Julio Lugo to get on base more, telepathically (which, of course, neither of us accept as metaphysically true).

Also, a joint Argentinean-Brazilian team of scientists have announced the discovery of a new titanosaur (sauropod) from Patagonia - an 105-foot-long plant-eater dubbed Futalognkosaurus dukei, that lived in the late Cretaceous Period (around 87 million years ago).  Its genus name means "giant chief lizard".


(Artist's rendering courtesy of Wikipedia/User "ArthurWeasley")

... Oh and the Colorado Rockies won the NLCS last night, & will go to the World Series for the first time in Franchise history.  They've also won an unprecedented 21 of their last 22 games, so it's surprising that I don't really care all that much, you know?  ...

Borlaug grew up on a small farm in Iowa and graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he studied forestry and plant pathology, in the 1930s. In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico. At the time Mexico was importing a good share of its grain. Borlaug and his staff in Mexico spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution, the transformation that forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians.

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."

In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug's success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia.

Contrary to Ehrlich's bold pronouncements, hundreds of millions didn't die in massive famines. India fed far more than 200 million more people, and it was close enough to self-sufficiency in food production by 1971 that Ehrlich discreetly omitted his prediction about that from later editions of The Population Bomb. The last four decades have seen a "progress explosion" that has handily outmatched any "population explosion."

Borlaug, who unfortunately is far less well-known than doom-sayer Ehrlich, is responsible for much of the progress humanity has made against hunger. Despite occasional local famines caused by armed conflicts or political mischief, food is more abundant and cheaper today than ever before in history, due in large part to the work of Borlaug and his colleagues.

More than 30 years ago, Borlaug wrote, "One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy." As REASON's interview with him shows, he still believes that environmental activists and their allies in international agencies are a threat to progress on global food security. Barring such interference, he is confident that agricultural research, including biotechnology, will be able to boost crop production to meet the demand for food in a world of 8 billion or so, the projected population in 2025."

I'll only add that (& this is especially for any dogmatic libertarians in the audience) that Borlaug was only able to attend the University of Minnesota in 1933 through a New Deal, Depression-era program called the National Youth Administration, which later operated under the Works Progress Administration from 1935 until 1943.

It is said that Borlaug's breakthroughs in agricultural engineering may have saved the lives of a billion people ... that's 1,000,000,000, by the way. 

in LA ...er, Anaheim?  Los Angeles County?  So we're back in the League Championship series for the first time since 2004 ... would it be unlucky for me to start counting 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, 2004 ... 2007?


(AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)


(AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

And ...

3-games-to-nothing in their series, which would be prefectly sweet except that we have to play them now and boy, they looked like a well-oiled baseball machine versus New York.  Not to mention that we had the exact same record this season ... but we won the season series and have home field advantage, which only contributes to the aforementioned confidence.  In a related note, I wonder if Steinbrenner is going to live up to his promise of firing Joe Torre?  My co-worker, a cordial Yankees fan, said in a moment of measured honesty that she thinks he should go.  The Yankees have been tilting on the cusp of futility since we came back from that 3-0 hole in the 2004 ALCS - it's like they never really recovered ... or maybe they're just not as good as they were in 1927 ...


(AP Photo/Kathy Willens)


(AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)

As for the Senior Circuit, their Division Series played like some sort of metaphor for the emergence of Sun-Belt libertarianism & the modern "exurban" community and the decline of Eastern economic and cultural hegemony ... in otherwords, the Cubs and the Phillies got swept.

(AFP/Jim Rogash)

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In other news (& pardon me for being a little late coming with this), Richard Dawkins is spear-heading the "Out Campaign" - a campiagn centered on bringing Atheists (in America and elsewhere) "out of the closet" and developing the bonds of fellowship between atheists/agnostics, free-thinkers and seperation of church & state activists.  There is also an out reach aspect to the movement, especially vis-a-vis people who live in religiously oppressive parts of the country.  The Campaign seeks to communicate to these closeted atheists/skeptics that, in Dawkins words, "Atheists are far more numerous than most people realize ..." 

I both love this idea and long for a world where a campaign like this is unnecessary.  Yes, I'm an atheist (I'm also an aThorist, an aZeusist, an aVishnuist ...) but I'm also a humanist, an American, a boyfriend, a son, a brother & a friend, which are infitintely more impactful then the lack of a belief in a deity (or the supernatural in general ...).  Regardless of my wishes, I fully support the "Out Campaign" & would like to say that, if anybody needs someone to talk to about their atheism (and their fears/apprehension about "coming out"), I'm here.  They also have these hot T-Shirts:

So the Major League Baseball Playoffs start today with the Phillies and the Rockies at 3pm - which I plan on listening to ...

... but you know that is just a warm-up to tonight's match-up between our heroes, the Boston Red Sox, & the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (someone should tell these guys that 'brevity ... is wit') at 6:30.  I feel alright about this match-up; we won 6 out of ten meetings this season, including the one Missy and I went to in April, & we have Beckett pitching on good rest.


(photo credit Boston.com / Thushan Amarasiriwardena)

Here is Yahoo's "Series at a Glance" (which I lifted completely from their website):

By the way, I've joined the American Humanist Association and donated $35 to them, which I'm very proud of.

Check them ... er, us out here: www.americanhumanist.org :

"... the AHA actively educates the public about Humanism, brings Humanists together for mutual support and action, defends the civil liberties and constitutional freedoms of Humanists - indeed of all peoples - and leads both local and national Humanist organizations toward progressive societal change. Through a strong network of over 100 grassroots organizations, appearances in national media, an advanced Internet presence, regular public appearances, and a broad spectrum of publications, the AHA is the VOICE OF HUMANISM.

Over the years, many women and men who embrace Humanism and who have worked closely with the AHA have contributed greatly toward the betterment of our world. Among them are:

Novelists Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker; Environmentalist Lester R. Brown; Women’s rights proponents Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem; Elder citizens advocate Maggie Kuhn; Economist John Kenneth Galbraith; Evolutionary scientist Edward O. Wilson; Abortion rights champions Faye Wattleton and Bill Baird ... & Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Earlier Humanists included Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Andrei Sakharov, ... Margaret Sanger, Gene Roddenberry, Julian Huxley, Brock Chisholm, John Dewey, Bertrand and Dora Russell, and Albert Einstein.

The American Humanist Association has honored these individuals as well as many others to recognize their contributions on behalf of humanity."

When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your bonnet in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way [Friday and Sunday's Sox-Yankees baseball games did].

I know I'm on a Douglas Adam's kick but leave me alone - he & W.P. Kinsella are the two authors of fiction who really speak to me ... Well, maybe Salman Rushdie too ... but thats not really the point.  The point is, we cannot put away the Yankees and while I'm probably going to regret this, I'd like to see the Yankees in the playoffs, against us in the ALCS, so we can show the world (again), "Ha, see, we didn't just let Baltimore do our dirty work for us!  We can beat the Yankees the way we did in April and May!  Now, leave my girlfriend alone!"  Anyway, the magic number is 9 (still) & our division lead is 4 1/2.  Oh and one bright spot:


(Reuters Photo)

And, hey, it could be worse - we could be the Mets right now.

(Text Credit here)

In tribute to Big Papi's Walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth last night (& yes, Missy and I stayed up and yes, we danced around like crazy fools while Missy was on the phone with Bonnie who said, before it happened that Papi was gonna hit a homer ...), Boston Dirt Dogs via the Boston Globe has a lovely photo retrospective