Trade-off

I'm not going to complain about a day off work yesterday (spent at the beach), but getting back late did mean that I unfortunately missed watch last night's performance of "Take Your Broken-Bat Bloop Single Walk-Off Win And Shove It Where The Sun Don't Shine" by Commander Kickass of the F@#k Yeah Brigade (© Surviving Grady): 7 innings, 1 earned run, 8 strikeouts (including career #1000) and a win.

The Sox are now 23-14, good for first place in the division and the best record in the American League. If that doesn't take the edge off having to go into work today when the world and his wife seem to have taken a long weekend, then I don't know what will.

Go figure

So, let me get this straight: Daisuke - throwing regular, (theoretically) controllable pitches - walks eight batters in 5 innings; Tim Wakefield - throwing the notoriously enigmatic knuckleball - walks not a single guy over 8 innings in last night's win?

The more I watch the game of baseball, the less I understand it.

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Fact of the day from the Globe:

Research by the Elias Sports Bureau indicates that last night marked the first time since 1900 a team pitched a shutout using multiple pitchers all over the age of 40.

Totally useless, but pretty cool, if you're a baseball geek like me.

Reverse mojo

It was late, so I may be mistaken in this, but if I remember rightly the ESPN crew last night came up with these two classic bits of sports broadcasting:

Situation: 2nd inning, Mike Lowell at the plate.
Quote: "Lowell, just back from injury, had 120 RBIs last season. So far this year, he has none."
Result: Two-run home run.

Situation: 4th inning, Kevin Youkilis at the plate.
Quote: "Youkilis is 0-for-6 lifetime against Bonderman."
Result: Two-run home run.

An impressive 2-for-2 on the night. I think NESN should hire these guys as a backup broadcast team. When the going gets tough, they could bring them in for a batter - pinch-hitting, SWAT-style, for Don and Jerry - to get those crucial runs on the board.

Change of speed

I don't know where the days and weeks go, but they seem to be going there at a hell of a lick right now. I looked at the calendar this weekend and suddenly realised we are already into the month of May.

That realisation had me thinking back to this time last year, when I was preparing to go back to Boston on my second Fenway pilgrimage. That in turn brought on an acute bout of baseball depression, since I won't be going anywhere near the Commonwealth of Massachusetts anytime soon, so I thought I'd try to cheer myself up by reading over some of the posts and reliving some of the magical moments from that homestand.

As I started to look over the posts from last May's trip, it struck me that my whole baseball rhythm has altered dramatically over the course of the past twelve months. I already knew it had done, because the new job has been such a drain on the time and energy I have available to devote to the game, but it was only when looking over those posts that I realised to what extent. By May 5th of last year, I had already watched 26 Red Sox games. (Not just highlights, but 26 complete games. If you need a yardstick, the Sox had played 29 games at that point. 'Obsession' doesn't even come close...). This year, what with work, vacation and my broadband connection having bad hair days (always on Sunday evenings, when I have the time to watch the game) if I've seen 10 games, that would be about it.

I'm not trying to win any prizes, so the number itself is not a problem, but I will say this: I miss those damn games, even if for the most part they left me feeling tired the next morning. I have a good, comfortable life that I am happy with, but nothing in that life gives me the same sense of belonging that watching the Red Sox does. It doesn't matter that I'm half a world away from the action, or that the games begin in the middle of the night. If anything, those things just make the feeling of belonging all that more intense, since differences in geography and time zones are erased by the simple fact of rooting for the same team.

I still feel connected to the Sox, but if I could have a wish for the rest of the season, it would be to rediscover the time and energy that would allow me once more to become a full-time member of Red Sox Nation.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Just-in-time management

My internal alarm-clock didn't go off last night, so I didn't join the game until about 3:30 CET. It was already the bottom of the 7th inning, and the Sox were down 3-2. I almost didn't hang in there, but I was awake and unlikely to drop back off to sleep, so I figured what the hell...

One inning later, Papi tied the game and Manny worked yet more of his unbelievable early-season magic.

(photo: AP)

In any other situation, a quote like this:

"[Ortiz is] going to come through," said Ramirez. "If he doesn't hit, I'm going to come through for him,"

would just sound like a player trying his hardest to support a struggling teammate, but looking at what Manny has done this past week, you can't help wondering if he hasn't slipped through a crack into some strange, parallel superhero universe where he is actually trying to do this...and succeeding. A bad man indeed.

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Whilst Manny's game-winning blast is quite rightly going to get all the headlines, the former center-fielder in me would like to say that without Jacoby Ellsbury's running catch in the top of the 8th, the Sox wouldn't have been in a position to win the game at all. So consider it said.

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Stat of the game: thanks to baseball's sometimes bizarre accounting system, Ellsbury's catch allowed Javier Lopez to record the win with the sum total of one pitch. I don't care where you work - that's a pretty efficient day at the office.

Old friends

So far this season, I've seen bits of different games at different times of the day, but for the first time this season, there was my favourite middle-of-the-night gathering chez Iain, with the best guest-list that an MLB.TV subscription can buy: me, Don and Jerry and the Red Sox.

When you get up at 1am to watch the game - especially on a Friday night after a tough week at work - things can get a little shaky around the 3rd or 4th inning, as you fight to stay awake. Last night was no exception. The evening was slow in getting going, and with Daisuke looking like he needed a map to find the strike zone, it seemed like we were in for a looooong night. What I hadn't counted on was the proceedings being considerably enlivened by the arrival of an unexpected old friend from seasons past: Big Papi - he of the monstrous bat, the 5 RBIs and the grand slam home run.

It's amazing what four runs in the 3rd and five runs in the 4th (including four from the Sox' Young Guns: Lowrie, Ellsbury and Pedroia) will do for your stamina. I went from almost asleep to full fist-pumping mode in the space of about 20 minutes, and that rush of energy kept me going from Daisuke's exit in the sixth right through to Timlin's 1-2-3 ninth. (I'll repeat that again, just for Beth's benefit: Timlin's 1-2-3 ninth...).

The Sox are a long way from perfect, but taking into account the Japan trip, the absence of Lowell, and the pale imitation of Big Papi that we saw up until last night, records of 7-3 over their last ten games and 11-7 overall seem pretty good to me. Now would be a perfect time to build on that at Fenway and put together a nice little winning streak between now and the end of the month.

Over to you, gents...

Stop, start

One of the things that has always drawn me to baseball is that it's a game of discontinuous action. I grew up watching soccer and cricket, and although I spent more time watching the former than I did the latter, I think that cricket always appealed to me more because of those constant breaks in the action. Soccer has its breaks too, but they're much shorter, and the game itself flows - and time passes - much quicker. Cricket, on the other hand, is a game where there is a break between every delivery, giving the players, the spectators and the broadcast teams time to take a step back and place everything back in the bigger picture.

Baseball is exactly the same kind of game. Despite it being an incredibly physical game, those bursts of action are quite widely spaced, and the time between each pitch, each at-bat and each inning is time which all of us can use to look back at what has just happened and look forward to what is about to happen.

If you watch any baseball game closely enough, you end up noticing that there are actually countless moments when time seems to just stop. The same kind of thing happens in other 'bat & ball' sports – tennis and golf are the ones which spring to mind – where there's a split-second before the action where everything seems to be in suspended animation, and there's an overwhelming sense of a huge wave of energy about to be unleashed. The tennis player comes to a stop just before the ball is thrown up in the air for the service; the golfer stops for a second just before starting the backswing; the baseball diamond is frozen in time just before the pitcher goes into his wind-up. Once that moment is over, there's a flurry of action as the ball heads towards the opposing player, the green or the plate, but it is that moment which appeals so much to me as a fan. In the minutes and seconds leading up to it, we can see all the potential outcomes of the situation, and chances are that we're probably praying for one or more of them at any given time (strike, strikeout, ground ball, double play, sac fly, home run). As time stops for a moment, the play and the game are ours to imagine as we see fit, but once that split-second is over, the game is once more beyond our grasp and in the hands of the guys on the field.

Last night's game saw one of those moments taken to the nth degree: one-run Sox lead in the top of the 8th, two on and two out for the Yankees, A-Rod at the plate. Messrs Buck and McCarver – Fox's resident specialists in "stating the blindingly obvious" – pointed out that this was the ballgame right here. Tito clearly felt the same way, and he summoned Papelbon from the bullpen to put an end to the foolishness. However, thanks to the vagaries of Massachusetts weather, the key moment of the game was suspended for much longer than a mere split-second. The rain came down before Papelbon could throw a single pitch, and he had to wait 2 hours and 11 minutes before he could get back out there and face A-Rod. (Question, did the baseball gods do that on purpose, thinking, "Shit, we can't have a Sox-Yankees game that lasts under three hours – let's send 'em some rain"?) Those 131 minutes were enough to allow the following to happen: the tarp to be put on the field; the tarp to be pulled off the field and put back on again; Papelbon to warm up on three separate occasions; Fox to show the end of the D-Backs / Rockies game and yet more inane banter (this time courtesy of Zelasko, Karros and Kennedy); my cable channel to decide to switch to the Bruins game; and, finally, me to go to bed.

So, in the end, the 2 hours and 11 minutes on the East Coast translated into something like nine hours over here, as I was only able to catch up with the 8th and 9th innings of the game over breakfast today. Leaving the game hanging in the balance like that didn't stop me getting a good night's sleep, but there was definitely a sense of unfinished business and a rush to switch on the condensed game this morning. I deliberately picked it up again right where I'd left off, and was rewarded with a three-pitch strikeout of A-Rod and a 1-2-3 ninth.

I wouldn't want all those key moments to be as long in coming, but now and again they really are worth the wait. And in the end I woke up to a win, so my day was made before it even really got started; anything else from here on in will just be icing on the cake.