Big Papi did Steroids, But it’s Cool. Seriously.

Not exactly roid rage.

So out it came. Juicin. ’04, ’07, Manny, Papi. Without question, if they aren’t in Boston those years, we get no hardware.

It’s really important to begin with that statement so that people know I’m still sane… but honestly, Papi did steroids, and I’m cool with it. We all knew it already, kinda, when it took him a zillion plus games to hit his first dinger this year, and even if that wasn’t a direct result of him stopping when ever he did, it was enough to introduce the suspicion and condemn him subconsciously… the irony of course being that we were all right.

But I’m not givin’ back squat. I’m keeping my World Series trophies and I’m still rooting for Big Papi. Sure, if he was a Yankee, or Manny, or a pre-existing a-hole (or Rod), then ya, I’d freakin’ hate him… but he isn’t. He’s a guy that has been universally loved by every member of the Nation and he and his wife Tiffany have been model community citizens. Big Papi is good for Boston and for baseball. Barry Bonds was a pre-existing a-hole and A-Rod is so despicable that the best thing we could say about him was “at least he isn’t Bonds.” (Now we can just hate them both regardless… which is nice.)

It's Cool.

I’m cool with Papi because his equation still checks out. Whether or not you are one of the greats is a formula. Clemens was an a-hole (negative), but he was a dominating pitcher who mastered the mound (double positive). Clemens’ equation before steroids checked out because even though he was an a-hole, he was also The Rocket. Introduce steroids and he’s just some a-hole on drugs, his equation got thrown all out of wack.

Papi is a model citizen, involved with philanthropy and community, has a local business and a charming smile, helped bring 2 World Series trophies to Boston, blasted countless bombs on to Landsdowne Street and beyond, put smiles on the faces of MILLIONS of people and… ya, he juiced some. In an era when almost everyone was doin’ it (please not you, Griffey… please), pitchers and hitters alike, Papi Juiced. And when I look at everything he’s meant to the Sox, I’m square with it.

So go screw, Yankees fans; when you do it it’s cheating, when we do it, it’s just tryin’ harder. And ya, I actually feel that way.

StartMattCassel

The Red Sox Need A Moment Of Zen.

The Beard, LaFrenchy, Bay, The Captain: 0-15. Nothing Good To Say.

You’re a cocksucker.

Go Sox.

Done.

Who The Hell is Oakland and Why Do They Deserve A Baseball Team?

Eff Oakland. Eff Alameda County. Eff  The Colors Green and Gold. Eff the Letter A.

This is now last night's game made me feel.

What started out as a great night at the old ballyard in the Fens turned out to be a four hour suckfest which drained all hope from my body. I blame it on Nomar. For the last two months he was here he took just about everything cool and made it suck with his angry face (no seriously, the guy kind of always looks angry, even when he’s smiling. I think it has something to do with the fact that his nose makes him look like the witch in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, just not green), and now he is doing the same with special events that his awful team just happens to be in town for.

You Are Welcome, Jim.

Jim Rice Night was awesome. The number got unveiled on the right  field facade, Jims family and friends were on the field to salute him, along with many of the guys he played with. He was relaxed, eloquent and happy in his speech, more so than at Cooperstown on Sunday. The Sox banged out 5 runs in the third to give their young starter (some guy who’s going to end up as a Blue Jay) a lead that they should never have relinquished. Everybody was hitting, Ellsbury was stealing bases, it was a good night.

Yeah, that sucked, we know.

And then a shaky Papelbon (if you didn’t see this coming eventually, you are crazy, he’s been rocky for a few weeks now), two errors from Nick Green (a career backup who hasn’t played like it for the past two months) and a breakdown in the rest of the pen doomed me to an extra hour of sitting on the couch, sweating like Rich Garces at a rib eating contest, and cringing with every pitch. I just knew that this one wouldn’t be pretty from Paps, and he’s allowed a shitty night every now and then, but this wasn’t just another night, it was a chance to take a game back from the Pinstriped Assholes (who lost to the Rays).

I really don’t know who to blame for this one. The bullpen, the defense (O.K. only Nick Green, because Pedroia and Lowell both made sick plays in the 11th), Pedroia for not being able to get the two out hit in the 11th to score Kottaras from third, or the entire city of Oakland.

I choose Oakland. I can’t see a reason for their city to have a baseball team, football team or modern plumbing. Aren’t all of those things available just across the Bay in San Fransisco? Either way we’ve got two more nights of shitkicking to put on these guys heads before spending the weekend at Fenway South (possibly with some Canadian guy pitching for us, or not).

Go Sox.

Done.

Brett Favre to Stay Retired.

“Brett Favre always played with a little kid in him.” -Herm Edwards

Done.

Wait a minute…

Now it all makes sense.

StartMattCassel

Josh Beckett Defends His House and Adam LaRoche is Enjoying His Stay.

Nasty.

In his last five starts at home, Josh Beckett is 5-0 with an ERA of 1.19. Overall he is 7-0 on the mound at Fenway Park. Maybe that’s why his offense loves to come out and play for him, or maybe it’s the fact that no slump can last forever and this is a $100 million lineup.

Either way, the Sox came out ahead last night with an 8-3 win that was sorely needed. Beckett had ten Ks in seven innings, giving up three runs and also bringing his record after a Red Sox loss to 7-1, and the one loss was a 4-2 complete game in which he got absolutely no backup from his hitters. He is leading the AL with 12 wins and a 3.44 ERA. If that doesn’t smell like a Cy Young candidate you need to pull your face away from the mirror and put down the rolled up dollar bill.

In case you forgot, we're really good. Oh, and F#$% A-Rod.

As for the other side of the ball, if Adam LaRoche (not French) hasn’t proved to you yet that he is an Ideal lefty hitter for Fenway, mcuh like Wade Boggs, then you are watching the wrong game. Since being freed from the baseball abyss known as Pittsburgh, LaRoche is 5-12 with a home run and three RBI. Last night he used his inside out swing and left center power to pace the Sox with two doubles in his first two at bats, both hits glancing off the wall, much like the way that Boggs got himself to 300 hits (this is not to say that LaRoche is a Hall of Fame Caliber hitter, just that he is perfect for Fenway).

Those doubles, along with hits from the slumping J.D. Drew and Jason Bay, a first inning bomb from Pedroia and three hits from Ellsbury at the top of the lineup, are possibly signs of the bats breaking out of their slump. Everybody out there who is freaking out that we need to trade for Victor Martinez, Adrian Gonzalez (who makes me all hot and bothered because he would be awesome, but not for everyone in the farm system), or Hank Aaron, please just remember the track record that our guys have, and that there is still a lot of baseball to be played. A 2-1/2 game deficit in July is nothing to get worried about. So chill.

We’ll be fine. Unless something isn’t done about Smoltz.

Go Sox.

Done.

Jim Rice: This Time It Was the Destination.

Rickey and Jim had a blast yesterday.

I’ve always heard that it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey. I figured out a few years ago that this wasn’t in reference to my daily commute, but to those achievements and events that really make differences in people’s lives. The journey is what shapes how we look at whatever goal was ahead of us in the future, and how we look back at those in the past. Most of the time this is right.

But yesterday we all got to witness a time when it was the destination, and not the journey that made all the difference. Jim Rice is a Hall of Famer. It took fifteen years of balloting, the most that was possible, but it doesn’t matter whether he got in on the 15th try or the first (like Rickey Henderson, who went in with him), just that he is in.

Jim Rice is also the only man cool enough to wear sunglasses indoors, on TV.

For the last twenty years, Jim Rice has been a statue. He couldn’t do anything to improve the numbers which include three seasons of 35 HR, 100 RBI and 200 Hits (the only player in Major League History to do that). In his MVP season of 1978, he lead the league in HR, RBI and triples. As impressive as those stats are, they haven’t changed one bit over the past fifteen ballotings for the Hall of Fame, or the five years before that. The journey, and how long it took, don’t really matter anymore.

Yesterday, Jim Rice entered the Hall of Fame. It took way too long, and the journey got harder year after year. But as we watched Jim Ed speak on that podium at Cooperstown, the years melted away and we could see the man who walked away twenty summers ago after having dominated the American League for a decade. We saw the smile that I grew up loving, and pitchers learned to fear, and we saw one of our own enter the final stop on his journey, one in which he will be enshrined forever. And where he ended up is what really matters.

Go Sox.

Done.

Now That the Yankees Lost to the A’s, Let’s See What the New Guy’s Got.

Judging from the camo shirt under his Jersey, this guy will fit in to the clubhouse just fine.

The Red Sox are going to win more than one game after the All Star break. Sure, it wasn’t impressive, other than the catch by Ellsbury and Pedroia’s diving stab in the fourth, but it was a win, and something to build on. Penny was good enough to stay, and we’ve got Lester going tonight.  Hopefully building on that will include scoring some runs for Lester tonight.

More importantly tonight we get our first look at the guy who replaced Kotsay on the roster. Adam Laroche will be playing first tonight and batting sixth (giving The Beard a well deserved day off), and as we’ve seen with last year’s July deal, guys love getting out of Pittburgh and into the real baseball of Fenway. Plus, this guy is notoriously nasty in the second half. So LaRoche (who, dispite his last name, is not French and loves his freedom fries, freedom dressing and freedom toast as much as any red blooded American) will get a greeting from the Fenway Faithful tonight and will hopefully show his pleasure by helping the Sox score some f#$%ing runs for once.

And the Yanks already lost to the A’s (that Nomar guy helped us out), so it’s already a good day.

Go Sox.

Done.

I Virtually Hate Bleacher Report.

As some of you my know, for the past few months, SMC and I have been posting some of our work on a site known as Bleacher Report. This is a site for aspiring sports writers and other douchebags (ourselves included) to post their opinions, reactions and predictions on anything relating to the wold of sports. It is a great idea, and probably makes the people who came up with it a crapload of money. It has been a mostly enjoyable experience for us, as we have brought a lot of traffic to our site (mostly because we only put half of each article on there with a link to the rest of it, which pisses some people off but works really well) and given us some guidance on how to improve our work by allowing us to read the work of others like us.

The seedier side of StartMattCassel.

In the past week, however, I have come across the seedier side of BleacherReport and this whole internet thing in general. On Monday, we received an email (through the BR system) from our first fan on the site, a guy named Revo. I have never met Revo, nor do I have any idea of who he actually is as a person, but he has been enjoying our work and commenting on it for a while, and generally seems to be a good guy. In his email, Revo warned me that ” due to an insulting and controversial article I wrote, taking the BR leaders to task for their incompetence, it is not advisable for you to be associated with me if you are interested in not having possible harassment issues on BR.” I was shocked. First of all, having people harass me about what I write is part of the fun of it to me. Thats why SMC and I try to keep the site as anonymous as possible, so that what we say here is less likely to comeback and bite us on the ass in our real lives. Second, the fact that somebody had to warn me to not be seen as associating with him because, just by being a fan of his, people would bother me is incredible to me.

Bleacher Report.

Yes, Revo did write an article (much like this one I guess) telling the people who run Bleacher Report (who have been nothing but nice to us) exactly why they should go fornicate themselves with a sharp stick, or at least run their business better, but that is the whole purpose of the site. If it was not created for the free exchange of ideas, then why is it there? Not being able to criticize the way that the site is run will lead to it stagnating and not getting better, which was all that Revo wanted in the first place. Now, the site won’t get better, and is actually worse, because one of the people who cared to make it better is gone (you can find Revo at therevofiles.blogspot.com for some really good Bruins stuff).

The other thing that I discovered on BR is that it is not the quality of your writing or your ideas that makes you “good.” Rather, it is the amount of comments that you receive from the other miscreants on there. For the most part these comments are less often actually commentary on the article and more often sycophantic responses regurgitated in the hopes that the author will comment on your writing.

Heartbeat of the Bronx.

This was taught to me by a gentleman who calls himself  “Heartbeat of the Bronx.” I had commented (starting with telling him that he is an idiot) on an article in which he explained the the Yankees would have run away with the division if they hadn’t played the Red Sox this year. I said it was a ridiculous argument based not on cold fact, but on the hot streak that the Yanks are riding and his juvenile wish to block out the fact that the Pinstriped Assholes are 0-8 against the Sox this season. I explained that he was looking at a snapshot of a point in the season and claiming that the race was over. While I expected some type of response, his comment amounted to the fact that he thought himself better than us because more people comment on his articles. He has not yet responded to my criticism.

Now, I’m not a genius, and I don’t know much about the politics of this whole internet thing (though I do know that when SMC was forced to take a class on second life, he got in a virtual fight with a guy after bumping into the guy’s virtual wife, and got a real apology from the guy the next day), but what happened to the idea that the best writer is the guy (or girl) with the best writing, best points and most clever delivery? This “Heartbeat of the Bronx” character truly is an idiot. His writing is full of logical fallacies, hyperbole, and poorly delivered arguments. He believes that he is the pulse of the Yankees, but has to make up ridiculous ideas like “What if the Yankees were animals?” and the all time Catholic team. If you are reading this, “Heartbeat,” I hope you have an especially painful poop today.

I know that this article might get us kicked off Bleacher Report, or at least harassed by all those people that Revo warned us about, but that would be kinda cool.

Go Sox.

Done.

The only thing more important than SEC football is God and Country.

You see this, America? The big white jesus loving palm of mine? This is where you will get your meals for the next few months.

I hate almost all media days. Super bowl media day: a hoax; highschoolers signing with college team media day: painful; putting Tim Tebow in a suit at a microphone stand for a half-hour so the nation can see how proud the SEC is of their jesusfearing big white virgin quarterback: infuriating. I popped over to ESPN during my lunch burger today and there he was: talking about how great these new coaches Florida just hired for him are, some guy from Michigan he was all bonered up about. Blah blah blah, hard work this, blah blah , Jesus that. Florida has HUGE shoes to fill. Wire to wire for their third straight national title? I freaking hope not.

I can also confirm that Mark's wife, Jamie, is smoking hot.

On another note, Done woke me up this morning to explain why it was cool that the Sox had an off day at home today so they could all get their shit in order and have coffee with their wives. Sure enough about 45 minutes ago as I was picking up an iced sextuplet latte at my local beacon hill coffee joint, out walked Mark Kotsay and his significant other pushing a baby carriage talking about the lease on his apartment… which he’ll probably be subletting very soon. (I was wearing a Steamboat Bill’s Crawfish t-shirt which he remarked about so we chatted Louisiana for a minute and then parted ways. We can now confirm that Kotsay is just another professional guy that spent some time helping the depth chart of the World Champions. Godspeed.)

And on even another note, I have discovered a cool new distraction based funny blog today. Props to the writers of On The List. Great hilarity.

Don't get too worked up. You're just the other Sox. And go #27.

And my final note… Mark “I was the guy you were gonna trade Lester for but it’s cool cuz we’re both sick but Lester is still more sick even though I threw a perfect game but he only threw a no hitter but he’s younger and will end up having a better and longer career with more wins and championships than me” Buehrle threw a Perfect Effing Game today. Super cool. First time since The Big Twisted Unit tossed one five years ago.

Not bad for an off-day.

StartMattCassel

Adam LaRoche and the Red Sox, A Match Made In Pittsburgh.

UPDATE: In a move that nobody thought any team would be stupid enough to make, the St. Louis Cardinals have traded Chris Duncan and a Player to be Named Later (hopefully named Albert or Yadier) for Julio Lugo. This makes two first basemen acquired by the Sox today, though Duncan, still to be counted as a prospect, will be sent to Pawtucket. Good luck with Julio, St. Louis, I hope he is better to you than he was to us.

If the Pirates keep giving quality bats away this mascot is going to end up swallowing that gun Hemmingway style.

I am really beginning to love the Pittsburgh Pirates. Not only are they called Pirates, but they have developed this great habit of giving up just the kind of player that the Sox need right around the All-Star Break. Last year it was Jason Bay, who is slumping, but will still give us the 31 HR and 110 RBI that he has every other season of his career (The man is so consistent that his first half and second half career numbers are almost exactly the same), and this year it is Adam LaRoche.

Apparently he's slick with the glove too.

LaRoche (whose French seeming name is already annoying to type) is a first baseman and not to be confused with his brother Andy, who plays third. He will allow the Sox to spell Lowell and his aging hip by shifting over to third while providing some pop. My favorite stat about this guy is that while he is an average first half player, his numbers in the second half of the season have traditionally been All-Star Quality, with an OPS after the Break of .901 (which has always pissed me off, had he had those stats in the first half, he would have been an All-Star, but because they were in the second half and he was on a shitty team, they go unnoticed). LaRoche will provide a lefthanded power bat who, when he’s on (he is a streaky hitter), destroys right handed pitching, which is exactly what the club needed.

They said yes? Again? Hilarious.

Odds are that Kotsay and his “ailing calf” will go on the DL to free up a roster spot as Theo was only forced to send a couple of spare change minor leaguers to Baseball Purgatory/Pittsburgh in return for LaRoche. Hopefully this will turn out to be another great deal by Theo, and not another Gagne. Not having to give up a major league part in this deal makes it even better because it keeps Tito’s options intact when working with his bullpen.

The New Guy probably won’t be able to make it to Texas tonight before the first pitch at 8:05, seeing as he was in a dugout for the Pirates game vs. the Brew Crew this afternoon, but he’ll be at Fenway for us to wlecome him proper on Friday night.

Go Sox.

Done.