Blogging BLOHARDS

Break On Through To The Other Side Of San Diego

Ted was supposed to join us at Petco Friday night but he didn’t post.  Mr. Yawkey and I wound up sitting by some guys from Revere who had flown in for the game.  They were trying to convince each other they knew what Dice was throwing but none of it sounded plausible. 

After the game we went back to Mr. Yawkey’s suite at the Del.  He groused about the greed of the resort’s owners for the rates they were charging and the time shares they had built by the tennis courts.  We sank into creaky wicker chairs on the balcony and stared into the salty darkness.

Donovan Sounds Off On Dice-K

“You’re telling me my great grandfather was a member of the Boston Red Sox?”

“Dice, we’ll go through this again.  Let’s start with your Mom.  When you were born, she named you after Daisuke Araki, right?”

“Yes.  She was always a big baseball fan.  She loved Araki.  She said he moved like a leopard lubricated with sake.”

“And you’ve told me your Mom acquired her love of the game from her late grandmother.’

“That is correct, Mr. Donovan.”

“And what I’m telling you is your great grandmother acquired her love of the game from the love of her life, who happened to be a catcher for the Red Sox, and is your maternal great grandfather.”

Donovan: Seasons In The Sunset

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Viva Lost Wages

Other than the all too obvious and sudden splintering of a once delightful world, here is what we know for sure. 

That like Jim Lonborg’s downhill run on Christmas Eve, 1967, it all fell apart on Monday, July 31….the day the front office failed to make a deal for Dontrelle Willis or Barry Zito.

And we know that facing reporters during the Yankee massacre, Theo Epstein, sleep deprived and suffering from an uncommonly severe flare-up of his Bright’s Disease, staggered into an ill-advised tirade against the Yankee’s payroll.

We can now pinpoint with precision the exact moment our darkest suspicions were confirmed.

Mi Tío

Far from publicity’s toxic glare, safe in the rural bowels of the Dominican Republic, Manny Ramirez walked out to the middle of the Ramfis Bridge.

A thousand miles away, they had just played the All-Star game. 

The Smoking Gun?

Buried in the photo archives of the Sports Museum of New England is a rather obscure picture of Don Zimmer taken in Winter Haven in 1980... 

The Gang's All There

BART GIAMATTI had the kind of bounce in his step, gliding down the hallway of the fourth floor of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, that came only with the game’s highest level of wizardry.

He was humming one of his favorite new songs, Shannon McNally’s “Miracle Mile”, and smoking a Marlboro. It felt good to be in a position where nobody would lecture him on the perils of smoking.

Steinbrenner Fumed

Steinbrenner fumed silently, slouched in the back of the lime-colored Lincoln Town Car gliding down the FDR.  He was about to pay off the kind of wager no man wants to lose. 

The indignity of it brought him back to his days in the big house, when Little Chito from Santo Domingo, Little Chito with the big knife, had the convicted felon deep in a nightly ritual of acts so unnatural they could never be mentioned.

Acts as appalling, George thought, as his team’s middle relief.