Unless something weird happens, we’re done for the season with Cleveland, and considering that we finished 3-4, that’s probably a good thing. “Looks like Wakefield’s carriage turned back into a pumpkin, Dad,” my son Owen said during last night’s postgame call. (Not so fast, kid—Wake’s been down before, but he’s never been out.) Now we’re on to Toronto, and what my other son likes to call the CreepyDome, because it’s been so empty over the last three or four years…and especially now, while playoff hockey is still wending its slow way through the lower intestine of bigga-time sport.[12] Schilling is starting for us tonight, and since Toronto beat him last time when Schill insisted on holding on to the ball in the late innings, this should be a game worth watching. But first I have to watch Jeopardy. This is Political Gasbag Week, and I have to root for Keith Olbermann, himself a recent émigré from the Land of Bigga-Time Sport.

Later: “This one’s no masterpiece,” Jerry Remy of the TV crew opines in the seventh inning of tonight’s tilt, and that’s an understatement. Every pitcher seems to have one team he just can’t seem to beat, and for Curt Schilling, it’s the Jays. He went into this game with only one victory against them in something like half a dozen tries (that one win came in his Diamondback days), and he’s not going to improve on that record tonight. The final score is 12–6. Schill struggled, and he’ll probably get tagged with the loss, but that’s not the real story of this game; he only gave up three runs, and the Sox have already scored twice that many as we play into the eighth.

The story of the game isn’t even the Red Sox defense, which has been horrible—a Johnny Damon error in center let in two runs, and Mark Bellhorn’s failure to snag Frank Catalanotto’s foul pop cost another two (Catalanotto singled on the next pitch). No, the real problem, it seems to me, is that the Sox have turned lackluster in their last five games, playing catch-up in four of them and only successfully in one of those. The Yankeeswon earlier today, beating the Angels (Mariano Rivera was shaky, but had just enough gas to survive a bases-loaded jam in the ninth), and if things don’t turn around, the Red Sox are going to find themselves with a 5-9 mark for the month of May…and in second place. They need a shake-up. This may be where our new manager really starts earning his paycheck…assuming he can, of course.