Sitting there by myself in the dark house, facing the screen, I have nothing to distract myself from the terrible baseball I’m seeing. There’s no one to commiserate with or to help absorb the loss; it’s all mine. We’ve hit the ball well enough, and while our outfield isn’t close to their cannon-armed trio of Jose Guillen, Raul Mondesi and Vladi Guerrero, we’ve fielded decently, but our pitching has been horrendous. All three pitchers we ran out there tonight got their butts whipped. By the ninth inning, as Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez strikes out David Ortiz and then Manny, I’m in a sour mood, blaming the Sox for my own impatience and irritability. The final’s 10–7, the third time in a week we’ve given up double digits—and we came in with the league’s best ERA. It’s one o’clock, only a three-hour game, though with all the scoring it feels like four, four and a half. I feel crappy and blue. I feel like I’ve earned the day off tomorrow.

June 3rd

Boston’s on the West Coast, and I hate it. We always seem to do poorly out there during the regular season, and the pennant hopes of more than oneRed Sox team have been buried in places like Anaheim and Oakland. This year is looking like no exception. The Angels have now beaten us twice in a row, and in both cases we’ve come from behind only to blow the lead again. Youch.

And when they go out there, I always feel as if the Olde Town Team (Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy’s term) has voyaged over the curve of the earth and clean out of sight. News travels faster than it used to, granted—I can get game highlights on NESN instead of just a bare-ass score on the morning radio—but details are still pretty thin unless you actually stay up and watch the game, as O’Nan was threatening to do last night (and gosh, he must have gone to bed grumpy in the wee hours, if he did). What I want most of all is a box score, dammit, and there won’t be one until tomorrow, by which time last night’s game will already be old and cold.