So we go from embarrassing to humiliating to painful, finding a new, more wrenching way to lose each night. I should have never mentioned the word sweep. We’re eight and a half back, and the tone of the break is definitely set.

In bed, still pissed off, I revisit the question of what the fuck Millar is doing out there in the thirteenth inning. The answer goes back to spring training, and the last man cut from the squad. Rather than keep Adam Hyzdu as a bona fide backup outfielder, Theo and Francona made the decision to go with Burks, Dauber, McCarty and Millar, understanding that Trot wouldn’t be back for a couple of months. None of those four gets to that ball. Hyzdu does. And why is Kapler watching the play from the bench? It’s like Francona has to learn the same lesson game after game—and it’s common sense: to protect a late lead you want your best defense on the field. It’s just fundamental baseball. Numbnut.

July 2nd

SO: Not Tony the Tiger or Flash. It was Miguel Cairo, who kicked Tek on the force at home in the twelfth. In Little League he would have been tossed.

SK: Hate to give you the news, but this is the bigs.

SO: The big leagues, where you can gobble down steroids and not even get suspended. Would you buy a used car from Bud Selig?

SK: You got a point there. Where money talks and bullshit takes a walk on Boardwalk.

Shit.

The Yankees took all three games at the Stadium—swept us out, sent us packing, dropped us eight and a half games back in the AL East, and the second-to-last thing in the world I want to do this morning is write about baseball. The last thing I want to do is write about the Boston Red Sox. Since I have to, maybe the best thing to do is get it out of the way in a hurry.

It was clear from the Yankees’ jubilation that they really wanted the sweep, probably as payback for the humiliation of being beaten six of seven earlier in the season. For Boston fans, the series was a quick-and-dirty refresher course on how hard being a Red Sox fan can be. It’s not the sweep that hurts so much as the fact that we should have won last night’sgame (the Yankees took that one by a score of 5–4 in thirteen innings), we could have won the June 30th game, and I would argue that we might even have won the first game of the series, in which we were blown out, if not for the errors (the Sox committed three, two by Garciaparra, who committed three overall in the series—he didn’t play last night).