I get the news from my daughter-in-law, a once-upon-a-time Yankee fan (like once-upon-a-time Protestants who convert to Catholicism, lapsed Yankee fans who become Red Sox partisans are the ones who REALLY MEAN BUSINESS), and she sounds the way I feel: shocked but somehow not all that surprised.

The player most commonly identified with the Boston Red Sox, the one whose number most fans probably expected to see someday up on the wall along with Williams’s, Pesky’s, and Yaz’s, is no longer with the Red Sox. Number Five has been traded, and probably the only consolation to be taken by fans who place tradition and heart above salary and statistics is that he’s been traded to the one other team in baseball whose long World Series drought has become not just the stuff of history but that of myth. That’s right folks; at game time tomorrow, Nomar Garciaparra—Boston’s surviving marquee player from the days of Dan Duquette—will take the field as a Cubbie.

Does the deal make sense? I don’t think so; I think that two years from now it will look like a panic move made by a young GM who saw his high-priced (and supposedly high-powered) baseball team treading water eight or nine games behind the monolithic Yankees in the AL East and a game or two behind the Oakland A’s in the wild card (but still more advantageouslyplaced than their closest competition). In other words, I think that Theo Epstein probably pulled the pin on a big deal at the trading deadline mostly because everyone in Boston’s howling oh-God-my-ass-hole’s-on-fire sports community was yelling for it to happen

!!OH JEEZ!!

!!BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!

What exactly did we get for our usually dependable, sometimes brilliant, and (I admit it) at times erratic shortstop, who was batting .321 at the time of the trade? We got two Gold Glove infielders, one with a name that can be both pronounced and spelled—that would be Orlando Cabrera—and the other with a name that can at least be pronounced: Doug Mientkiewicz (man-KAY-vitch). Putting the bat on the little white ball has seemed a little harder than catching it for these gentlemen, at least so far this season. Both are hitting around .250.