It’s a hot, muggy afternoon in what Mainers sometimes call New Hamster. Due to road construction, the two eastbound lanes of Highway 101 are down to one, and the traffic is bumper-to-bumper. A roadworker points at me, shakes his head, and draws a thumb across his throat. It takes me a minute to realize it’s almost certainly my truck he’s pointing at—specifically to the bumper sticker on the tailgate readingSOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT. All of this should conspire to put me in a foul mood, but I’m as happy as a kitten in a catnip factory. Pedro goes nine innings and strikes out 10 (in the postgame he admits to Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano that in his old age he’s come to appreciate quick ground-ball outs and ten-pitch innings as much as the Ks). We’re now 7-3 over the last ten games, we need only to split the next two with Chicago to finish the Dirty Dozen at 8-4, and as of today there’s a game’s worth of sunshine between us and the Anaheim Angels in the wild-card race.

Best of all, though, the last few innings of the game lightened what otherwise would have been a very tiresome drive through heavy traffic, and I think that’s really what baseball is for, especially baseball on the radio…which is, as Joe Castiglione says in his book Broadcast Rites and Sites, the last bastion of the spoken image.

Or something like that.

As Ole Case used to say, “You could look it up.”

August 14th

The Red Sox didn’t make it easy (that has never been a part of the deal with them), but they managed to finish the twelve-game stretch that began on August 2nd at exactly 8-4. The opener in the current series against the White Sox was another one-run loss, and tonight’s game began badly, with Curt Schilling giving up consecutive solo home runs to Timo Perez and Carlos Lee almost before the last notes of the national anthem had died away.

But in this game the Red Sox played flawless defense (the highlight was a sliding, twisting, skidding catch in foul territory by Kevin Youkilis, who almost ended up in the White Sox dugout), and you have to admire Curt Schilling, a pitcher whose face—along with those of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, maybe—ought to grace the cover of the Old School Baseball Encyclopedia. Following the home runs, he surrendered only one more hit until the sixth. By then the Red Sox had tied the game on back-to-back solo home runs of their own, one by Manny Ramirez and one by David “Big Papi” Ortiz.