I’m addicted to the Little League World Series the way a college hoop junkie craves March Madness. Every game is high drama, and you never know what to expect. Tonight we switch back and forth between the Sox and the Lincoln, Rhode Island, team, and after a while, like the end of Animal Farm, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Both survive late scares. The kids’ defense falls apart in the sixth. In Chicago, the Sox are up a run in the eighth, thanks to back-to-back jacks by Manny and David, when Manny goes to plant himself under an easy fly, slips on the wet grass, recovers, then slips again, and the ball falls behind him. Timlin gets us out of it and Foulke closes, looking sharp. The Angels have swept the Yanks, and the Rangers finally lost, so we’re five and a half back in the East and a game up in the wild card. And the New England kids win.

This is terrific—we beat the White Sox again, making us 5-1 in our last six games. The Rangers also won, but the trade-off is that the Yankees took another drubbing from the Angels (and at the Stadium, hee-hee), meaning that the New York lead is down another full game. Knowing that their team has lost almost half their seemingly insurmountable lead in the space of a week cannot make Yankee fans happy. (That lead probably is insurmountable, but north of Hartford the only thing we love more than seeing the pin-stripers have a bad week is seeing them have two bad weeks.)

The Red Sox have scored 20 runs against the White Sox in the last two games. Varitek is thumping the ball, and so is Millar, but I think the big offensive story in Chicago has been Manny Ramirez. He’s been sluggish at the plate since the All-Star break, but in the last two games he’s shown a return to the batting brilliance that made him such a catch for us in the first place. He hit the 16th grand slam of his career in the second inning of the Friday night game (August 20th) and added a three-run job yesterday. He has a total of 9 RBIs in the two games.