The stuff between my ears feels more like peanut butter than brains this morning, and with good reason; the Red Sox–Angels contest that started last night at 10 P.M. East Coast time didn’t go final until five to two in the morning. That’s just shy of a four-hour baseball game. A nine-inning baseball game.

Part of the reason is national TV coverage—the breaks between half-innings are longer to allow for a few more of those all-important beer commercials—but in truth that isn’t the largest part. I’ll bet you could count the number of postseason games under three hours during the last seven years on the fingers of your hands, not because of the extra ads but because the style of baseball changes radically once the regular season is over. It becomes more about the pitching, because most managers believe the aphorism which states that in seven games out of every ten, good pitching will beat good hitting.[67] Games about the pitching become games about the defense. And games about defense and pitching in the field often become, for the offense, games about what is now called by the needlessly deprecating name of “smallball.” Few twenty-first century baseball teams are good at smallball, and their efforts to bunt the runner over are often painful to watch (although Doug Mientkiewicz of the Soxput down a beauty in Game 1, and it resulted in a run), but smallball certainly does burn up the hours. I bet they sold a sea of beer in Anaheim last night, and the hopeful fans had plenty of time to twirl their Rally Monkeys and beat their annoying Thunder Sticks, but in the end neither the monkeys or the sticks did any good. The Angels must now come to our park down 0-2, and their fans have only this consolation: for them, the game was over before 11 P.M., and they won’t have to spend much of this lovely fall day feeling like what Ed Sanders of the Fugs so memorably called “homemade shit.”

Pedro Martinez got the win in last night’s/this morning’s game, leaving with a 4–3 lead after seven innings, mostly thanks to a two-run Jason Varitek dinger and a scratch run provided by Johnny Damon. The invaluable Damon stole second after reaching on a fielder’s choice, took third when loser Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez (who bears a weird resemblance to movieland’s Napoleon Dynamite) uncorked a wild pitch, then scored on a Manny Ramirez sac fly. It turned out to be the winning run, because a relay of Boston relievers—Timlin to Myers, Myers to Foulke—were lights-out.