Apparently Manny threw a 61-year-old Red Sox traveling secretary to the ground on Saturday afternoon when the secretary couldn't get Manny eighteen tickets to the game on short notice. From what I've read that was when Theo decided Manny had to go no matter what. Boras didn't broker his current deal (which means he doesn't see a dime from the option years); it's pretty clear Boras instructed Manny to get himself traded so he could hit the market (there was a strong chance the Red Sox would have picked up his option years). Really lame shit.

I stumbled onto this program at www.heromachine.com that lets you put together portraits of your RPG characters (which you can then print up and use as miniatures). Download Heromachine 2.5 and then open the file in your browser, it's awesome. Right now I'm working on One Eyed Zeke from the old Deadlands game I ran.

PLUS PROSPECTS?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!? He's fucking Canadian!

St000-fuck-000n

I am completely dumbfounded by some of the names in Sen. Mitchell's report: Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Mo Vaughn, Fernando Vina, Ismael Valdez, Gary Matthews Jr., Todd Hundley, Rondell White, David Justice, Mike Lansing, Kent Mercker, Miguel Tejada, Kevin Brown, Eric Gagne, Paul Byrd, Troy Glaus... it's just nuts.

I cannot wait to see if some of these guys begin violating those buddy pacts and naming other names. I also cannot wait until Big Papi and Pujols get outed and Barry Bonds stops lying and admits his use. If there's any luck, hopefully A-Rod and Wright will not be implicated by anyone.

Crazy.

Insult! Ahh, it feels good.

Pappy - it wasn't just Spo and me talking baseball. Check out the Insult archive from October '03 (the taunting over the brutal game 7 ALCS loss) and October '04 (that ghostbusters/choking post, Wilson calling Johnny Damon a sexy mongoloid) - everybody got into it. As far as this weekend goes - it just solidifies the position of the Red Sox as the best-run organization, top to bottom, in baseball right now. They spend a ton of money, true, but half of the most important people on this year's team were young, home-grown players. Whatever you think of Red Sox fans, there aren't really any villains on this team.

The Patriots on the other hand - good christ, they're a bunch of bastards (I mean that in the most complimentary way). Running up the score, going for fuck-you touchdowns at the end of every game, it's awesome. I hope they follow the path they're on to the logical end and start doing things like: pretending to get injured on the field only to hop up and cheap shot someone, "accidentally" replacing the football with a puppy before Gostkowski kicks a field goal, turning the Dallas star into a bloody pentagram (if they play Dallas again), imprisoning Archie Manning at an off-site location before next week's Colts-Patriots footbalpocalypse. I want to see more unnecessary roughness penalties when they're up 49-0.

Everyone in CT...we should try to do something good, another dinner, over the holidays.

ST00N!

Congrats to the Red Sox on sweeping those crazy weirdos from Colorado right out of the series and then celebrating the victory in the visiting clubhouse! Hot damn, what a crazy thing. Who'd have thought... not only did the Red Sox finally win in 2004, just three years later they won it again.

Hmm... are they becoming... THE NEW EVIL EMPIRE?!?

Did anyone think the Pats WOULDN'T win?

WOOHOO!

You all can eat a dick. The Yankees have for years cultivated this image of being invincible - the history of Babe Ruth, the Mick, Yankeeography, and the rest of that bullshit. The Yankees fans are the ones who chant "1918" (trying to shove the fact that Boston hasn't seen a WS win in years in our face) and pretend they've got some fat old ballplayer's ghost protecting them from losing baseball games.The Yankees fans are the ones that threw trash on their field after an umpire called out one of their players for cheating.

Boston fans are revelling in the fact that the Yankees fucked up because for years, the Yankees fans have made a massive deal of their belief that there are magical Yankee spirits protecting them. The Yankees spirits keep the team from losing...except when the team gets beaten by the Angels or the Diamondbacks. But, but, the curse of Babe Ruth is what keeps the Yankees from ever being beaten by the Red Sox. Class? I had Yankees fans at my job smiling smugly at me after the first 3 wins, wearing "1918" shirts, talking about how "there's just something about the Yankees that keeps the Red Sox from beating them", etc. Every New York paper referenced the curse on its front page each day last week. If you think New England is going to go all crazy over the Cards' choking if they happen to lose in four games, you're crazy - no one is going to be wearing a "1987" t-shirt. If the Yanks fans taunted us the way that Steinbrenner did with the A-Rod trade ("NY is an organization willing to go the extra mile for its fans"), that'd be fine, since it's true - the real Yankees teams of 1996-2000 deserved to win every one of those pennants and World Series championships because they were truly great teams: good coaching, excellent farm system, so on. The Yankees had a better organization than the Red Sox for a long time. The hatred has to do with the supposed curse, and how much Yanks fans seem to talk about it when the chips are down.

I would be happy if Boston beat anyone. In this case, I was happy about winning, and I was additionally happy that the Yankees choked because it puts the lie to all of the Yankee bullshit superstition that has been pounded down New England's throat over the last few decades. You don't know shit about baseball, or the Red Sox-Yanks rivalry, Pappy.

The Because the Yankees are in the AL East, the Yankees' mystique has been the monkey on Boston's back for 80+ years. The Yankees mystique died during game 7, and what we're left with is two great teams - that's all I was looking for.

You know what, as an aside, I don't even think real Yankees fans like the 2004 Giambi-ARod-Kevin Brown etc Yankees all that much. The real Yankees to me are that team of 1996-1999, the one that was built on an awesome farm system and had players who genuinely cared about the team, that was 100% professional, would never have done something like bitch-slapping a pitcher's arm to get on base, and constantly deserved respect. Being happy about winning and being happy about the Yankees choking is (or should be) entirely about getting the "you can't beat the Yankees and you're going to die without ever seeing a Boston world series win because the Yanks are in the AL East", but it was also entertaining because this Yankees team is a joke compared to the real Yankee teams of a few years ago, before they became this insane Steinbrenner-driven train wreck. I liked the team that had players like David Wells, Paul O'Neill (even if he was a whiny bitch), Tino, Cone, Pettitte, the sort of team Spo would like. And, whatever negative things I have to say about the NY Yankees fans, at least they don't riot and get people killed the way that Red Sox fans did last night.

One other thing I was thinking about. On Wednesday morning, every other person in this building had some sort of Yankee gear on - hats, shirts, jackets. I work in New Jersey. These aren't people who just wear the stuff during the playoffs, since a lot of them wore the stuff regularly a month ago too. Thursday morning, I didn't see a single piece of Yankees paraphernalia in the building - seemed like bandwagoning to me.

Heh, one more thing, people bitching about the Yankees high payroll is stupid, particularly the Mets or Red Sox fans. $190 mil vs $130 mil doesn't mean anything. I've done that before, I think around the A-Rod trade, and it was dumb. The evil empire thing is stupid but entertaining, and I think it's cool that the Yanks have embraced it by playing the Imperial Death March before games.

Stone