Sometimes I wonder what goes on in Terry Francona's fragile little mind. Tonight, according to Remy and Orsillo, he hoped to get seven innings out of Julian Tavarez. Aside from the fact that Tavarez has gone seven innings only once this season and had thrown over 100 pitches twice coming into this evening's game against Oakland (which is run by the Sabremetrician's lizard king), it seemed like a nice plan. Unfortunately, even good plans sometimes fall apart.

As it was, the Francona Tavarez plan hit a snag in the form of Mark Ellis, who was a single short of the cycle, having faced Tavarez three times in his 5 and 2/3 innings of work tonight. Just in case you care, Mark Ellis was hitting .257 when he came up for his third at bat of the evening. But apparently Julian Tavarez was good for what ailed him at the plate.

I am not happy about this series, even though Papelbon is almost assuredly not available for Game One. After all, Francona's mighty closer is only to be used in consecutive games in the direst circumstances. Of course when you're Terry Francona, sometimes the direst circumstances include a game in which the Sox were leading by five runs in the ninth and then a tie game in the top of the ninth the following evening. On the plus side, as neither was a save situation, Papelbon has only one blown save to date.

But, the real problem is that the Oakland offense is not good. Outside of Ellis' remarkable performance, the offense did very little against the least formidable of the Red Sox starters. And on the other side, the Red Sox are coming off a long game with a slightly later start than usual (8PM Eastern vs. the usual 7PM game time) and a cross country flight that got them into Oakland in the early morning hours. So it was no surprise that their offense struggled against Danny Haren, the ace of this Oakland staff. It bodes ill for Oakland that their pitching gets worse as the Red SOx finally have a chance at a full night's sleep.

In other news that bodes ill for Sedition In Red Sox Nation, Jon Lester threw a complete game one hitter at the Norfolk Tides today in a 7-1 victory for the Pawtucket Red Sox. Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you the name of a single player on the Norfolk Tides, but I'm willing to bet that they aren't very good. I base this supposition on the knowledge that they are the Orioles' AAA affiliate, and the Orioles aren't that good.

Any pro-quality prospect in Orioles organization is probably competing to push the spare parts that surround Miguel Tejada and Brian Roberts out of Camden Yards. So Lester didn't exactly throw a one hitter against the 1927 New York Yankees. Here is as good a place as any for me to offer this disclaimer, I am glad that his cancer seems to be in remission, but not glad enough to wish him professional success in this organization.

And we have a tool of note segment from this weekend's spectacular managerial tirades. It's not Lou Pinella, who didn't seem to do anything to deserve a suspension. Nor is it Ozzie Guillen, who is still immune from criticism in this space because he makes Jay Mariotti froth at the mouth. Nor is it the manager of the Mississippi Braves for his spectacularly stupid behavior.

Instead, it is the entire Mississippi Braves organization. I'm sure you've seen this footage by now, but I give you the video of this sad spectacle in part because it's funny, but also to ask this question: "Why didn't a player, a coach, a front office executive or a damn peanut vendor go out there and tackle that nitwit before he started crawling like a fat guy trying to do Rambo in some demented parlor game like charades throwing the rosin bag as though it were a grenade?"



I was under the impression that professional sports teams were expected to look out for one another. Granted that fracas between Barrett and the Big Z in the dugout at Wrigley calls that naive assumption into question, but don't minor league teams sell themselves as a purer form of baseball, untainted by the vast sums that grow monster egos at the highest level? The video is just surreal.

His team allowed him to ruin his career. Even if he somehow managed to cure cancer (I admit that's somewhat unlikely for the manager of an obscure AA team), every single person who watches it will remember him as the guy who slunk on the turf behind the pitcher's mound as though he were an infantryman dodging enemy fire and threw the rosin bag like a grenade. Who is ever going to hire him again?

Can you imagine that sell as an MLB general manager? You might as well announce the hiring of Shemp from the Three Stooges (if he weren't dead) as tell the press in any given city that has a professional sports team that you wanted to hire the guy who went ballistic in such a bizarre fashion on the field turf at the Mississippi Braves game. Granted the guy probably had no shot at making it to the Show as a manager. But at least he could have dreamed about it.

Now he's going to go down in history as a viral video loser like that fat guy who fell off the Dance Dance Revolution machine or the loser who filmed himself doing a very graceless rendition of a Jedi routine. Some member of his organization had a moral responsibility to step in and stop him from making such a moron out of himself. Maybe they didn't want to do it, but I feel they owed it to him.

There is nothing short of personal tragedy or getting puddled like a day of watching ESPN and looking for sports stories on the web to turn a good mood into a bad mood quickly. I was happy, or at least as happy as I get when nothing bad has happened to a person I dislike, when I woke up. I am not happy now. But I guess I get what I deserve, in the end, because no one made me watch ESPN or surf the web.

Against my better judgement, I made my way over to the Chicago Sun Times site. Sometimes it pays to keep an eye on what the enemy is doing. Today, one of our favorite bullies has finally found a nice easy target for his aggressions. Finding Ozzie Guillen, Jerry Reinsdorff and even Hawk Harrelson too difficult to push around and being disappointed in his efforts to convince any responsible authorities to fight his battles for him, Jay Mariotti has taken it upon himself to crush the single greatest threat to American sports currently working in Illinois, U of I basketball coach Bruce Weber.

I am tired of the media criticising certain coaches for succeeding with a group of players recruited by his predecessor. Whatever merit the charge may possess is undercut by the selectivity with which reporters use it. I said it this fall when a piece on Page 2 knocked Charlie Weis for taking a team recruited by Ty Willingham to a BCS bowl. I found it all too convenient that the piece failed to mention that Willingham had his best season in South Bend in his first year, with players recruited by Bob Davie. Also, not enough was made of the fact that 22 of the 24 starters on Florida's national championship team were recruited by Ron Zook.

Bruce Weber should be able to draw the best of the best recruits to Champaign. What with the beautiful beaches, perfect climate, vibrant night life and proximity to major cities (Indianapolis is only 120 miles away), it might as well be paradise on Earth. Who doesn't want to live in East Central Illinois? The Orange Crush provides a great home court advantage, but the facilities aren't overwhelmingly better than any of their chief competitors. And while the school has a nice tradition, it doesn't have the basketball pedigree of an Indiana, Kansas or Kentucky (or even Ohio State or Michigan, for that matter). So why is Illinois supposed to surpass the rest of the Big 10?

In the end, if Jay were honest (and that is a monumental if), he'd tell you why Bruce Weber deserves to be picked on by this particular knight of the keyboard. Quite simply, Bruce Weber is a nice, mild-mannered quiet guy. He won't fight back the way Ozzie Guillen did. After all, what fun is there in bullying a person who will stand up to you? Especially when Bud Selig won't step in and fight for the noble newspaper man against the big bad Venezuelan.

The attack on Weber and the Illini is not surprising. Any one who read this piece, written just two days before the attack on Weber, would wonder what happened in the meantime if they didn't know Mariotti. Only he could pronounce a team in the tournament then shred them so viciously when the team hadn't played another game.

Emerson once said that foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds. Of course there's no guarantee that he had ever met a mind as little as Mariotti's when he said that. I doubt that even Emerson would see a mind large enough to harbor a hobgoblin should he ever meet Jay the Joke through the miracle of time travel. Even the CHB would have had more shame than to drop that once, twice, three times a lady reference from the second piece linked above.

The other story that has me steamed is this one. Apparently, Terrell Owens did not know his playbook. As his last defender, I spend entirely too much of my time responding to stories like this. But I still do it.

Covering football isn't exactly breaking the Watergate story. So whenever I see a piece like this, I don't take it too seriously. An investigative journalist needs to protect his or her sources because these are often matters of life and death. A sports columnist protects his sources so he can get better quotes. Not naming a source makes me think that the player who said TO didn't know the playbook had a particular axe to grind with TO.

Now it could be that the axe is resentment against TO for all the drops. Or it could be a little bit of jealousy. Say you were a wide receiver on the Cowboys who had once been an NFL number one pick, but you hadn't lived up to that potential since your rookie season. Imagine then, that you had little to fall back on after football, since you attended a school notorious for allowing athletes to coast through an academic program that was something short of rigorous.

On top of that, a much more talented receiver with a lot of negative image issues came to town and stole your thunder. Would that make you angry enough to whisper a comment or two to a reporter, knowing that just about every person who knows anything about football will believe the worst about that particular player? It's the preferred weapon of the high school gossip, and just maybe a certain product of the Ohio State University.

I simply can't see how TO could have ended up with 85 catches and 13 TDs in a season if he didn't know at least some of the plays. After all the drama with Jeff Garcia, Greg Knapp, Donovan McNabb, Brad Childress and Andy Reid, almost every fan is automatically going to believe the worst of TO. If some story emerged from Dallas that had TO entering hospitals in the dead of night and juggling newborn babies while the staff looked on in horror, I think people would believe it.

Just once, I'd like to see TO help himself (and me) out by going one week without becoming national news. I don't think it's going to happen, but I can hope.

Just so you know, there will be no links tonight because I'm feeling particularly lazy. But I have somethings to say. It's just another post with an ESPN theme. Obviously they spent a lot of time on the Daytona 500, today and the breaking story was the bizarre episode of All My Morons that has been the 2006 San Diego Chargers. There was the linebacker shot by an off-duty cop. There was the safety arrested by Federal authorities for allegedly selling codeine. Then there was the waiting until the offensive and defensive coordinators accepted head coaching positions with other teams. Now they hire Norv Turner, who was once chased from a blackjack table in Las Vegas by Bill Simmons and one of his super-cool friends.

But there was a substantial amount of coverage dedicated to the All Star Weekend. First, on Mike and Mike in the Morning, Greenie made the pronouncement that no one puts on a show like David Stern. Meanwhile, he admitted later that he gained a renewed appreciation for Bono as he watched Mary J. Blige flounder her way through the classic U2 song "One."

And then there was Wayne Newton. It took me 2 days to come to terms with his presence. He was terrible. Actually, he was far, far, far, far worse than terrible. First, as Mike Wilbon would say on PTI, he looked like he'd escaped from the wax museum. Whatever they did to lift his face and Botox away his wrinkles made him look like a 2 week old sandwich in Saran Wrap. And there was his "tan." I don't know how to describe it, save to say that it made him look like one of those oranges that have those rough brown patches that the growers call wind scars.

Then there was his hair. It looked like his hair had been dyed with the black paint they use to rustproof metal benches and chairs. I don't know that it can be fairly called hair, but it sits on his head and it's not a hat, so we'll call it hair. It looked to me as though some drunken hair restoration technician had sewn the hair on somewhat imperfectly.

And there was his singing. I don't know much about octaves and that sort of thing, but I know he was nowhere near the high notes that made up the falsetto that made the song unique in the first place. His version of Viva Las Vegas was an insult even to people who aren't Elvis fans (I, however am an Elvis fan). Basically he looked and sounded like a bad impersonator. I get the feeling that Englebert Humperdink sat up somewhere in Branson, Missouri or wherever old lounge singers go to die and called his agent wondering why he couldn't get a gig with the NBA.

Then there was the triumphant return of Around the Horn. Because the show had been bumped all last week for NASCAR Now, they hadn't had a chance to excoriate Tim Hardaway. Everybody's conscience, Jay Mariotti, was in top form. He commended David Stern for the swift and fair response in banishing the homophobe from All Star Weekend. The voice of the voiceless went on to lament that certain other commissioners (Bud Selig, by name) do not act with such probity.

It was truly inspired, or at least it was, before I translated it from Mariotti-speak into English. Basically, Jackass Jay said: "Whah, Whah! Big Bad Ozzie Guillen was mean to me, please fight my battles for me, Mr. Commissioner." I've had enough of Mariotti. He's a total tool. And of the off chance that one of his minions monitors my site, feel free to tell him this. Jay Mariotti is a middle aged guy just coming off an angioplasty. The actuarial tables are in my favor on this one. He's going to die before I do, and I'm going to find his grave and take a leak on it. A little harsh, and totally lacking in my customary good humor, but I am so sick of phony tough and crazy brave reporters.

Speaking of people monitoring my site, I've been setting traffic records lately. It got me thinking. For those of you who are new to this site, Catch 22 is one of my favorite books. In the novel, the protagonist was forced to censor letters written by enlisted prisoners while he stayed in the officer's ward at the military hospital. Since it was boring duty, he got creative and started censoring all the modifiers, then all the romance words, then everything but the salutation while he rewrote the letter's body and finally he censored the envelopes. When he censored the letters, he signed Washington Irving's name.

Once he censored the envelopes, the military bureaucracy sprang into action. The Army sent a man from the the Criminal Investigations Division to the hospital to catch Washington Irving. This triggered an entire series of misadventures which ended up with the first CID man getting sick. The Army then sent a second CID man. Eventually, the two CID men spent all their time investigating each other.

I went through that long aside to say something, believe it or not. The other day, I joked with one of my friends that my spike in traffic was due to a number of people monitoring me for Mariotti, the CHB, the Red Sox, the Pats, NASCAR, Ainge and the other targets of this blog. After keeping an eye in this site for a while, I imagined that they would eventually use this site as a means to monitor one another. It seemed like a funny image.

Can you picture it? Across the country, recent college graduates who always wanted to be athletes, but lacked the size, speed, strength, talent or any/all of them to make it became jock sniffs and gave up their dreams to enter the world of sports journalism. Now they sit in their cubicles, dividing their time between monitoring my site and mooning over the hot receptionist who is hopelessly out of their collective league. And I bet they're questioning their career choice as they try to remember whether Mr. Mariotti takes his coffee with cream and sugar and wonder if Jay will release his pent up aggressions on the lowly intern after Ozzie or Hawk Harrelson disses him again.

Ozzie Guillen is at it again. By now, everybody who follows sports has heard that he referred to Jay Mariotti with the same derogatory epithet that Jeff Spicoli used to describe the surfing prowess of his rivals, Mark "Cut Back" Davis and Bob "Jungle Death" Gerrard in the dream sequence from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He was wrong to do so, and he apologized.

One can debate the merits of his apology, and its sincerity all day. At least you can. I have to be somewhere in an hour and a half. The real problem with living in an ostensibly free country is that you have to allow people the right to be ignorant. If Ozzie wants to shoot off his mouth and deal with the consequences in the form of a fine or sensitivity training, that's his right. He shouldn't lose his job over something like this. He is paid to win games. He is not paid to be a role model.

My problem with this situation is the hypocrisy in attacking Ozzie for being ignorant in this instance. Jay's own reaction is well worth reading, if only to see him hide behind his status as a journalist. He can claim he is merely staying above the fray, not descending to Ozzie's level. It is, of course, an admirable sentiment. You can check Skip Bayless to see a justification for avoiding locker room confrontations which dances nicely around the issue of whether or not the columnist who does so lacks intestinal fortitude.

Or it would be if it weren't a convenient cop-out. Let's not forget that Mariotti once threatened Hawk Harrelson and then backed off when answered in kind. It's hard to get tougher than a guy changing his tune to "I'll sue you" in an altercation. Mariotti's a bully and a coward, and shame on you Ozzie for expressing it with the regrettable term you used.

But back to Jay's response...

He opens with this gem worthy of Hemingway, provided of course that Hemingway had been lobotomized and a bad writer to boot: "Try as I do, it's hard to view sports as some sort of guiding light for humankind." This isn't 1947 any more, Jay. Sports is entertainment, now. Only this, and nothing more. Of course, I am running a grave risk with this post, since Jay staked the claim to the moral high ground. But the post must go on.

This particular passage, the link that connects what I've said to the central theme of tonight's stream of consciousness, is particularly noteworthy. Mariotti claimed that after an incident where Ozzie made an insensitive comment toward a homosexual that he criticized Ozzie for it. Not only that, but Sir Jay was "the only writer in Chicago who did, which is often how it works in a town softer and more politically driven by the sports franchises than a genuinely tough, independent sports media town such as Boston."

So, to quote Hans from Die Hard (for only the second time in the short history of this site): "I could discuss industrialization and men's fashion all day, but work must intrude." I leave aside the Ozzie vs. Jay mess and move on to the "genuinely tough, independent sports media town" which Mariotti apparently loves so well.

Boston has a sizeable gay community. Massachusetts has taken the lead on gay marriage rights. I am not interested in politics, at this point. I reserve the right to keep my opinion on these matters my own. But I must say this. A baseball manager calls a reporter a fag in Chicago and it's national news. He's being treated like Homer Stokes from O Brother Where Art Thou after he revealed that he was a Ku Kluxer. Ozzie certainly deserves punishment, whether or not it should be as severe as Mariotti wants is another question.

What is more important is the institutionalized homophobia of Red Sox Nation. Ozzie calls Mariotti a fag, and everybody has a problem with it. Thousands of fans in Boston wear "Jeter Swallows" t-shirts, and chant Gay-Rod at the Yankee third baseman, and no one says anything about it. Where is the outrage?

In case I missed the reaction in the media, I googled "Gay-Rod" and "Jeter Swallows." The closest I could come to finding anything like a repudiation of this phenomenon is this site. To its credit, Harvard stopped students from selling the shirts when gay student groups complained. A regrettable level of immaturity and ignorance pervades a more representative sample of the sites, like this tool's MySpace profile.

I checked a few other sites too. I went to the Yankee Hater homepage (because of a strong objection to the methodology of their top 10 Yankee haters of all time, I will never link to that site). They didn't seem to have much to say about the homophobia in the stands at Fenway Park. I came across this site which is full of pleasant little snippets calling various Yankees homosexuals. Yeah, the Red Sox were on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last year, but does that make the Gay-Rod phenomenon go away?

As far as the Red Sox are concerned, they turn a blind eye to this particular aspect of Red Sox Nation's behavior. In Fenway Park A-Z, there is a section on ejection from the park for what the team deems inappropriate actions. Although it states:

Fans are also reminded that anyone observed with offensive articles will be promptly ejected from the park. The Club is committed to maintaining a high level of morality and denounces all forms of misconduct. The Red Sox will continue to make every effort to ensure socially acceptable behavior in order to allow fans to enjoy the game in comfort,

I have yet to hear of anyone ejected from the stadium for Jeter Swallows shirts or Gay-Rod cheers or any other homophobic act.

I managed to unearth this particular gem, by a Boston transplant writing for an Orlando paper. In his way of thinking, the same spirit that motivated the Sons of Liberty to throw tea into Boston Harbor inspires Red Sox fans to wear the infamous shirts and jeer at A-Rod. It reminded me of a professor I had when I was in college. He was fond of saying that in 1773, men disguised as Indians threw tea into a harbor to protest a three cent tax. Now we hand over one third of our pay to the government without thinking twice. Perhaps I would have reacted more favorably to the article if I shared the author's interest in the Red Sox, or the title didn't remind me of Ralph Wiggum's reaction to the card Lisa gave him at the end of the President's Day Pageant.

I looked pretty far and wide on google for any kind of criticism of this sordid mess of childish behavior. I even looked up psychological projection on Wikipedia, in case I could think of a decent joke to lighten the tone of this post. I haven't been able to come up with anything. I don't know why I am the only person that has noticed this behavior and thinks it's a problem.

I'm not gay. As a guy going to a Catholic school, I was as homophobic as the majority of my classmates. I've called people a fag in the same way Ozzie Guillen called out Jay Mariotti. It's just one item in the long list of things I've done and regret as I look back on it. The road to enlightenment has been difficult for me, like it is for most people. Like driving down Dorchester Ave. these days. My problem is with hypocrisy (except, as I've said, my own).

There is no way you can convince me that Ozzie Guillen can be justly punished for his stupid, insensitive, childish comments while sports fans, sports writers and MLB officials turn a blind eye to the homophobia in Red Sox Nation. I agree that Guillen's comment warrants a suspension and sensitivity training, but I don't think MLB can do anything to him without looking foolish (of course, the Selig administration has no problem looking ridiculous). You can't say that one man's homophobic comments are wrong, but the homophobic behavior in a whole group of fans is all in good fun.