Terry Francona, Exasperated Babysitter

With Jacoby Ellsbury whining about how his groin hurts and hurling the ball willy nilly in the general direction of the infield and Jed Lowrie tripping and falling on his face and getting doubled up at first base and then diving OVER the ball after taking the field the next inning, and Clay Buchholz balking and kicking a foul ball fair, basically, tonight was one of the thankfully rare occasions our rookies really looked like rookies.

Tito's probably buying Excedrin in bulk these days with all of them flailing around in the field like newborn giraffes and finally forcing him into a crisis during which he completely lost his composure with an umpire over a balk call that even a complete homer like Jerry Remy couldn't really take issue with.

Can't blame him, though, really. It must be like trying to herd kittens--somehow, I feel like he got even balder during this game.

The older guys, too, seemed nonplussed by the display. Kevin Youkilis cut off Jacoby's errant throw with a nearly palpable eyeroll, and Papi and Wake were caught on the dugout camera looking on thusly:

As I'm sure I've mentioned, I get score updates on my cell phone in the form of text messages, which delivers them with a cheery BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! about five minutes or so after the score actually changes. When I'm watching live and still have my phone on, that BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! has a tendency to put either a cheerful or obnoxious note of punctuation on the situation, depending on whether it was the Sox who scored the run.

When I'm watching on TiVo, I've discovered that new wrinkle of modern technologically-created consciousness that is struggling with whether or not I should peek at the score while still several innings behind, or trying to guess by the number of texts and their frequency against approximately how far I am behind in the game, thereby trying to extrapolate which team is likely to be up now and therefore scoring the runs. It's fun.

Tonight, at first, the BEEP tolled for Clay. But he's young, yet.

Julian Tavarez, in the meantime...

P.S. I definitely need to get my hands on this book, if only because I was unaware until I read this post from Surviving Grady that Josh wrote the foreword. First of all, Josh, writing, whuh? This does not jibe with my IBW and therefore gives me cognitive dissonance. Then, there's the fact that the excerpt Denton extracted over at SG is the second time in about a week I've seen / read Josh wax downright sappy about a teammate. I'm still carefully trying to process this information.

P.P.S. I know it's unlike me to venture beyond the borders of the Nation, but my friend Andy actually wrote on his personal blog a little while ago about a Nats tradition known as the Presidents Race, which in turn led to the revelation, for me anyway, of a website entitled 'Let Teddy Win', which is quite frankly one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Comments

[LetTeddyWin.com]

Oh my, I'm blushing. You just made my day!