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October 21, 2004

Wow, Wow, Wow!!!

Wow!!! What a game and what a night! I am absolutely euphoric and at my office after coming over to the Kenmore Square/Fenway Park area immediately after the game ended. I have never in my lifetime experienced a sports moment as powerful as this one. There are still many thousands of people there. I tried to reach Fenway but eventually the cops or something started pushing people back and things for a few minutes really became crazy and dangerous with people being shoved (unintentionally in all cases I saw) around as the crowd mass moved in no controllable fashion. I am a big, strong, tall guy and even I was feeling in danger. The small women there were really in difficulty and also couldn't even see enough to even consider trying to find a way out and there was really nothing others of us could do to help them. I finally managed to make it to the side and wait for the problem to subside. Anyway, aside from that, amazing to be in such a mass of people so euphoric. The chant of choice was "Yankess Suck!". This is going to be a crazy place to be next week and absolutely insane if they win. The Sox winning would certainly be one of the most important sports moments anywhere in history I think given their importance as a franchise, the curse stuff and the 86 year drought!!! I think it would rival the 80 Olympics Hockey win and am having trouble thinking of any other events that would compare.

Well, despite the euphoria, I guess I''ll persevere with my game analysis. This was of course a pretty easy game compared to the last 6 thanks particularly to Damon doing as I asked and picking up 6 RBIs on 2 HomeRuns including the incredible Slam he hit. Waiting for the pitch, I said 'All is forgiven if you drive in 2+ here, particularly if you hit the Slam' and when he did I jumped up and was screaming YES!!!, even TiVo delayed by like 1.5 hours at that point. Ortiz's Homer in the first and my man Damon's 2 walks and Homer didn't hurt either. On the pitching, what an amazing job by Lowe giving the best performance of any Boston pitcher this whole series.

My one negative is on Francona who I thought made the two worst bullpen moves of the entire series on a single pitching change, the first very bad, and the second really crazy. Taking out Lowe who had only thrown 69 pitches and was doing incredibly was the bad thing but maybe he saw something I didn't. Putting in Pedro was insane for a ton of reasons: 1) Pedro only had two days of rest and in the past has not pitched well even on 3 days. 2) Pedro is a starting pitcher and always has been and is a bad choice from the bullpen. 3) Pedro seems to have a psychological issue pitching against the Yankees (Game 7 last year, the "Who's your Daddy?" thing) 4) Partly because of 3, there is no better way to seriously get the Yankees crowd into the game than bringing in Pedro and having him do badly. 5) We want Pedro fully able to start a game as early as possible in the World Series. I really felt that they should bring Pedro in only after ALL of Timlin, Embree, Foulke, Arroyo and Wakefield and this is absolutely not hindsight - just before leaving work tonight I said the same thing to a colleague.

My final thanks is to TiVo which as I mentioned last year is the only thing which makes baseball games watchable for me and was impossible before TiVo. My practice is to start recording the game and then start watching like 2 hours in. Doing this, I usually catch up to live action right around the 9th inning. In Game 6 I caught up right between the break before the 9th inning and so watched the final inning live. Tonight I caught up in like the 7th and then switched a few minutes elsewhere and only watched the bottom of the 9th live. Baseball for me is just too slow and, with these games, too tense and stressful, at regular speed. With TiVo, the slowness is totally gone and the tension is greatly reduced because it is caused more than anything else by the waiting to see what happens which now takes a fraction of the time. Watching a game that is already over does almost nothing for me but this delay effect while the game is still going on reduces the interest for me only a tiny fraction. For this reason, this TiVo effect would be impossible to achieve using a VCR. Oh, since I'm on effectively this huge Ad for TiVo, if anyone buys one and isn't giving the referral to someone else, let me know as they now have a nice rewards program.

Go Sox and Thanks!

Posted by aarondf at October 21, 2004 01:23 AM

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