Mike: Considering the virtual inverted-wedgies the CHB has been getting the past several years from the blogosphere, somehow I think he already knows this.
Doug: So this is it, the truck is packed up and on it's way back and we only have one final weekend sans baseball.
Mike: Can you imagine a summah without the Red Sox?
Doug: Absolutely. It's right out of a 60s sci-fi movies. Bees are are vanishing without a trace, no bodies left behind or anything, and the scientists are stuck scratching their heads.
Mike: Right and they just fail to consider the possibility of aliens taking all the bees up to their spaceship …
Doug: Hidden from our view by some sort of "advanced cloaking device" …
Mike: And using the bees in some nefarious plot to Wipe Out the Human Race!™
Mike: Yes, the bees became too intelligent and formed their own super-colonies and are now in some remote unknown location plotting to Wipe Out the Human Race!™
Bill: Yeah, it would have been the suck if Matsuzaka had injured himself, but I like to think that aftah 2004 Red Sox Nation has put away their joo-joo beads, voodoo dolls, Santeria chickens and all the other talk of curses and mumbo jumbo and would see such a freak accident as just life rationally playing itself out.
Bill: I mean leave all that sophistic hocus pocus to the fans of the othah teams.
Susan/Circle: OK, I've tried to deny it for a couple days, but I can no longah beah the weight of this terrible secret: After watching Peyton Manning on SNL I found myself kind of liking the guy.
Mike: The ballplayah doth protests too much, methinks?
Doug: Seriously, because if you really didn't care you wouldn't even think to bring it up.
Mike: It's kinda like how when newspapah guys try to dismiss the web phenomena as being a bunch of late-night blog boys who live in Ma's basement as a way of pretending it's still 1997 and newspapers ruled the earth.
Mike: And the conclusion from at least one of the Globe's dudes is, of course, that the readahs are stupid sycophants who should be made fun of at every opportunity.
Susan: I love the image of the restless Paps, tossing and turning in the sheets like a lattah day Hamlet, Prince of the Fens.
Susan: "To close or not to close: that is the question."
Mike: Whether 'tis nobler to go every 5th day Of fortuitous routine and 200 innings, Or to seize the ball in a 9th of troubles, And once, twice, thrice end them?
Bill: I'm sleeping like a baby, Mahty, but thanks for the concern and all.
Marty: Doesn't it astound you Bill that Theo Epstein can go after JD Drew like he's Angelie Jolie going after a 3rd World orphan … so much passion, so much showering of gifts on Drew while being so blasé about finding a closer?
Bill: Well, obviously we need to fill the closer role, but I don't think that's a weakness.
Marty: Not a weakness? Not a weakness? What are they putting in the water up there in Bahstin anyway?
Bill: Despite the absence, for now, of a definitive closer, this bullpen is not that bad. It is probably the best bullpen the Red Sox have had since 2004.
Marty: Considering your '05 and '06 clubs, that's like saying the Heaven's Gate death cult wasn't as bad as the Jim Jones death cult because fewer people died but, you know, in the end everyone is still dead.
Bill: The 2006 club had a lot of life.
Marty: Bill, I hate to break it to you, but the games played in August and September actually count. Heh.
Bill: Injuries, Mahts, injuries. It's like Schilling writes on his blog, we are much better suited depth wise to handle an injury this year than last.
Bill: And the AL East team whose stahting rotation spends the fewest days on the DL ovah the course of the season will win the division.
Bill: If you've been paying attention, Mahty, you might have noticed the Boston stahtahs are looking mighty fine this spring.
Marty: Ah, yes, hope springs eternal in the Sawx fan breast.
Bill: Why not? Did you see Matsuzaka, the game's best numbah 3 stahtah, against the Pirates? 96 mph fastballs to go with the big curve, tight slidah, and Wiffleball change.
Bill: Like I said, Mahty, I'm sleeping fine at night.
Marty: Enjoy it while you can, Bill, as it's going to get really hot and muggy come August. We'll see how rested you feel then.
Bill: I don't know why, but the image of Manny Ramirez as mastah of the grill and flipping burgers in the backyahd really tickles me.
Doug: But I see Manny as more of the charcoal and lightah fluid kind of guy, you know, creating a Vesuvius in the thing and scaring the piss out of all his neighbahs.
Bill: Heh. And his wife yelling, "Manny Ramirez if you burn this house down, so help me, you'll be Manny Being Ass-whooped Manny!…"
Bill: Can't say I blame him. Our culture is awash in opinions already.
Doug: Totally. But I can't help but want to bust Manny's balls now, but having people just asking his opinion on everything, especially totally random, out of the blue kinds of things.
Bill: Yeah, imagine Shaughnessy yelling across the Red Sox lockah room: "Hey, Man-Man … you think these pants make my butt look big?"
Susan/Circle: Are you kidding me? This tourney is Vanilla Dong's to lose.
Mike: I dunno, I think Gertrude Nipple could surprise a lot of people.
Susan/Circle: Yeah, and in that same regional, I think Lady Comfort seeded numbah 15 could be the first upset over Ayo Yayo, but seriously, in the end, nobody gets past Vanilla Dong.
Mike: Does seem a lock. I mean that name just works on so many levels.
Mike: Anyway, once your NOTY bracket is in, you need to head over to the Community Forecast site for the Red Sox … You know, the whole "Wisdom of the Crowd" thing.
Susan/Circle: Wait a second, I thought the Wisdom of the Crowds deal was heavily dependent on diversity of opinion and can fail entirely if the crowd is too homogenous?
Susan/Circle: Wouldn't that pretty much preclude Red Sox Nation as a so-called "wise" crowd?
Susan/Circle: That, of course, isn't going to stop me from going with my Bayesian feeling an putting a 3.04 ERA next to Josh Beckett's name.
Mike: Heh. Which will be offset completely by someone like our favorite pessimist "Paddy" predicting a 7.50 ERA for Beckett.
Susan/Circle: Ah, right, Paddy. L'enfer, c'est les autres.
Mike: I know, talk about your Princess Nocandy. But, seriously, maybe with the half-fulls and the half-empties combined the aggregate wisdom of Red Sox Nation will be a good predictah in the end?
Susan/Circle: Hah. Betting on baseball equals heinous blight on all of mankind. Encouraging people to gamble with MLB branded scratch tickets, er, not so much.
Mike: Well, we should be used to contradictions in baseball by now.
Susan/Circle: Right. Aftah all it's the "National" pastime, provided, of course, that you define national as subscribing to a sole vendor and installing proprietary equipment in your home in ordah to watch out of mahket games.
Mike: Well, you know what they say. Those who can do. And those who can't create blogs criticizing the can do people for doing what it is they do.
Susan/Circle: Yeah, and those that can't do and can't blog, well, they become blog comment trolls.
Mike: The lowest of the low.
Susan/Circle: You know Nietzsche's greatest fear was that people who became disabused by religion and by politics and by all the other social norms out there would become nihilists and believe in nothing.
Mike: Absolutely. And the result would be that they'd lead very small lives in which they'd only think about pleasure and they'd only think about their own advantage.
Susan/Circle: Can't think of a better description for what makes a troll a troll.
Bill: Jeez, Mahty, are you still listening to the Spice Girls as well? C'mon last time I spent any time thinking about Roger Clemens was way back in 1996.
Bill: Ah, memo to Mahty: The Red Sox acquired him as a numbah 2 or 3 guy.
Bill: Besides we both know you're lying awake a night in cold sweats thinking about the gyroball.
Marty: Yeah, well, that might make sense, Billy Boyo, since just like a dream, the gyroball doesn't really exist.
Bill: Too funny that this is coming from the same guy who in back in college also claimed the vaginal orgasm was a myth? How's that one working out for you, Mahty the Minuteman.
Marty: Real funny, Callaghan. Don't you ever get tired of the ad hominem?
Bill: Yeah, that's what your girlfriend said, too.
Marty: Talking to Red Sux Nation is like talkign to a bucnh of 12 year olds.
Marty: Oh, Billy, it's going to matter to you Sawx fans when you're 11 games back (again).
Bill: Right, Mahts, because we all know nothing evah changes from year to year in baseball. That's why, of course, no team has evah come back from being down 3-0 in the playoffs … Oh, wait a second … What's that Mahty? Hello? Helloooo?
Doug: With Schilling joining that other Olympian of bloviation, Mark Cuban, I fear the rest of us on the blogosphere will suffocate from pixel asphyxiation.
Bill: Are you kidding me? If Cuban and Schilling ever post a blog entry at precisely the same moment, the entire interwebs will collapse under the weight of the collective conceit and self-aggrandizing.
Doug: Gotta give Schilling credit, though, for opening up the comments just as Cuban did.
Bill: Yeah, but you've gotta wonder how long that'll last.
Doug: Seriously, somewhere right now in Chillicothe, Missouri is a a guy huddled over a computer and eating sliced bread as he furiously types in all caps something about how THE SAWX SUX! and that Schilling is TEH BIGGEST WOOS!
Bill: From this morning's Herald: "In Matsuzaka’s Red Sox debut against major leaguers, two Marlins - Jason Stokes and Jeremy Hermida - said they saw a pitch that had movement and action unlike any other pitch they had ever seen before."
Bill: "Hermida saw it three times, Stokes once and the UFO broke down and away to the left-handed hitting Hermida and in on the hands of Stokes."
Doug: Spring day game Gyroball goes by The sound of whiff.
Bill: Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell said Matsuzaka’s changeup was really the pitch they actually saw but the Marlin's insist it was the gyroball.
Doug: A ball spun clockwise by: "Look!" the batter said, But he was alone.
This is a double-header day, so be sure to scroll down to the second strip that follows …
Steve: Same last name and both are writers, but the comparison pretty much ends stops cold right there.
Mike: Maybe the Ron version can use his two month suspension to focus on writing a work worthy of the Borges name.
Steve: Hah, can't you just picture the Ron Borges trying to birth a masterpiece like The Garden of Forking Paths?
Mike: Yeah, but instead of a story that describes a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, each one itself leading to further proliferations of possibilities …
Mike: The Ron version would describe a world with only one possible outcome for every event: Bledsoe is awesome, Tom Brady is way overrated, and Bill Belichick is a stoopid n00b with bad mannahs. And, oh yeah, the Patriots are teh suck!
Doug: Ah, jeez, you know a story like that can totally piss ovah an othahwise perfect day.
Mike: Dude, don't let the assclowns of this world bring you down. Focus on the positive … They may have a cure of Beckett's blistah issues and we get anothah look Matsuzaka today against the Mahlins.
Bill: Yeah, it and only took a dozen or so years aftah Al Gore invented the interwebs for a baseball beat writah to get hip to it but, you know, bettah late than nevah.
Doug: "… while any 100-win team has a legitimate shot at the World Series, those with three dominating starting pitchers do better than those with equivalent-but-deeper total talent. If Schilling, Beckett, and Matsuzaka are humming along, the wait for the next Red Sox World Championship won't be anywhere near as long as the last one."
Rider on Green Line: FYI: The Soxaholix site was mentioned in an NPR piece on baseball yesterday. You can listen here. That combined with Matsuzaka's first outing, made for a pretty good day.
Susan/Circle: Mahk my words, Josh Beckett is going to be a pitching stud in '07.
Tara: He's bringing sexy back.
Susan/Circle: [growl]
Tara: Anything and everything is imaginable in the Spring …
Susan/Circle: Schilling will drop his wintah weight.
Tara: Matsuzaka, under the tutelage of Wake, will add the knuckle alongside his gyro.
Susan/Circle: There'll be peace in the Middle East.
Tara: After contentious negotiation, Ahmadinejad will agree to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program in exchange for a permanent guest judge position on American Idol.
Susan/Circle: Holy 12th Imam, now that'd be funny. He'd make Simon Cowell seem endearing by comparison.
Tara: Yeah, picture it … "Infidel number 3. That song was too big for you and you were pitchy like the Zionist dog you are. Exit stage left to your execution by stoning."
Susan/Circle: "Seacrest, you disgraceful and wretched homo who shall burn in the fire of Islam's fury, send in the next spawn of Satan … I tell you, Paula the Whore, the real Holocaust is having to endure this dried up and rotten show."
Doug: I can see this being the new summah fashion trend.
Bill: Not for me. Since I was a kid, I can't stand the feeling of having anything wedged between my toes.
Doug: Wha? No flip flops?
Bill: Nope. Nothing separating my little piggies.
Doug: This would explain a lot …
Bill: And how's that?
Doug: Well, according to Shiatsu theory, wearing Tabi socks benefits one's digestion due to the acupuncture meridians located between the toes and, you know, you and your little "flatulence" problem?
