"It does not 'get better'" for the Boston Red Sox

I am a baseball fan and have been for as long as I can remember.

My first baseball memories were during the 1978 World Series in which the New York Yankees repeated as world champions with names such as Reggie Jackson, Ron Guidry, Thurman Munson, Goose Gossage, and Craig Nettles. My love affair with the Yankees was cemented at the tender age of seven. It would be another eighteen years until they won another World Championship.

Being a fan of the Yankees means, almost universally, that you "hate" the Boston Red Sox. It simply comes with the territory. Over the last dozen or so years, these two teams have locked into epic battles for the baseball ages with teams evenly matched. I joyfully watched in 2003 when the Red Sox imploded in the final game of the American League Championship Series. The following year, I sat in the stands way out in Left Field to watch the Yankees suffer through the greatest collapse in post-season history -- surrendering a three-oh best of seven lead.

On Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox completed what is the greatest collapse in baseball history (which is saying something). They led the Tampa Bay Rays on September 1, 2011 by nine games with twenty-seven left to play. By the final game of the season, the two teams were tied. On the final night, defying any conceivable statistical probability (which, after all, is what baseball is about), the Red Sox coughed up a one run lead in the bottom of the ninth against one of the worst teams in the league. Down to their last strike, the Baltimore Orioles rallied for the win. Meanwhile in Tampa -- at nearly the same time -- the Rays clawed back from a seven-oh deficit in the late innings -- hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes by a batter who was known only for his lousy hitting. They would later hit another home run and win the game and eliminate the Red Sox from the post season.

This particular Boston team was not a likeable one. Any baseball fan could not help but admire the moxie of the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox with characters such as Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, and David Ortiz. This team felt like baseball's version of Daniel Snyder's Washington Redskins -- manufactured and banal. That may seem like some statement coming from a fan of the free-spending Yankees, but Carl Crawford and John Lackey? These guys are millionaire babies that epitomize what is wrong with professional sports. So without any divine reason, I was glad to see this particular team fail this way.

This summary presents a lot of detail, I admit it. And baseball is simply a past-time; it has become endemic of the bread & circus culture we modern men inhabit. But let me connect the divine with the temporal for one moment -- and interpose a cause and effect between baseball and cosmic infamy. On July 1, 2011, the Boston Red Sox were firmly in first place in the American League Eastern Division. Anyone with more than a passing interest in baseball would have told you at that time that the Red Sox were a tremendous baseball team and very likely to later play in the World Series. They also cut a video on July 1, 2011; here it is:




If you could stomach watching this video, you know what a vile "project" the so-called "It's gets better" project is -- as if the greater and greater exposure to a sin like sodomy could get better. But there you have it from infamous and particularly vile sodomite Dan Savage who created this diabolical youth-oriented sodomy project. I have written the topic here.

The "It's get better" project is evil -- that the Boston Red Sox endorsed is lamentable. And today the manager of the Boston Red Sox (the first person on the video) was essentially fired. So there you have it: perhaps it was divine justice for the venerable Boston Red Sox to fail in almost miraculous fashion because they openly and publicly encouraged young people to continue in sodomy.

P.S. If the New York Yankees make such a video, I will have watched my last professional baseball game. With the ways things are regressing in the society at large, I expect sadly that day is not long off.