My Prediction

Well that was worse than I could have imagined. First, Boston played eighteen innings in LA, and managed to score a single run. They came back to Fenway, having batted .148 in those first two games. Then in Game Three, they scored five runs early, and staked Buckholz to a lead. He pitched as well as anyone could have hoped against the Angels’ lineup. And even after the bases had been loaded early in the sixth, Bard held the Angels to a single run; Boston led 5-2 going into the eighth.

Over those last two innings, the unthinkable happened. Papelbon let in five runs. I know he was charged with only the three from the ninth inning, but really, he was responsible for the two inherited runs in the eighth. In the first half of 2009, the bullpen was close to perfect, but after the All-Star break, how many huge leads did the pen surrender? In a way, he might have done us all a favor, painful as it was. Because it just hasn’t seemed over the past couple months like this team was going to put all the pieces together. Whether it was the recurrent losing streaks, or the way they backed into the playoffs, or the way they couldn’t win on the road, but since the All-Star break, I never had much optimism for the end of this season. So Pap put an end to all that dread, and the season came to an early, if abrupt, even shocking, end.

I have received G-Man’s predictions for the rest of this season, and as long as we’re looking into the future, I have had some visions of my own. Here’s the biggest one:

Sometime this winter, G-Man will move to Portland, Maine. That’s not really a prediction; it’s more like a fact, even if you can’t look it up on Wikipedia. That will mean that next February, when spring training starts, in fact on the morning that the pitchers and catchers report, G-Man will wake up in the heart of RedSox nation. Really, the fans are even more rabid in Maine than in Boston, where there are many distractions, and too many visitors from foreign lands. Like all those college kids from the New York area. Maybe it won’t happen next spring, or even the next year or two, but sooner or later, surrounded by all those Red Sox fans, G-man will gradually be pulled into the Nation, just by pure gravitational attraction, or whatever other cosmic forces work on the hearts of anyone who has seen the insides of Fenway Park. And then one day, I’ll get a message, perhaps a voicemail, or a postcard, or even Morse code, and G-man will confess allegiance to the Sox and contrition for all the years he rooted for the evil empire. On our next visit to Boston following that message, after we drink Hirsch at the Last Hurrah with John, we’ll drive over toYawkey Way, and have John take pictures of the two of us standing beneath the 2004 World Series banner. (In case anyone can’t remember, that was the year when Dave Roberts stole second base.) Then we’ll laugh about how funny it was back in the day when G-Man was a Yankee fan, just like we now laugh about the time we got our butts kicked at Carvel. On our drive up to Portland, we’ll stop at the New Hampshire store right off 95, and buy a few bottles of scotch to share with all the other Sox lovers. And it will be like one big happy family. No more Haters. That’s my prediction.