I took the 25-man World Series roster and added a few key players that were left off (Tavarez and Wakefield) to see how we’re doing.

Here’s how it stacks up as of today:

Amazing. At the start of the 2007 season, it was said that, on paper, this appeared to be a championship team. It turns out they were right. Wouldn’t that mean that essentially the same team would look the same in 2008?

Some players will likely not come back as strong. I think Schilling will continue his aging decline, but Dice-K should be even more effective after seeing the league once. Hopefully Ortiz will come back strong and we won’t suffer the kinds of injuries as the last half of the 2006 season.

In any case, I’m optimistic.

Update 1/11/2008: Mirabelli is back!
Update 1/19/2008: Lopez re-signed. Youk and Snyder still in salary arbitration.
Update 2/2/2008: Youkilis and Snyder re-signed. Sean Casey added at 1st base.

The 2007 Season of the Boston Red Sox started for me last December. We had already booked a cruise with my parents for March, which left out of Miami. Red Sox spring training games would be happening in Fort Myers, Florida, so we decided to try to hit a few games before the cruise.

One Saturday morning in early December, my parents, sister, Anne and I all got our browsers refreshing when tickets first went on sale for the games. We got some good seats for a home game in Ft. Myers. A few months later we got tickets to see the Sox play the Phillies in Clearwater the day before the home game.

My sister also presented some late-season tickets to my parents for Christmas. I guess they sell some for games at the beginning and end of the season way ahead of time.

The Season

March came and we enjoyed the spring training games. It was neat to see them plan in a smaller setting and see some new rookies such as Dustin Pedroia start to play.

Thanks to my Slingbox at my parents’ house in New Hampshire, I was able to catch the first game of the season. Of the 162 regular season games they played, I probably watched most or all of 150 of them. On days when they didn’t play, I missed it and craved some kind of baseball to watch.

They played extremely well in the first half. In the second half things got tighter, but the team stayed healthy for the most part, unlike the end of the 2006 season.

We saw the Red Sox play when they came to Oakland. It was fun to go, but nothing special happened – nothing big was on the line.

In August, Anne booked a flight to Denver from Oct 26 to Oct 30. Some friends from the East coast were going to be there for a conference since it’s a quick flight from the bay area, she decided to meet them there.

My Dad and sister went to the game on September 27. The tickets my sister has purchased nearly a year before missed the division-clinching game by only one day.

I watched the playoffs with much anticipation. Meanwhile, the lottery for (potential) World Series tickets in Boston was announced. We entered mostly as a “what if?”. A few weeks later I got an email that said I didn’t win. Oh well.

When the Rockies clinched the National League, we noticed that the World Series was going to be taking place in Denver, over the same weekend Anne was supposed to be there. Interesting.

My parents were in town for a few days, just in time for the end of the ALCS. I got to watch the Red Sox win the League Championship with my Dad. When JD Drew hit the grand slam, my Dad and I started yelling. Audrey was on my lap and she looked surprised for a second, then started screaming in fear. Oops. We were reprimanded by our wives and we had to be careful to cheer quietly from then on.

Getting World Series Tickets

The following Monday night when I read about the Colorado Rockies having problems with their web site when they were trying to sell World Series tickets. What? They’re still selling tickets? I assumed that they had the same lottery the Sox had. Later I read that tickets would be on sale again at noon the next day.

A plan started to form – I already had a place to stay in Denver. The Red Sox were playing in the World Series. Tickets were still available. Wow.

At quarter to noon on Tuesday, we had 3 computers at home pointed at coloradorockies.com. I had 3 at work. We all started hitting refresh. By 1:15, none of us had gotten out of the “waiting room”, so I started to take a look the code for the site. It turns out that the page checks to see if you can get in, then waits 120 seconds and tries again. I found the code that triggers the retry and ran it manually. Now instead of a chance every 2 minutes, I had a chance every few seconds! After a few minutes of doing this, I started to get a very slow loading ticket purchase page. I was in!

Their website was painfully slow. Pages took minutes to load. We had decided ahead of time to try for Game 4. After many minutes, I finally got the search for seats. I picked 4 best available. It came up with some seats way in the upper deck for $90 each. Just being there was enough, so I went ahead. The next few minutes were agonizing as I filled out the billing form. By the time I got to the end, my tickets had timed out and the seats were released again. Arrggh! If their site wasn’t so slow, I wouldn’t have lost them!

This was a blessing in disguise though. I still had access to the site and I could search again. Realizing that our friends weren’t into baseball, I went for just 2 seats, figuring that I could get some better seats if asking for only 2. It worked. The new seats were still upper deck, but closer to home plate in foul territory. Now that I already registered my billing info, the purchase went much faster. We were really going! I could hardly believe it.

I quickly used my free flight on Southwest to book the same departing flight as Anne to Denver, then another back on Monday. Everything was set and Anne was thrilled not to be flying alone with a 3 month-old for the first time. Meanwhile, I watched tickets similar to ours sell on Ebay for $1100, $800 more than I spent for them. Wow.

Denver

We probably should have left more time for the flight to Denver. Getting to Oakland, checking in and dealing with all the infant stuff made it close. Audrey did well on the flight. People couldn’t stop ogling her and commenting on how cute she was. We were very popular. We met our friends at the airport, dealt with getting a rental car, then drove 1 1/2 hours to Colorado Springs.

The excitement over the Rockies was immediately obvious. We drove up to a toll booth where the attendant was wearing a Rockies jacket. Posters were all over his booth and there was purple and black everywhere. I asked how much the toll would be for Red Sox fans. He responded, “Ehh, we’ll charge you the same.” I was a bit worried about invading the opposing team’s territory and how they would respond, but the toll both guy and every other Rockies fan I met were very friendly and just glad to be in the series.

On Saturday we toured around a bit, gasped for air at the top of Pikes Peak, then drove through the mountains to Frisco, where we were staying for the rest of the trip. I had never been to Colorado before and I found it quite impressive. Huge mountains and lots of trees reminded me of New England a bit, but on a larger scale.

On the drive to Frisco, we listened to the game on the radio. The Sox won again, making it 3-0 and possible for us to see them win it all. Wow again.

Game 4

We drove the hour and a half from Frisco and got to the park with plenty of time to spare. Parking in Denver is cheap! $9! We packed a bag with all the stuff Audrey needed and walked to the gate.

As soon as we started walking towards the stadium, Audrey started getting attention. Even the Rockies fans didn’t seem to mind the total Red Sox outfit on account of her being so cute. Our seats were indeed way up there. We were 2 rows from the very top, and several rows above the purple row of seats signifying exactly 5,280 feet above sea level.

The park was still pretty empty, so we thought we should walk around and see if we could get close the field while the Red Sox took batting practice. Audrey got even more attention now. People pointed and commented at “the littlest fan” and offered to take our picture or wanted pictures with her. We should have started charging money. We even got a picture with a woman and her 2 1/2 month old, dressed up in Rockies gear. Most people thought she was a boy, I guess becuase she didn’t have a pink Red Sox hat or maybe they assume that girls don’t like baseball. Pfftt to that!

We managed to wander down right behind home plate where we chatted with some very nice Rockies season ticket holders and even some Red Sox fans. By my estimation, Red Sox fans were outnumbered 20 to 1.

As the game time got close, we headed back up to our seats. We were concerned that all the noise would scare Audrey. She wasn’t thrilled about me and my Dad screaming in our living room, so 50,000 people screaming might just terrify her. We brought some cotton balls to muffle her ears underneath her hat but it was still pretty loud. Unfortunately there were two young idiots directly behind us that were screaming at the top of their lungs at every stupid thing. Audrey began to cry whenever it got too loud. After a half-inning I was about to tell them to shut the hell up when Anne said she would take Audrey down to a quieter area for a while.

I watched alone for a another inning or so and then decided I didn’t come to watch a baseball game alone. I found Anne and a spot where we could stand at the top of an aisle. Audrey seemed to settle into a defensive sleeping mode, muffled under hats and blankets. We stood for 4 or 5 innings.

Audrey continued to get comments, even under several layers of blankets. One woman asked Anne how old she was. Anne told her and the woman responded “my 3 month old is at home”.

In the 7th, we saw some people leave, saying something about having to go to school tomorrow. School? Come on, this is the World Series! Skip school! Their seats were nice though, in our same section, but 20 rows lower.

For a while the fans were pretty quiet. When the Red Sox scored or made a good play, you’d see a few lone Sox fans pop up amongst the crowd and cheer. The rest of the stadium got back into it when the score went to 4-3 in the 7th. The towels started spinning again and everything felt alive.

The last few innings were tense in a close game, but I knew the Rockies would have a tough time once it was Okajima and then Papelbon in to finish the game. Papelbon struck out the final batter, a sparse roar went through the stadium and the Red Sox scrummed on the mound. THAT was pretty cool. They won it all.

The Celebration

We celebrated with Red Sox fans emerging amongst the purple and black for a bit, then decided to see if we could get a closer look. A sea of red consolidated around the Red Sox dugout. We watched from the upper level for a bit, then went down to the field level while we waited for the team to reemerge from the dugout.

I called my Dad at 12:30 am Eastern to congratulate him as well. It was a pretty cool moment.

I worked my way down the aisle, then pushed my way closer. The crowd was full of Red Sox nuts, people with signs, painted red, dressed in gorilla costumes and screaming at the top of their lungs. I pushed my way in, stood on top of the arm rests of two rows at once and eventually got a foot right on the dugout. I was that close.

The guy to my immediate right was holding the famous “dancing Papelbon” sign. I stepped on it at one point, a sin that will most certainly earn me some time in Red Sox purgatory. Unfortunately, that was the closest we saw to Papelbon dancing. Despite our persistent chants of “dance!” to him, he just did his interviews and hung out on the field.

Fans just started chanting stuff at the field every minute. Bobby Kielty spent a lot of time talking on his cell phone so I started a “Get off the phone!” chant. We had fun. The chant the news picked up was “Re-sign Lowell”, the MVP of the series. When we chanted that at Theo Epstein he held out his cap, mock pandering for change. Later, Tina Cervasio from NESN asked us to yell again for Lowell so she could get it on tape. “Don’t sign A-Rod” also went around a few times.

Only Mike Timlin played with crowd, spraying champagne on us for a bit. What was more disappointing was that we knew nothing about what was going on. They just displayed a graphic on the big scoreboard. We guessed that Lowell was the MVP when they walked him around with the trophy. There were no announcements or video from the clubhouse. People watching home probably saw more than we did right next to the field.

The cameras came by several times, but I’m not sure I was close enough to get on them. The photos I saw afterwards showed people right in front of me, but I couldn’t make myself out in any of them.

I recognized a lot of the other sports reporters from the Boston area. Tina Cervasio has really big teeth. Michael Chiklis from The Shield and the Fantastic 4 movies was there. I have no idea why.

Eventually most of the team went back into the clubhouse and I ran out of batteries on my camera and my cell phone. Anne and Audrey were waiting patiently above and Anne was happy I was able to join the madness down there. I was very appreciative that she waited there for so long. Of course she had lots of people make comments on Audrey. One guy even helped her change a diaper!

With no one but Red Sox fans left, we exited the stadium and walked back to the car. At 2 am we got back to Frisco. Still jazzed up, I read the coverage of the game until 3 am and even then had trouble getting to sleep.

Post-Post Season

The whole year was incredible experience. Getting tickets throughout the season and seeing the Red Sox win the World Series was a culmination of a heck of a lot of luck in timing and coincidence.

While it would have been even more amazing to see it happen at Fenway, being in Denver made it a much more personal experience. Most of the crowd left, enabling me to get as close as I did to the field and the players.

2007 was definitely the year I was the most invested in the Red Sox. Never before did I got to Spring Training, watch so many games on TV or of course go to the World Series. While it was fun, it’s also a big emotional investment. In the end it was satisfying, but clearly every year will not be like this one. When they lost a game, I was grumpy and unhappy. I’m sure I took it out on others as well, all for a stupid baseball game. Spring training starts again in only 3 months, but right now I’m not sure I want to spend so much of my life being a fan again.

Most of all, I was happy to share all those fun moments with my family – from spring training all the way the World Series. Those games I will remember forever. But in case I do forget, at least I have this story and the photos on flickr.

This affects even the simplest of things, like dinner. Anne asks what I want for dinner. I’m too grumpy to talk about it. At 8:15 I decide that having dinner sounds better than watching the game. Unable to find something immediately microwavable, I decide on the next simplest thing – spaghetti. But I can’t even do that right.

We have angel hair and linguine, but not enough of either for the both us. If I was smart, I would put the linguine in first since it has to cook longer, but I already put the angel hair in so it was too late. Then Anne gets annoyed at me because I picked a pot that was too small for pasta for two people. A few minutes later, she gets annoyed that I put the pasta in before the water was completely boiling. As I go to drain the pasta, I accidentally dump half of it in the sink. It turns out there was enough for 2, but not anymore.

I’m so grumpy I can’t even cook pasta. So sad.

They won tonight, but only by sheer incompetence on the part of the Toronto Blue Jays. Alex Cora hit a ball to deep right center. The Jays’ Alex Rios was under it, had it, then lost control if it. It bounced out of his glove, into his other hand and then he managed to fling the ball 10 feet into the crowd. The Red Sox won 6-5 on that 2 run home run/error. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Clearly the injuries of David Wells, Trot Nixon, Tim Wakefield, Jon Lester, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Jason Varitek, Lenny DiNardo, Keith Foulke, Adam Stern, Alex Gonzalez, Matt Clement, David Pauley, Lenny DiNardo, and Willy Mo Peno are a problem. That’s 15 players! The team is barely recognizable today. But they haven’t even been able to score when pitching has been (in rare cases) good. They seem to have lost their will to win.

I haven’t given up on them this season yet. I hope the turn of the calendar page will make as much as a difference from August to September as it did from July to August. They’re currently 8 games behind the Yankees and 6.5 games behind for the wild card. They have 28 games left.

Here’s what needs to happen for them to turn it around:

• Varitek needs to come back. Clearly the team is lost without whatever he does to lead them.
• Ortiz needs to get a weekend at a spa or something, stop stressing out, and hit 15 more homers, preferably with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th.
• Manny needs to stop being such a wuss and get back out there. Your knee is fine. Perhaps he could even pay attention to the game from left field once in a while.
• Coco Crisp needs to teach Willy Mo Pena how to catch a ball.
• Trot Nixon needs to be a tad less enthusastic. Play hard, but don’t frickin injure yourself.
• Josh Beckett needs to stop being so flaky. You’re making a gazillion dollars to pitch well in every outing, not every 1 out of 3.
• The entire bullpen with the exception of Papelbon and maybe Foulke need to be replaced. I shiver every time Tavarez or Delcarmen go in. The replacements should not be relievers with losing records and double-digit ERAs.
• Mike Burns needs to prove that he’s damn appreciative to be traded to a team that will at least finish over .500 this year.
• Wakefield needs to come back and pitch many long innings for the bullpen’s and all our sakes.
• Schilling, Lowell, Loretta and Youkilis need to be kept under constant supervision, away from all sharp or otherwise dangerous objects that might cause them to be injured.

Nevermind, I guess it is hopeless.


M. Clement SP Jun 15 15-day Right shoulder strain
K. Foulke RP Jun 12 15-day Right elbow tendinitis
D. Wells SP May 27 15-day Right knee soreness
L. DiNardo SP/RP May 22 60-day Neck strain


Which made me wonder – what the heck does a 15-day disabled list mean when someone’s been on it since May? Wikipedia to the rescue:

There are two types of DL: the 15 day and the 60 day (previously there was also a 21 day DL). Players may be put on either list and may not rejoin the team until the associated number of days has elapsed. However, a player’s time on the DL may exceed the specified number of days.

I’ll finally see my first game of the season Tuesday night when the A’s play the Red Sox. Go Sox!

We debated whether or not to take Caltrain to the game. We’ve tried driving and Caltrain in the past. Two people taking Caltrain is almost as expensive as driving and paying for parking. Caltrain also takes a lot longer. They don’t have any express trains on weekend, so we decided to drive.

It was a nice day for a game, though a bit chilly, especially since we were underneath the View seats so there was no sun to warm us. They did some Sept 11 memorial stuff before the game including a 4-jet flyover which was pretty cool.

The Giants lost of course, but it was nice to see a game again in this great park. We even saw Barry Bonds, a day before he’s scheduled to be activated again. He was driving out of the park in his massive black Hummer.

I had a few hot dogs, some fries and even found a cache while we were in there. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

What’s this? It’s a baseball game. It’s a Red Sox game. It’s on my TV. But it’s a Thursday night and they aren’t playing a local team and I don’t have a satellite dish. This is amazing.

Lately I’ve been getting annoyed that I couldn’t watch all but the rarest Red Sox game here on the west coast. I use GameChannel on Yahoo! Sports of course, but’s not nearly the same and way delayed.

I started to conjure up a scheme to rebroadcast games from my parents’ computer in NH over the Internet to me. I had them rummage up an AM radio with a headphone jack they could hook up to the microphone jack on their Mac. My elaborate plan was to leave the radio always on and tuned to WEEI. Then I’d set up Nicecast to encode and broadcast the audio stream out to wherever I was. That would be excellent.

Thankfully Glen alerted me to something better and far less Rube Goldbergian – MLB.TV. It’s Major League Baseball’s live audio/video streaming service. I had heard of it, but I thought was expensive. It’s actually quite reasonable – $15 for a month of unlimited live games or $8 for unlimited audio for the rest of the season. I was going to just get the audio, but the video was too good to pass up.

Just seeing my first game felt great – it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time and before now simply wasn’t possible without getting some sort of satellite service.

The streams are pretty high-quality. 350kbps Windows Media 9 Video. They’re certainly good enough to watch on a computer. It looks like they’re using Akamai to distrubute the streams. While it’s usually pretty clear, some nights I’ve had problems with the video stalling while the audio continued.

The player itself works fine. The video image seems to get stuck sometimes with Firefox, so I usually just play it using IE. The player window is way bigger than it needs to be though and it’s filled with useless stuff. Why not make it small so I can stick the window in the corner of my monitor or add scores and data ala GameChannel in the other half? Considering that the score is barely readable on the small video screen, this would be really handy.

The video player takes more screen real estate than I’d like especially when my laptop screen runs at a maximum of 1024 x 768. Other than that, the video that plays automatically on their home page is extremely annoying; I have to remember to close it as soon as I launch the player.

You can set the video to play in full-screen mode which is pretty nice though it reminds you how much higher resolution computer screens are over televions.

The “live” stream isn’t quite live. It’s about 30 seconds delayed probably just due to technical limitations. I discovered this when my Dad IM’d me about a few plays before they happened for me. From now on I make sure he doesn’t ruin any plays for me.

One of the strangest things is watching the local commercials. I get pitches for furniture stores and car dealerships in New England. It’s funny to hear the Boston accents again. I also get to hear Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo call the games. Tonight the game is being carried by Fox Sports West and I’m listening to a couple of personality-free sportscasting drones who appear to favor the Angels. Grrr.

To get the full effect, last night I decided to hook it up to my TV. I plugged the S-Video out and component audio out from my laptop into my receiver. It worked beautifully. The only problem was that I had to periodically touch it to keep my screen saver from coming on. Oh, and I lost the use of my laptop.

Still, this is a really promising vision of the future. Any video you want at any time on any internet-connected device. I’ll never be productive, or when watching the Red Sox, emotionally stable again.

There was a great bit on the Daily Show last week. After the Red Sox won game seven, they characterized the mood in Boston as ‘cautiously optimistic’ that they were going to the World Series. Heh.

Boston seems to be the favorites, but let’s not forget their past luck. I’m 99% sure that if New England had TWO championship teams simultaneously, it would trigger some sort of apocalyptic event. The world would become unbalanced. Thousands of old new englanders would have nothing left to live for. If they won, would there still be a purpose to life?