Doctor My Eyes Have Seen the Years and the Slow Parade of Tears

(Jackson Browne, Doctor My Eyes)

Recent Red Sox hero, David Ortiz, who just a scant few years ago was awarded a plaque by the owners of the team declaring him “The Most Clutch Hitter in the History of the Boston Red Sox”, has been having a tough time this season.  You could say he’s in a bit of a slump.  In fact, he has exactly one more home run so far this season than I do (despite making approximately $12,999,920 more than I do), and that ain’t too good.  Not exactly clutch. 

It’s gotten so bad that when Amanda, Eric and I were at Fenway in April for a game against the Rays, Eric and I were making jokes like “It’s amazing how much better he was when he was on steroids,” and “The inning will be over soon, Big Papi’s up next.”  That kind of thing would have never been uttered a few years ago, or even last season.  But times have gotten tough for the big man.

Recently, he has decided to go have his eyes checked.  He doesn’t really think there’s anything wrong with his eyes, in fact, he thinks he has 20/20 vision.  But he wants to cover all of his bases, I guess.  (Which would only be the second time this season that’s happened.  Zing!)  I imagine this is what his eye chart might look like:

 I

M I

S  S  M

A   N   N   Y

HITTINGBEHINDME

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Baby I’m Not Trying to Make Amends For Coming to Los Angeles (No More Boston)

(Counting Crows, Los Angeles)

It is a dark day for Red Sox Nation.

When the Sox dealt Nomar back in 2004, he wasn’t the same player he once was, and they did, of course, go on to win the World Series that year, so who can argue with anything they did that season? After that season, they cut the cord on Pedro, which seemed like an insane move at the time (except for the money factor), but in hindsight really was a great move for them, because he’s been injury-plagued ever since, and hasn’t really regained any of what he had during his heyday in Boston. Derek Lowe, Billy Mueller, and Orlando Cabrera all saw Boston in their rearview as well shortly thereafter. Even former manager Grady Little was gone (after the 2003 playoff debacle), though not too many people really missed him all that much.

The strange thing is, all of those guys except Pedro ended up in Los Angeles, and all but Cabrera ended up on the Dodgers (Cabrera went to the Angels). When we lived in LA, I would occasionally go to Dodger games with Josh, Jeremy, Jason, and a few other people whose names didn’t start with J, and it felt natural for me to wear my Red Sox hat to Dodger Stadium, since we had fielded so much of their team for them. In fact, I even got yelled at once in the bleachers, while I was there with my sister, and when some drunk guy told me to “Go back to Boston, buddy!”, I calmly (maybe not so calmly) responded, “Hey, we gave you half of your team!” He just shrugged his shoulders and sat back down.

Well, today the tradition continues. Manny Ramirez, the embattled, dreadlocked, power hitting, (possibly) clinically insane, RBI machine, protector of David Ortiz’s strike zone, has finally been traded. To the Dodgers. As if it had been scripted. Sure, he’s been asking for a trade for years now, but he usually forgets about that a few weeks later, and knocks in 50 more runs before the season ends. It did seem like an inevitability this time around, but I was still holding on to a little bit of hope that maybe this would blow over and he’d keep high-fiving fans while catching fly balls, before gunning out a runner from left-fucking-field. Seriously. Watch this video. It’s awesome.

This is what we’re losing. We’re also losing, indirectly, the potency of Big Papi’s bat, because without Manny hitting behind him, he’s going to be walking to first on a much more frequent basis.

The only real silver lining to this would be, now that Manny’s in LA, if they finally make a movie about him, like I’ve been saying for years, if they get Donald Faison to play him. They might as well be brothers, or at least cousins. Right?

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