We do not scream for ice cream in this house

Dear Boston Red Sox,

Look, we know you used up your offense for the week against...some phantom team allegedly from Tampa. Clearly you weren't interested in winning last night* (c.f. Mike Lowell skying the ball over Not Youk at first, and also, Julian Tavarez). Tonight, despite a decent start by Little Suzy Gabbard, you (once again) couldn't move one extra run across the plate in twelve straight innings**. You guys need a break. Our hearts need less breaking. Is there any reason you didn't just forfeit the Detroit series and let everybody do something else fun for the weekend?

Big love,
The girls of Respect The Tek.

That said, we have a couple of non-game related items worthy of discussion:

+ Jason Varitek's Golf Mailbag. Oh, Captain our Captain. There's plenty to love here (Tek's baby Japanese! "Kevin can't steal my beard, his chin is too big!") but our favorite bit is his resistance to the implied suggestion that he might use a computer to collate his data on opposing players. Theo Epstein has probably tried to push this on him in the past--"See, you choose a name from this drop-down list, and the pivot table will break out the numbers for you like so!" Tek took one glance at the nice Excel fields and the tidy SQL backend and replied, "Theo, I got this binder here, it's my Central Division binder and it's organized by team and then by depth-chart position, and I went through with a highlighter so the lefties are yellow, the righties are blue--guess what color I used for switch hitters?"

And Theo probably didn't give up completely, he still sends out notes about corporate discounts on the Palm Pilot, but Tek just hugs his binder tight, secure in the knowledge that he'll still be able to look at hitter profiles when the peak oil crisis comes and the lights go out on Broadway.

Oh, and he has secret pregame rituals about which nobody must know. 'Fess up, Cap'n, said rituals involve staking vampires in the name of the Light, don't they?

+Friendly's Scoop with Jonathan Papelbon. He's serious, he's comical, he's sweet, he's surly, he surveys his teammates as to who's the sexiest pitcher*** and hitter, and he refers to himself as Cinco Ocho. After watching El Papelbon walk sadly away from the mound tonight, this is just what we needed. Well, that and a win later today to stop the sweep.


*Granted, Doug Mirabelli is a stud who hits bombs.

**Can anyone explain why they even put Papelbon in at that point? Sure, we were running low on arms, but we felt like it was a bad omen to see him come in when we hadn't taken a lead in the top of the inning.

***You can actually see him thinking, Come on, say Jonathan Papelbon, say it! Aww, shucks, no one ever says I'm sexy. Of course, if anyone ever did, he would probably blush so hard he'd fall down from the head-rush. And Josh Beckett would owe him ten bucks. Come to think of it, that would be the funniest Scoop ever. Make it so, Friendly's! And hey, I ordered a sundae, like, an hour ago!