We do not control the vertical in this house

04/29/08: Blue Jays 0, Red Sox 1

RCN and NESN conspired to keep us away from baseball-induced ulcers by refusing to broadcast last night's game until it was well underway. Therefore, we spent a good portion of last night watching an exhibition softball game between Team USA and the Oklahoma Sooners and imagining Jonathan Papelbon's rapture over watching Jennie Finch in the circle for Team USA. She's blonde, she's an amazing pitcher, and she wears short shorts with thigh high socks as her uniform. Obviously Pap is in love with her. And he won't hear you talking any smack about her, okay? Okay.

So, thanks, RCN, we missed most of last night's game. In fact, when the softball game ended, our NESN feed still wasn't working. We were forced to watch basketball. And not women's college basketball, a sport that we (like Manny Ramirez) respect and love. Oh, no, this was professional basketball. NBA basketball. Where's the fun in that?*

But luckily the blue screen of doom finally went away, and we were dropped head-first into a crazy pitchers' duel. And how proud are we of Little Jonny Lester**, who finally started throwing some first-pitch strikes and showing that will to win we all know he has? How awesome is our Second Base Midget***? What about that Youk fellow? And how thrilled are we that our Captain seems to have survived the flu, minus a few pounds that he hardly had to spare, and he's back behind the dish where he belongs? And did we mention Little Jonny Lester? And Pap, of course. It would've been nice for Lester to get a complete game, but we were starting to worry Pap would explode if he didn't get to throw.

Yeah, what a game. We assume. The last couple of innings were good baseball, at any rate. M-may we have some more, please?

GBMU for last night: one infield single against the Doc. Which is more than anyone not named Youkilis, Ramirez, or Varitek managed.


*Please do tell us where the fun is in that, if you happen to have its coordinates. As far as we can tell it retired around about the time Michael Jordan switched numbers. We like Kevin Garnett and everything, he seems like a good dude, but the actual games are just shy of NASCAR levels of boring.

**Who would likely kick our asses for continuing to refer to him as Little Jonny Lester, but we just can't help it. It's not his size or his talent level or even his age that causes it, necessarily; we don't think of Jose Reyes as a kid in the same way. Maybe we could convince him to take it as a compliment. We'll just tell him it's his blues musician name. Like Little Walter, or Blind Willie Fill-In-The-Blank.

***In the immortal words of one Vernon Wells, he is "Superman at second base." Our Infield Midget can totally beat up Toronto's Infield Midget.