Newsflash: we won tonight's game. It's a miracle! Wake up your children!

The plan was simple: go to Fenway, watch some Red Sox prospects and a few major league retreads duke it out with the Orioles' prospects and organizational filler, and steadfastly ignore the major league scoreboard. And, hey, were it not for our perverse preoccupation with the outcome of the epic Barry Zito-Bronson Arroyo duel going down in the NL, we would've very probably succeeded. Still, Futures at Fenway is, bar none, one of our favorite baseball experiences every year, and even though we think it works better when the Lowell Spinners get the invite (no offense to the Paw Sox, but both they and the Norfolk Tides are littered with guys who were playing in the bigs only a few weeks ago), it was an awesome time yet again.

We sat in what we lovingly call the "rich people's seats," up close and personal with the visitors' on deck circle. We cheered for our favorites--no, they weren't all catchers, though we obviously shouted extra loud for Expo and Brownie--and avoided sunstroke due to a fortuitous combination of SPF 75 and some timely shadows. We decided that Ryan Kalish and Ryan Khoury should be best friends forever based on nothing more than their names. We ate ballpark food. We tried to keep score (an unfortunately timed bathroom run killed that plan), and we took a few pictures.

And we needed those simple pleasures, to remind us that baseball games aren't always the terrifying experiences that have happened to certain parent clubs in recent times.* Sometimes you can even sit through nine whole innings and still have enamel left on your teeth at the end.

Futures helped us to remember that, though baseball is famous for for its yesterdays--its segregated, dead-balled, spike-sharpened, mob-rigged, amphetamined and roid-raged yesterdays--there are always tomorrows. There are 21-year-old kids who get to hit a home run over the Green Monster, and keep that story forever. There's Josh Reddick making the most of things (and sacrificing his Mohawk in the process, oh, woe). There's tomorrow, and Junichi Tazawa's second chance to make a first impression.

And then there's the day after tomorrow, when we'll be back in the standing room saddle, resisting the siren song of frozen lemonade and cheering for the guys in the biggest, reddest socks of them all.** And reminding Dustin Pedroia that we expect to see a laser show. We may grow weary, but we never turn our backs on our boys.

Because we're afraid of getting hit with a line drive foul. That would hurt!


*Hey, as long as no one gets diagnosed with cancer, we're counting this season as better than 2006. Knock on wood!

**This means you, Tek.

Josh Bard will look up and shout, "Save me." And we'll whisper, "No."

The Curse of Doug Mirabelli is alive and well and living in Fort Myers.

Just when we were starting to like Bard-o, too. Still, we're not gonna lie, we're excited that the PawSox Two are apparently getting an actual shot to win the gig. In fact, we're going to just throw this out there: we want a Kottaras-Brown backup catching tandem, people! Three catchers means we could, you know, pinch hit and double switch and all those National League tricks Bill James disapproves of so heartily. Make them uber-super-duper utility guys! Teach 'em to cover shortstop! Or throw a knuckleball! Heck, Dusty Brown was an outfielder once upon a time; we're sure all those innings crouched behind the plate haven't affected his ability to play right field when JD "Mr. Glass" Drew needs a day off.

So that's our cunning plan. Well, that or kidnapping Taylor Teagarden and telling everyone that he's Mark Wagner after extensive plastic surgery.

Anyway, it's time for some more 2009 predictions. We know you're all excited.

1. Jonathan Papelbon will hit a game-winning grand slam during interleague play.*

2. Julio Lugo will come back from his injury, and he will continue to play (almost**) as well as he did in spring training. Jed Lowrie will also continue to kick ass. This will be a great problem to have, no matter what you think about either player, and it will only make the team better.

3. We will never, ever, utter the words, "Man, I wish we'd signed Pudge Rodriguez." No disrespect to the future Hall of Famer, but there are plenty of other catchers we'll wish were on the Red Sox ahead of him. You can even strike Mauer and Martin from the list and end up with a strong Pudge-free top five.

4. Futures at Fenway will, once again, kick ass and take names. (What? We love FoF, okay, and we needed an excuse to point out that tickets go on sale this Saturday. Be there or be somewhere else. But somewhere else won't have baby baseball players taking each other's picture in front of the Green Monster while the Frisbee dogs run free.)

5. Every single team whose personnel have openly stated that they think they can be "the Rays of 2009" (We're looking at you, Reds, Pirates, and Orioles) will be bitterly disappointed. You know why Cinderella teams are interesting? Because they're really rare, like glass slippers. However, the national baseball media (now we're done looking at the Orioles, let's all turn our pointed gaze to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver) will keep this meme alive and anoint one of our lucky contenders "the Rays of 2009" around the all-star break--whoever it is, they will be instantly jinxed, and discover that they're the Rays of 1998-2008 instead.***

Tune in next week when we try to predict setlists for the bullpen band.


*Please ignore our footnote on this very issue from last week.

**Because no one actually hits .500, and we do not actually believe he will ever play error-free defense. This is not an insult, it is just reality.

***Or, dare we say it, the Devil Rays.

We do not give up the big inning in this house

A coworker called it, "a game you can tell your grandkids about." We're more apt to describe it as something we survived, barely, something we're still recovering from all these days later. A day so crazy we're still half-convinced Mikey Lowell successfully executed a double steal. We've tried a couple of times to piece together a narrative, to tell you all about Wally (not that one) and his stories and the 2004 World Series cup he brings with him to every game. We're pretty sure the sucker punch feeling of losing a 10-0 lead was the same whether you were at Fenway or sitting on your couch or at a bar, and we're just as sure that the sharp joy of Youk being Manny was just as universal. But Wally is one of a kind.

Tomorrow we're heading up to Portland to see Lars and Josh and all the little Sea Dogs. We're mostly hoping for a nice day: a good game and a chance to see all the Baby Sox before they're rookies of the year and pitching no-hitters up at Fenway, maybe even a win. We'll settle for no storms.*

*We may like pina coladas, but we're not quite as fond of getting caught in the rain.

We do not go back to the future in this house

No photo credit, Jennifer took this one all by herself.

While the big team struggles to sort out its business in Chicago*, and our current president is interrupting perfectly entertaining Olympic gymnastics to talk about--well, we're not sure what he's talking about, but the wildly incoherent closed captioning suggests it's a message he's sending to the Cheese People**--we bring you some notes from a day in the Future.

Futures at Fenway, naturally.

All the Lowell Spinners looked so tiny in their vest-y uniforms, none tinier than the pitcher Stolmy Pimentel. Stolmy Pimentel, besides having a name that's really fun to say, is a small Dominican pitcher who wears #45 and who pitched 5 effective innings while we revelled in the requisite Pedro Martinez flashbacks.

That picture at the top of this entry is Stolmy with his catcher, the baby-est of the baby catchers we saw on Saturday, one Tim "FedEx" Federowicz, late of UNC. We got to know FedEx thanks to a UNC fan friend of ours, during the College World Series, and what we hear is that he doesn't like to talk to pitchers, or be touched. What we saw with our own eyes was a couple of excellent throws to second to cut down basestealers, which may have kept the Spinners in the game.

Because it was a long game. We're talking 12 innings in total, with the Hudson Valley Renegades vacuuming up everything that flew into the outfield, capped with a walkoff single (while Fedex was on base, no less!). It was a long enough game that cries of "Come on, Deshaun" and "Get 'er done, Mitch!" rang out in our section, because we'd had time to learn everyone's name. It was a long enough game that the Spinners pitchers were seen out in the pirate pen, forming a baby bullpen band. Manny Delcarmen, watch your back: these kids have got soul.

In addition to the baby band's performance, we were happy to enjoy the minor-league entertainments between innings, like guys in sumo costumes, frisbee dogs, the giant toothbrush that ran the bases for undisclosed reasons***. A little girl seated in the row behind us summed it up perfectly, after a small child raced the Spinners mascot: "So when that kid raced the alligator, that was a commercial? No commercial's better than that."

As for the PawSox, it seems like the cream of that particular crop has either been called up to the big club or traded to the Pirates. And it cannot possibly surprise anyone who's been reading this blog at all that we're a little catcher-centric. So we were especially thrilled that while Dusty Brown was starting, George Kottaras was first-base coaching. Two wee catchers for the price of one! Actually, not so wee. We've always thought George was skinny, because we've always seen him standing near Brown or Varitek or Mirabelli. Turns out, he's a pretty good-sized guy, just not built like a brick house or a Mack truck. Or a brick house riding in a Mack truck.

Brown had a hard day behind the plate; he overthrew second base twice, but his game plan was definitely effective. David Pauley went a sassy seven innings--four hits, two runs, two walks, four strikeouts--and he had the Charlotte Knights guessing. Think the big club's putting the coffee on for him, in light of recent tragic events****? Because he was fun to watch, but we were sad not to see knuckleball fraternity member Charlie Zink on the mound. Is it time for us to start a campaign to get Zink called up? Should we get buttons made?

It was a really nice way to spend the day (and, okay, way too much of your money) at Fenway, not least because nobody at all stayed in their assigned seat and we ended up with a bettter view than we paid for. We also got to see our prospects gaze in awe at the Green Monster, and cut loose in the dugout to do the Chicken Dance. But the best part? Both home teams won. Our farm system, in fact, is undefeated in Futures play.

Now if only the young guns could teach their big brother team a thing or two. If they can't make the Red Sox win, maybe they can get them to do the Electric Slide.


*Is now an appropriate time for us to say that we're worried about our man Claybelline "Why Can'tcha Be True" Buchholz? Because, um, whatever he was doing last year, when he was the shiniest of the shiny, this ain't it. Maybe we need to run him through the dishwasher with some Electrasol.

**Actually, now that the words "Balco" and "Barry" and "Baball" have appeared, we're pretty sure they're discussing steroids. Which might be an interesting interview if, you know, it involved someone other than the President, who really ought to be more concerned about anything in the world more important than baball.

***It seems like some kind of clean base=clean teeth analogy was at play, but really, who are we to try and understand the mind of the Great Toothbrush?

****Okay, maybe Wakefield's sore shoulder does not quite rise to the Aristotelian standard for tragedy, but we're definitely crying in our official terrible lite beer of Major League Baseball. Come back soon, Wake, and come back strong.