Nancy Sinatra – "Bossman" (2004)

Winter, summer, fall

Passes us by

Both you and I

My Sirius/XM subscription allows me to listen to broadcasts of New York Yankees games – and the games of every other major-league baseball team – while driving.

My car has a feature called “Personal Assistant,” which works the same way Siri works on an iPhone and Alexa  works on Amazon devices.  You can ask it what the weather forecast is, or get directions to your destination, or tell it what radio station you’d like to listen to, and it repeats your request back to you before executing it.  (You can set the Personal Assistant to speak in a male or female voice.  In my old car, I was able to get the female voice to speak with a British accent – I wish I could get my current car to do that as well.)

I’ve noticed that when I say “Play Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball,” the Personal Assistant says “Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball” – indicating that it understood my voice command – but it always takes me to the New York Mets broadcast instead.  When that happens, I have to hit the button on my car’s “infotainment” touch screen that takes me to the next channel – which is the Yankees channel.

Recently, I decided to try a different tactic.  I asked my car to “Play Sirius/XM Yankees baseball.”  The Personal Assistant responded by saying “Sirius/XM Oakland Athletics baseball,” but took me to the Yankees channel.

What do you think?  Should I take my car into the dealer, tell them about this, and ask them to fix it?  The car is still under warranty, so it wouldn’t cost me anything – although it might make my service advisor think I’m a total douchebag.  (Which is not a big deal to me – a lot of people already think I’m a total douchebag . . . probably because I am a total douchebag a lot of the time.)

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“Bossman” was released on Nancy Sinatra’s eponymous 2004 album:

That album includes songs written by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), and Morrissey (the Smiths) – all of whom appear on the album.  If you had asked me which musicians were the least likely to collaborate with Nancy Sinatra, those three would have been very high on my list – yet there they are, big as life and twice as ugly.

Click here to listen to “Bossman.”

Click here to buy “Bossman” from Amazon.

Jay-Z and Kanye West – "Otis" (2011)

They ain’t see me ‘cause

I pulled up in my other Benz

Last week I was in my other other Benz

(Think about those Kanye West lines, boys and girls.  Imagine having a Mercedes-Benz that people are used to seeing you in.  But one day you pull up in your other Benz.  Which confuses everyone, because just last week you were in your other other Benz!)

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In case you haven’t been to a baseball game since the 1980s, you may not know that teams play brief snippets of popular songs before each player comes to bat.  

There are “walk-up” songs representing every music genre – from hip-hop to metal to country to Latin.

Some players choose new walk-up songs frequently, while others stick with the same recording.  (Bryce Harper has used Moby’s “Flower” for many years.)  

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Before the New York Yankees’ home opener last Friday, Empire Sports Media – an independent digital media company that covers New York’s professional teams – posted the team’s starting lineup, along with each player’s walk-up song:

The Yankees’ walk-up music runs the gamut.  Veteran sluggers Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger, and Giancarlo Stanton walk up to the plate to hip-hop recordings.  Ryan McMahon uses a song by the country artist Hardy while Jose Caballero prefers Dandy Yankee.  Trent Grisham goes with a contemporary Christian record.

My two favorite Yankee walk-up songs are Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (which is favored by catcher Austin Wells) and “Otis,” the Kanye West/Jay-Z collaboration that samples Otis Redding’s recording of “Try a Little Tenderness” (which is the walk-up choice of second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr.).

“Otis” is a silly-bazilly song – its lyrics will remind you just how clever and witty Kanye and Jay-Z could be when they put their mind to it.  (I did a deep dive into those lyrics in 2013.  Click here to read that post, which was published exactly 13 years ago today.)  

Kudos to Jazz Chisholm for choosing “Otis” as his walk-up music.

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The Spike Jonze-directed “Otis” video is one of my all-time favorites.

That video features Kanye and Jay-Z having the time of their lives cutting up a $350,000 Maybach sedan, filling the back seat with hot chicks, and then driving around much too fast.

Click here to watch the “Otis” video.

Led Zeppelin – "Good Times Bad Times" (1969)

Good times, bad times

You know I’ve had my share

I’m pretty sure the New York Yankees were in a foul mood when they flew out of St. Louis last Sunday after dropping three close games to the Cardinals.

I’m absolutely sure that I was in just as foul a mood after watching those games.

*     *     *     *     *

In 1978, Bucky Dent – a woeful hitter who was batting ninth that day – shocked the world by hitting a three-run home run that gave the Yankees the lead in their one-game playoff with the Boston Red Sox after both teams had finished the regular season tied for first place in the American League’s Eastern Division.

The Yankees held on to that lead, completing their unprecedented comeback from what was once a 14-game deficit.  Ever since, the fans of the choking-dog Red Sox have referred to the Yankee hero as “Bucky F*cking Dent.”

Last Sunday I witnessed a shocking home run by a major-league shortstop whose hitting was even more pitiful than Dent’s.  

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out 

That home run – by the man I will hereinafter think of as “Paul F*cking DeJong” – was the absolute nadir of my trip to St. Louis last weekend to see the Yankees-Cardinals series.  It may have been the absolute nadir of my entire life. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Yankees and Cardinals played three games last weekend.   The Friday and Saturday games were pretty bad.  But Sunday’s game was absolutely horrific.

I’m prone to hyperbole in my 2 or 3 lines posts – to put in another way, I lie a lot – but “absolutely horrific” is no exaggeration.

For one thing, there was the weather.  I checked the temperature about an hour after the game began, and it was 95 degrees – but thanks to the humidity and lack of a breeze, my weather app said that it felt like a mind-boggling 108 degrees.:

I was sitting a few rows behind the first-base dugout, which meant that I was completely exposed to the sun for most of the game.  By the 3rd inning, every single square inch of my shorts and shirt was wet with perspiration – you would have thought I had gotten caught in a sudden summer shower sans umbrella if you had seen me.

*     *     *     *     *

Every one of the three Yankees-Cardinals confrontations last weekend was a sellout – the attendance figures for each game easily exceeded the stadium’s official seating capacity.

In fact, the Saturday night game broke the stadium’s all-time attendance mark.  The new Busch Stadium opened in 2006, and has hosted an All-Star Game and several dozen postseason games – including ten World Series games – but last Saturday night’s contest attracted more fans than any of those games.  (Such is the magnetic attraction exerted by the greatest professional sports franchise the world has ever seen.)

The Sunday game drew almost as many spectators, which ensured that there would be l-o-n-g lines at the concession stands and bathrooms – and also guaranteed that there would be no vacant seats next to you.  

Sure enough, my section was stuffed with people – most of whom were not only sweaty and smelly, but also packed enough extra pounds that I had even less elbow room than I had had on my sold-out Southwest Airlines flight from Washington, DC to St. Louis last Friday.

*     *     *     *     *

Other than Paul F*cking DeJong’s home run and the beastly weather conditions, the worst thing about the Sunday game was that it lasted four hours and 25 minutes – making it the longest nine-inning MLB game of the 1600-plus contests played so far this year.   

If the Yankees had won, I wouldn't be complaining about the heat and the interminable length of the contest.  Hell, if the Bombers had fallen behind by a sufficiently large margin that I could have abandoned the game early without worrying about missing something, I would have been OK.

But my boys hung close throughout the excruciatingly tedious game, never falling behind by more than a run or two until the very end, when DeJong broke open the game with a three-run roundtripper in the bottom of the 8th.

I suppose I should be grateful to him.  In the top of the 9th inning, Yankee leadoff hitter D. J. LeMahieu knocked one out of the park.  If DeJong had not homered, LeMahieu’s blast would have tied the game, and we would likely have been subjected to an hour or two of extra-inning torture.

*     *     *     *     *

Serious baseball fans will know that Paul F*cking DeJong has been the Cardinals’ primary shortstop since 2017.

He was an above-average hitter in 2017 and 2018, an average hitter in 2019, and a below-average hitter in 2020 and 2021.  

But DeJong really stunk up the joint this season.  His batting average as of May 8 was .130, which I’m guessing was the worst batting average of any everyday player in either league.  Not surprisingly, the Cardinals exiled him to their Memphis minor-league team at that point, and kept him there for most of May, June, and July.  

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out again

He was only 3-for-16 with seven strikeouts in his first week back with the Redbirds.  But then the Yankees – who had the best record in baseball at the time – came to St. Louis.  Suddenly Paul F*cking DeJong became Babe F*cking Ruth.

I was at the first game of the Yankees-Cardinals series last Friday.  After striking out in his first two at-bats, DeJong came to the plate in the 8th inning to face the Yankees previously unhittable All-Star closer, Clay Holmes, with two outs and two men on base and the New Yorkers clinging to a 3-2 lead.  

DeJong swung late on the first pitch he saw from Holmes, slicing a seeing-eye liner to right field that landed barely fair.  Suddenly, the Cardinals led 4-3 – which was how the game ended.

That double raised DeJong’s batting average from .137 to a gaudy .146.  He went 0-for-3 on Saturday, but on Sunday, he walked twice and hit a double before crushing the three-run home run in the penultimate inning and turning a 9-8 nail biter into a 12-8 laugher.

If I had had a fifth of gin and a bottle of Ambien handy, I might have shuffled myself off this mortal coil for once and for all at that point.  Fortunately for all you fans of 2 or 3 lines – who wouldn’t know what to do without my wildly popular little blog – I didn’t have access to said gin and Ambien.

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The extraordinarily slow pace of the Sunday game was largely due to the fact that no fewer than 11 pitchers pitched in it – most of them entering in the middle of an inning, which necessitated leisurely mound conferences, long saunters in from the bullpen, and lots of warmup pitches.

Those 11 pitchers threw a mind-boggling total of 380 pitches — of which 144 were balls.  (Watch the box scores for the next few weeks, and let me know when you see a nine-inning  game with 144 or more balls.  I have a feeling I won’t be hearing from you.)

The Cardinals’ starting pitcher, a wily (and whiny) veteran named Adam Wainwright, lasted only four innings.  He threw 111 pitches in those four innings – enough pitches to get a really good pitcher through an entire game – and yielded eight hits, four walks, and six runs.  It was a terrible performance . . . but the Yankees starter was even worse. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Yankees outhit their opponents 16 to 11 on Sunday, but left 12 men on.  Despite their inefficiency with runners on base, they might still have won if not for the home plate umpire, who had no clue what was a ball and what was a strike.  

Click here to read an article from USA Today that says that the umpire missed 20 calls in the first six innings alone – the worst of which was calling a ball that was over four inches off the plate a strike.  (If he had called it what it was – a ball – it would have resulted in a bases-loaded walk instead of a strikeout.  So it clearly cost the Yankees at least one run, and might have cost them more.)

According to UmpScorecards.com, that umpire’s inaccuracy cost the Yankees 3.01 runs – and the Cardinals won by three.  Imagine that . . .

*     *     *     *     *

Getting swept by the Cardinals was particularly upsetting because they aren’t a very good team.

Sure, they will likely make it to the playoffs this year – largely because they play in the weakest division in baseball.  (Three of the four other teams in their division – the Pirates, Reds, and Cubs – are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th worst teams in the entire National League.  Each is 20 games or more below .500.)

The Cardinals have two outstanding hitters, Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt.  And their rookie DH, Brendan Donovan, is pretty good at getting on base – although he has no power at all.  (He’s hit only two homers in 81 games.)

But the rest of their hitters range from pretty bad to absolutely terrible.  The batting averages of the remaining players in the Sunday lineup were .256, .244, .230, .225, .208, and .157 – and none of them had more than seven home runs.  (Yankees slugger Aaron Judge had twice as many home runs single-handedly as those six players plus Donovan had combined.)

Aaron Judge is a very large man

“If the Yankees are so good and the Cardinals are so bad, how did the Cardinals sweep the series?” you ask.

Baseball teams are usually quite streaky – they get hot for a while, and then they go cold.  

A wise man once pointed out that a team is never as good as it looks during a winning streak, and never as bad as it looks during a losing streak.  The Yankees weren’t as good as they looked in the first half of the year, when they were winning at a pace that would have broken records if they had been able to maintain it for a full season.  And they’re not as bad as they looked over the past two weeks – including last weekend’s series in St. Louis.

It didn’t help that the Yankee lineup was missing two of their most dangerous batsmen, Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo, who had combined for 51 homers and 127 RBIs so far this season.  But even without those two bats, the New York hitters were actually superior to their opponents – the sweep was more the result of bad luck than underperformance.  (The Yankees outhit the Cardinals 28 to 21 over the weekend.)

*     *     *     *     *

Enough whining about the games.  Let me shift gears and talk about the non-baseball aspects of my St. Louis trip for a bit.

I’ve never flown anywhere just to watch a baseball game before, and I wouldn’t have flown to St. Louis just to see the Yankees take on the Cardinals.  

But when my sister (who is a huge Cardinals fan) and I were together in June for my late mother’s memorial service, she mentioned that the Yankees were coming to St. Louis to play the Redbirds.  

That doesn’t happen often.  (Because the two teams play in different leagues, the Yankees come to St. Louis only once every six years.)  So I said – less than half seriously – that maybe we should meet in St. Louis for the weekend and see the games together.  She thought that was a great idea. 

I’m fortunate to have the time and the means to make a trip like this, but it’s not the kind of thing I usually do – I’m not really a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy.

Also, there have been a lot of horror stories about flight delays and cancellations recently.  It would have been awful if we had bought tickets to these games – which weren’t cheap – and then not be able to attend all of them because one of our flights got delayed or cancelled.

I was still on the fence a couple of weeks before the games were scheduled to be played.  But my two best high-school friends, who I hadn’t seen in years, both live in St. Louis.  I called them, and both were amenable to a get-together if I did decide to make the trip.  

I made plane reservations the next day.

*     *     *     *     *

One of my friends invited all of us to come to his home Saturday afternoon for lunch.  I figured we’d have time for a nice visit before my sister and I had to leave for the Saturday night game.  (We didn’t purchase tickets to that game in advance, figuring we could either get them online at the last minute, or just watch the game on the oversize TV monitors at Ballpark Village, a large outdoor restaurant and entertainment complex adjacent to the stadium.)

We ended up hanging around with my friends so long that we almost missed the game entirely.  We made it to a nearby sports bar just in time to watch the last couple of innings.  (The Yankees lost 1-0, so we hadn’t missed much.)

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out yet again

Why didn't we leave earlier as we had planned?  This will sound odd, but it was almost as if there was some force field preventing us from leaving my friend’s house that evening.  Even after we finally got up from his dining-room table and headed outside to our cars, we all ended up standing around in the driveway and talking for another half an hour or longer.

I often have trouble ending a conversation.  I sometimes keep one going single-handedly – or, more accurately, single-mouthedly.  

But it wasn’t just me doing the talking that evening – my friends also seemed reluctant for the gathering to end.  We kept dredging up names from our high school days, and retelling stories we had told each other multiple times in the past.

I have a lot of friends from high school, from law school, from my various jobs, and from other contexts that I have neglected to keep in regular touch with.  When I do finally get together with these people, it’s always a delight.  So why do I repeatedly let five years, or ten years, or even longer pass before belatedly making contact, and then try to catch up for years of lost time in the course of a single lunch or dinner?

It's partly because I’m a creature of inertia.  I follow my daily routine – which is mostly a solitary one – and all too rarely remember to yank myself out of my rut by the scruff of my neck.

*     *     *     *     *

What’s true of friends is truer of family, of course.

My sister (and only sibling) is seven years younger, so she was just a kid when I left home to go to college.  Since then, we’ve never lived in the same city – currently I live in the Washington, DC area, while her home is in Texas.

Our visits over the years were mostly limited to a few days around Christmas, trips to one-off events (like weddings), or brief get-togethers at our parents’ home.  Now that both of our parents have died, we need to work a little harder to make time to see each other. 

When I drove my sister to the St. Louis airport after that horrible Sunday game for her flight back to Texas, I was half-thinking to myself that I wished I had just stayed home rather than spending all that time and money just to watch my team lose three ugly games.

But then my sister told me how much she had enjoyed our weekend.  “How long has it been since you and I have done something together – just the two of us?” she asked.

I was touched by that – as I was touched by how complimentary she was of me as a big brother when we were talking with my friends.

*     *     *     *     *

On the drive back to my hotel after dropping her off for her flight, I realized that the outcome of the games really didn’t matter – what counted was spending time with two of my oldest and closest friends and my only sibling.

I really had no business being in a foul mood that Sunday evening.  My sister saw the big picture much more clearly – she had the right attitude.

Of course, it's easy to have the right attitude when your team hadn’t just lost three games to PAUL F*CKING DEJONG.

*     *     *     *     *

I may live to regret some of my selections for the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HALLS OF FAME, but I will never regret choosing “Good Times Bad Times.”  (Or “MacArthur Park.”)

Led Zeppelin couldn’t have picked a better song as the first track of their first album – everything about it is perfect.  As I said when I wrote about it a year ago,

I can’t imagine how “Good Times Bad Times” could have been improved – Robert Plant’s vocals are great, John Paul Jones’s bass guitar is great, Jimmy Page’s lead guitar (which was fed through a Leslie speaker) is great, and John Bonham’s drumming is especially great.  

 

Click here to listen to “Good Times Bad Times.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Prince Paul – “Not Tryin’ to Hear That/Words (Album Leak)” (2003)

I’m not a hater

I’m a congratulator

When it comes to my fellow man – and to my fellow woman – I am definitely not a hater.

But it’s a different story when it comes to sports teams.

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When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child – which meant that I rooted for the local sports teams.

I vividly remember listening to radio broadcasts the local high school’s football and basketball games when I was a kid – including the 1959 Missouri state high school basketball championship game between the team from my hometown (Joplin) and an all-boys Catholic high school from St. Louis.  (Joplin lost.)

I also rooted for the University of Missouri football team, which had eleven straight winning seasons between 1959 and 1969.  (I’ve written about the one and only Mizzou football game I’ve ever seen live — a 44-10 shellacking of Oklahoma in 1969, when the Sooners had three #1 NFL draft picks and Heisman Trophy winner Steve Owens on its team.)

Terry McMillan was Mizzou's QB in '69

When it came to the pros, I was loyal to the three St. Louis teams – the baseball Cardinals, the football Cardinals, and the NBA Hawks.  (Kansas City was much closer to Joplin than St. Louis, but the Kansas City A’s were too pitiful and the Chiefs were not as near and dear to my heart as the chronically underachieving football Cardinals were.)

There was one non-Missouri team I became a fan of quite early, and that team – the New York Yankees – is the only one that I’ve been consistently loyal to ever since.  

Why the Yankees?  Perhaps because Mickey Mantle – every red-blooded American’s beau idéal when it came to baseball heroes – grew up a stone’s throw away from Joplin, and played his only full season of minor-league baseball for the Class C Joplin Miners.  

Mantle as a Joplin Miner

Or perhaps because the Yankees were featured much more regularly on the CBS Game of the Week broadcasts, which were the only televised games I was able to view as a kid.  

Or perhaps because I spent most of my childhood at the local public library, and the Bronx Bombers’ dominance was so overwhelming that the library’s books about baseball history were really Yankee histories.

I think I was equally loyal to the Yankees and the baseball Cardinals until 1968., when I dropped the Cardinals like a hot potato after they gagged up the World Series.  (The thought that Bob Gibson would lose game seven after posting the most dominant pitching stats of my lifetime – a 1.12 ERA, 13 shutouts, and 0.85 WHIP – simply never entered my mind.)

Bob Gibson threw hard . . . very hard

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Once I moved away from Joplin, my team loyalties were more fluid, depending to some degree on where I was living.  I remained a diehard Yankees fan (although the retirement of Jeter, Rivera, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, and rest of the Joe Torre-era greats took its toll on me), and my marriage to the boys in pinstripes is one of those till-death-do-us-part deals.

The list of the teams I root against is much longer than the list of teams I like.  It’s funny – I’ve had short-term affairs with a number of teams based on geographic proximity or other factors.  (For example, I moved to San Francisco and became a fan of the great Bill Walsh-Joe Montana 49ers, but my interest in the team faded once I left the Bay Area.)  But once I hate a team, I hate it for life.

There’s often a reason for my ill-will towards a team.  For example, I root against the University of Michigan mostly because one of first bosses was an obnoxious Michigan Law School grad.  I haven’t worked for that guy in almost 40 years, but I still root for Ohio State when they play the Wolverines.  (What’s with those stupid helmets, Michigan?)

Bill Clinton in his Razorback hat

And I’m always happy when the University of Arkansas football and basketball teams suck.  That’s because my mother was born into a large Arkansas clan, all of whom were vocal Razorbacks backers.  My branch of the family was the only one to move out of Arkansas – albeit just barely – and I just had to be the turd in the punchbowl when it came to all that wooo pig sooie crap.

But I can’t really explain my dislike of a number of college or professional teams.  (Why have I never liked Notre Dame?  I don’t really know.)  

I rooted against the Red Auerbach-era Celtics when I was a kid, supporting whichever team had the best chance of toppling them off their NBA pedestal at the time – first the St. Louis Hawks, then Wilt Chamberlain’s Philadelphia teams, then the Walt Frazier-led Knicks.

The same was true of the Green Bay Packers – I cheered for whatever team had a chance to prevent them from winning a championship.  That was the Giants for a couple of years, then the Cowboys, then the Chiefs (who lost to Green Bay in Super Bowl I).  

I learned to dislike a number of teams when I was a student at Rice University in Houston.  There were a lot of obnoxious Cowboys fans at Rice, and I was still loyal to the NFL Cardinals, who rewarded my loyalty by spanking Dallas 38-0 in a Monday Night Football game my freshman year – a game that I viewed on a large TV in a basement common room in my dormitory while giving the Cowboy fans in the audience hell.

Texas A&M – a school I knew very little about before going to Rice – came very close to beating out Arkansas for the #1 spot on my college football “Most Loathed” list.  

The Texas A&M marching band

Why?  Keep in mind that this was the early seventies.  Rice was liberal by Texas standards, with lots of long-haired guys and braless chicks, while A&M was almost all-male and all-ROTC.  Our football players probably weren’t very different from the A&M players, but the cultures of the two schools were polar opposites.  

In 1973 – my senior year – the Rice-Texas A&M gridiron matchup was dominated by the Aggies but won in rather fluky fashion by my Owls.  Even worse, the irreverent and ragtag Rice marching band had the temerity to poke fun at various sacred Aggie traditions — especially the jackbooted, saber-equipped Texas A&M military marching band – during its halftime performance.  

The result was a postgame riot by the A&M ROTC cadet corps.  Rice’s administration had to call on the Houston Police Department to escort band members out of the stadium.  

Most Rice students had a major problem with the University of Texas, but my rather mild dislike of the Longhorns paled in comparison to the rancor I felt for Arkansas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma.  (I still remember the Texas students doing a hilarious cheer at one Rice-UT gridiron clash: “What comes out of a Chinaman’s ass?  Rice, Rice, RICE!”  How can you hate a school with such a well-developed sense of humor?)

The Rice marching band

I could go on and on.  I root against Stanford (my college girlfriend went to B-school there), Yale (I went to Harvard’s law school), Duke (I liked the ’78 basketball team, but have pulled against them since the Christian Laettner era), and the University of Miami (too many thugs and criminals on their teams):

As far as professional teams go, I loathe the Mets, the Orioles (who somehow had the Yankees’ number in the early eighties – I sat through far too many Orioles victories over Yankees teams chock full of better-known and higher-paid players), the Celtics (they play in Boston, my least favorite city – although I do like the Patriots), and the local NFL team, the Redskins.  

My dislike of the Redskins goes back 40 years, when Washington and the Cardinals were major rivals.  The first NFL game I ever saw was a 1975 Redskins-Cardinals game that was won by St. Louis thanks to a controversial touchdown catch by Mel Gray that Redskins fans still bitch and moan about:

The disputed Mel Gray catch

I root against the 'Skins today despite the fact that most of my family — especially my youngest son – and most of my friends are Redskins fans.  You can chalk it up to me being kind of a dick, I guess.

*     *     *     *     *

Which brings us to the ne plus ultra of loathsome sports teams . . . the Boston f*cking Red Sox.

For the first 50 years of my life, I didn’t worry much the Red Sox.  If there was one thing in life that you could count on, it was that any Yankees-Red Sox confrontation would end up going the Yankees’ way.

There was the 1978 season, for example.  The Red Sox led New York by 14 1/2 games at one point, but the Yankees ran them to ground and won a one-game playoff on the strength of a home run on an 0-2 count by their 9th-place hitter (Bucky Dent).

Yankees celebrate '78 playoff win over Red Sox

When the Yankees won the first three contests of the 2004 ALCS, it seemed certain that the Red Sox were going to be the Yankees’ bitches once more – after all, no team in the history of baseball had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game series.

But the unthinkable happened.  Boston staved off defeat with a couple of fluky extra-inning victories, and suddenly the tide had turned.  My son took a bus to see game seven in New York City, and witnessed the worst moment in the Yankees’ long history.  (I tried to talk him out of going to the game, but did he listen?  No.)  New York gave up six runs in the first two innings – which was about what I expected – and went down to defeat with nary a whimper.  The Bostonians went on to sweep the Cardinals in the World Series, and the “Curse of the Bambino” was broken at last.

Indeed

My dislike of the Red Sox has been off the charts ever since.  On occasion, I’ve given voice to the wish that the Red Sox team plane would crash.  Realizing that such a sentiment is hardly Christian, I’ve amended my wish to one that the team bus has a mishap that results in not a single fatality but plenty of career-ending arm and leg injuries.

Truth be told, I get much more pleasure when the Red Sox fail – as they did in spectacular fashion in 2012, when their final record was an embarrassing 69-93 – than when the Yankees win.  (I knew 2012 was going to be a good year when the Sox blew a 9-0 lead and ended up losing 15-9 in a nationally televised game against New York in April.)

Would I sell the Yankees’ soul to the devil if he promised me that the Red Sox would never win another World Series?  ABSOLUTELY.

Does that make sense?  OF COURSE it does.  (Does watching the Yankees bat and leaving the room when it’s Boston’s turn to hit – because only bad things can happen when the Red Sox are batting – make any sense?  OF COURSE it does.)

*     *     *     *     *

Years ago, when the Yankees were having a good year and the Red Sox had fallen out of contention, my wife – a Red Sox loyalist – announced that she was going to root for the Yankees for the rest of the season because she wanted my son and me to be happy.

“Wouldn’t you pull for the Red Sox if the situation was reversed because you wanted me to be happy?” she asked me.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what it means to be a sports fan,” I replied.

*     *     *     *     *

Prince Paul – who was born Paul Edward Huston – got his start in the rap world as a DJ for Stetasonic, one of the first alternative hip-hop groups.

In 1989, he produced De La Soul’s brilliant 3 Feet High and Rising album. 

Prince Paul has worked with legendary rappers (Chuck D, Ice-T, RZA, Big Daddy Kane, Coolio) and legendary comedians (Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Don Novello – a/k/a Father Guido Sarducci).  His Handsome Boy Modeling School album – a collaboration with producer Dan the Automator – is a combination of hip-hop and comedy such as the world has never seen.

“Not Tryin’ to Hear That/Words (Album Leak)” was released in 2003 on Politics of the Business, a concept album that was a follow-up to his 1999 concept album, A Prince Among Thieves.

The concept of Politics of the Business is the concept of following up a concept album that didn’t sell very well (A Prince Among Thieves).  This is so meta that it’s meta squared.

Here’s “Not Tryin’ to Hear That/Words (Album Leak)”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: