Agnatic
| Game 68: June 17, 2007 | |||
| Giants | 5 | L: Matt Morris (7-4) | 30-38, 4 game losing streak 7-12-4 series record |
 Red Sox |
9 | W: Tim Wakefield (7-7) H: Manny Delcarmen (1) H: Joel Piñeiro (1) |
44-24, 3 game winning streak 16-6-2 series record |
| Highlights: The Red Sox are 6-1 in series sweeps and have only lost two games when playing on Sunday. The win tipped Boston into a .500 record in June. Brendan Donnelly was placed on the 15-day disabled list with a strain to his right forearm muscle and Delcarmen was recalled from the Pawtucket Red Sox to take Donnelly’s place on the roster. I strain my own arm just watching Donnelly’s savage delivery. | |||
Boston swept the Giants out of town yesterday with a convincing 9-5 trouncing. But the Red Sox sweep, unlike the Yankees domination of the Pirates, garnered few national media accolades.
The expectation is that teams like the Red Sox and Yankees will clobber the cellar dwellers of the senior circuit. When the Yankees do so, it is an outstanding feat of revitalization and supremacy. When Boston mirrors the exploit, it is brushed aside as an afterthought.
Just after the completion of the U.S. Open I called my dad, Maui resident and ESPN addict, to wish him a happy Father’s Day. The first thing he mentioned was the failure against the Rockies, not the team’s most recent triumph. Five time zones away folks like him get ESPN’s message loud and clear: only the happenings in the Bronx Zoo are of any note.
We laughed about David Ortiz’s commercial for SportsCenter where he does his pre-game ritual of spitting and clapping before shaking the hands of a family touring the complex. I told him about how Ortiz’s son D’Angelo mimics his dad.
I wish I could have taken him to Fenway yesterday, and not just for my own selfish wish to play catch on the field. My dad would stand respectfully during the extended rendition of “God Bless America” but would have been to first to comment about its length. “I ain’t never heard all those words before,” he’d drawl. “He took so long my beer got warm.”
My dad moved from Oklahoma to Hawai‘i when he was 25 years old. He met my mom when she was trying to piece her life back together after divorcing my father, who had all but abandoned us before I was a year old.
There’s something to be said about a man who would love a child as if she were his own flesh, implicitly and unconditionally. He adopted me after my parents got married. It wasn’t demanded or even requested by my mom. When my dad and mom had a daughter when I was almost 10 years old, I was never treated any differently from her.
This reaches embarrassing extremes these days. My sister is struggling to make ends meet with her first job out of college, and my dad insisted on sending birthday checks of the same amount.
If me and my dad were at Fenway yesterday, I’d be the one paying.
He’d be the first to comment on Manny Ramirez’s hustle to beat out the twin killing in the first. “He really tore ass there.”
Tim Wakefield’s brisk pace would be appreciated. “I like this knuckleball guy. He just gets to work, no lollygagging around.”
I’m not a complete Barry Bonds apologist, but Dad would see and say things simply. “Look at his head, Joanna. That’s not anything natural, I can tell you that.” He wouldn’t applaud the slugger’s sixth-inning round-tripper despite being a wide-eyed tourist, but he wouldn’t boo either.
“That little guy can’t be very much bigger than you,” he’d say about Dustin Pedroia. I’m barely five feet tall.
As Ramirez’s seventh-inning homer carried through the summer air he’d exclaim, “That thing got small fast!”
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
