Shutout
| Game 4: April 2, 2008 | |||
 Red Sox |
5 | W: Jon Lester (1-1) H: Bryan Corey (1) |
3-1, 2 game winning streak |
| Athletics | 0 | L: Alan Embree (0-1) | 1-3, 2 game losing streak |
| Highlights: Last night Kevin Youkilis tied Steve Garvey’s major league record of 193 flawless games at first base. Garvey was far from exemplary in real life: he is known to have fathered two children outside marriage to two different women. | |||
Baseball season has begun, and so has the exploitation of all the illicit ways to watch day games while at work.
Like surreptitiously opening up MLB Gameday in a browser window and Alt-Tabbing if someone happens to walk by, which was what I was doing as Jon Lester compiled his six and two-third innings of scoreless work. Jack Cust certainly takes his hacks at pitches, that’s his second strikeout... I mean, this work-related spreadsheet is ever so interesting!
Or trying desperately to hide the disappointment on my face as the Red Sox loaded the bases in the first and sixth without scoring, which was much like the unsatisfactory response I received from the project manager on the study I am on. Truly, that is the reason why I have this sour look on my face, not because of consecutive strikeouts by Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell or Dustin Pedroia tapping out to the shortstop.
Aside from actually being at the game, there are few things better than slipping away from my desk at the end of the day to turn on 850 AM in the car and hear Joe Castiglone exult in David Ortiz’s second hit of 2008: a soaring homer into dead center, the end result of old friend Alan Embree’s placement of a pitch low and inside.
Did the people at the intersection where Winter Street turns into Totten Pond Road know that the bizarre display of a woman behind the wheel celebrating by herself was me enjoying the first extra base hit by Boston’s designated hitter?
It mattered not to me as I coursed home under a vast and hyaline sky, listening to Castiglione, looking forward to the replay of the game on NESN.
For as fine as Joe is describing Ramirez’s disbelief of Chris Denorfia’s nab of his near-home run in the seventh (“he’s standing there in disbelief”) and Kevin Youkilis’s basket catch (“like a punt returner making a catch”) to conclude the same inning, some things are better seen then heard.
