You did it again, didn't you?
You fell into the trap that these fun-loving, baseball-bashing Red Sox set for you. You became so enamored with their irreverence and their pizazz and their long hair and their long-ball capabilities, you actually convinced yourself they were better than the New York Yankees.
So what if the Yankees won the division? That was a minor detail, easily overlooked and ignored. The Red Sox were coming together. The Red Sox had momentum. Hey man, the Red Sox had style.
New York had nameless uniforms, tidy, cropped hair, respectful, measured sound bytes, and the resolve that has made their organization a model to be envied. How could we have all forgotten that above all else, the Yankees know how to win?
Don't feel bad. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas agreed with you. So did almost all the local media prognosticators (including yours truly). It certainly appears to be an unfathomable fact at this moment, but Boston was favored over New York when the American League Championship Series started.
All the T-shirt vendors in the Bronx, and the waitresses uptown, and the sanitation engineers on Broadway who told their bookies, "I Love New York," and backed it up with some greenbacks on their team, are dancing in the streets. Don't be surprised if a whole new bunch of little Bronsons are born in Queens nine months from now. Bronson Arroyo, Boston's previously unflappable young pitcher, finally cracked last night, showing the strain of facing baseball's most historic franchise in the biggest game of his life. Yet he is hardly alone in his misery.
So now the Sox are down, 3-0, and it's over, and everyone knows it, even the resilient Boston players who have never said die all season, and aren't about to start now. Give them credit for that, because there isn't much else to praise them for.
"We're in a tough spot," lamented Johnny Damon. "They're doing what we though we'd do in this series."
You can hang your bruised and battered Boston cap on the fact this series would be different if Curt Schilling was healthy.
You'd be wrong.
How could anyone have underestimated a lineup that features Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui all in a row? And, just when you think Bernie Williams (.400) is too old and too slow to hurt you anymore, he kills you with those sleepy-eyed, timely hits. Just when you're thinking you'll get a breather because 36-year-old John Olerud is batting eighth, and he looks like he's all done, he takes Pedro Martinez out of the park, like he did in Game 2.
If you said Yankees second baseman Miguel Cairo was not to be feared, then congratulations. He is batting under .200 in this series, and is just about the only player from top to bottom that hasn't killed the locals in some excruciating fashion.
