Say It Ain't So, Joe (Madden)

When all is said and done, no one can blame Bye Bye Manny, or the the absence of the clutch bat of Mike Lowell, or Josh Becket's strained oblique. As hurtful as it is, The Tampa Bay Rays beat the Red Sox straight up, fair and square, over and out. Joe Madden's Rover Boys stayed his steady (and irritatingly upbeat) course, and thier young bats kept pounding away (15 home runs to our 9, while thier younger arms gut- checked the mostly veteran Sox hitters when they needed to (the Sox scratched out 55 hits to Tampa's 54 while only scoring 27 runs to the Rays' 40). We lost two out of three at home (conjuring up a miracle to grab one), let a second game victory in Tampa get away, left a ton of guys on base in a variety of scoring situations, watched Captain Veritek become the surest out since the last stand of Bob Beetle Bailey, had Big Papi and Pedroia hit and run into a truly classic strike-em-out-throw-em-out momentum killer in the 6th, allowing the tiring Matt Garza to shut down rally killers Kotsay and Tek in the 7th with two men on, let Elvis Costello Madden mix and match five pitchers in the 8th without one run squeezing by, and, finally, let a guy (David Price) with 5 games major league experience to his name strike out J.D Drew (looking more than ever like one of those haunted movie Civil War vets stumbling back home through a field of cannon smoke and dead bodies) and absolutely shut us down in the 9th. I wasted a lot of time yesterday morning attempting to figure out which Sox jersey I'd wear to work today for my day after celebration, anybody wanna loan me a Willy Aybar model?