I had planned a post at the halfway point of the season which should be 81 games. For reasons I can't fathom, the Sox have reached this point with today's nice 5-0 win over the Diamondbacks. They are in first place with a 49-32 record, one game ahead of the Team Formerly Known As The Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

The Rays are 46-31 on 77 games and that's what I can't understand. Nobody else other than the Sox has reached 81 games, in both leagues. Yes, I know the Sox started before everyone else in Japan but Oakland did too and they're on 76 games. Odd, huh?

If you gave the Rays three of the four games, they'd be tied for the AL East lead. Will they never wake up and remember their place?

Anyway, with a fairly typical run of injuries, the Sox have stayed in serious contention for three months, with Papi due back imminently and Dice-K back this weekend in Houston after a disasterous return against St Louis.

The series loss to the Cards was their first home series loss this season and they're still on pace for some sort of home win-loss record. They have an opportunity on the upcoming trip to get their road record to .500. Only the Angels, Rangers and the Y*****s in the AL have road records above .500.

So off we go into the next 81 games. It may be a bumpy ride but I'd take 98-64 come September 30th.

Sitting in the back row of a United 757 en route to LAX, reflecting on my long weekend in the upper hemisphere and four great ballgames.

 

The three games in what the locals apparently call Balto where seriously good fun including, as they did, Manny's 500^th and 501^st career home runs, a reunion with Kelly and Beth from San Diego last year and meeting Cyn, Crystal and Brooke (Crystal's sister) from SG.

Not least of the new acquaintances was the legendary Steve who appears in a number of these photos. He must be the most photographed stuffed ferret on Earth, although some say he's actually alive.

The downer of the Baltimore experience for me was losing some gear to an opportunist thief who broke a window in my rental car to nick an MP3 player and a GPS system. The Maryland Transit Police couldn't have been more helpful, which is more than can be said for the Hertz tow truck guy, who took two hours to arrive and couldn't find the Hertz lot for another hour. The lot was less than three miles from where the break-in happened. Dipstick.

 

Manny's 500^th came earlier that evening, after a day of torrential summer rain and a brief palooze with Kelly, Cyn et al (who the F**k is al - Ed.) in Sliders, a bar that contrived to run out of hamburger on what must have been one of their busiest days of the season. Dinks.

The Manny shot was the most amazing thing I've seen in a ballpark, a no-doubter into the centrefield bleachers that I followed for all of its flight. There is no other sound like the noise which greeted its landing. The whole stadium exploded and cheering, screaming and clapping continued well into the next at-bat. I have no clue sitting here who pitched, what the count was, what the game situation was. None of that matters. I saw a 500^th home run. There have only been 23 before this and I was there, crying as it turned out.

 

I was in the far right field club seats, level with the foul pole and had a great view of the flight and the scramble for the ball, won by a true fan, a Mr Woo, who immediately gave it back to Manny and will surely find a place in baseball heaven.

For the Friday and Sunday games I had seats with Kelly, Beth, Cyn and Steve. Apart from Steve they are raucous, passionate, funny and delightful company. Steve said little but always had a daft grin on his face. He knows when he's well off.

Sunday's game included a standing O for Manny and #501 and was followed, for me by the Mount Vernon staff picnic, held in the grounds of Washington's home overlooking the Potomac. I got to see Kiana, her Mom Stacey, and my sister Anne and to savour the fabulous view and an idyllic summer's evening. Oh, and I persuaded the DJ to play Dirty Water.

So much for Balto (its abbreviated that way on road signs and on the Light Rail system maps) and on for a flying visit to Bahston. I had figured that, after coming 12000 miles, I couldn't not go to Fenway.

The highlight here, apart from returning for the first time in three years, was the truly awesome standing O Manny got on his first at-bat. If the Sox FO don't exercise their options next year and in 2010, they should be taken out and shot.

 

Paloozing on this occasion took the form of a one-on-one session in the Cask & Flagon with Josh Blue who can drink free Guinness like a native. (I kid, JB, if you're reading this). For some reason, probably not unrelated to the Sam Adams consumed, I have no photographic record.

There have been 256 no hitters in MLB, 249 if you count only those thrown by a single pitcher. Red Sox pitchers have pitched a disproportionate 18 of them and the last two were by Clay Buchholz and, today, Jon Lester.

All the superstitions were in evidence: don't mention the no-hitter, don't talk to the pitcher in the dugout and so on. At the end, Lester was hugged by what must have been the entire Sox field staff including Francona who lost it and disappeared in tears. Almost incidentally, the Sox beat the Royals 7-0 and are alone in first a game up on the remarkable Rays with the NY AL team 6.5 games back and four games under .500.

And, after going three for three in Boston, Ted and Tex missed all the fun while flying back home. I was at work today, caught an inning or two at lunchtime then ran the whole game on mlb.tv.

It's on Sportscenter right now and it's still amazing.

This little outpost of Red Sox fandom celebrates its second birthday today, although it started life as RSN UK. Back then, I was five months into unemployment and a search for a job which eventually turned up a few months later and it changed its name and your correspondent moved halfway around the world.

Right now, the Sox are 24 and 19 and in second place behind the team formerly known as the Devil Rays (of all people) and the NY AL team are two games under .500 and propping up the division, 4.5 games back. In 2006 at this point, the Sox were 23 and 14 but leading the division by a game from the Y*****s and we all know how that turned out.

I'll take what we have with this team and believe they're good enough to repeat, both in the Division and in the playoffs. The Rays are playing waaay above themselves as are the Orioles. The MFYs on the other hand are in some disarray with young master Steinbrenner carrying on the family tradition of interference and lunacy.

Meanwhile, Elmerpalooza is underway in Boston with Ted's first ever visit to Fenway Park due on Friday, accompanied by quantities of SG commenters and sundry stuffed animals. I suspect it could get a little dusty around 5 pm EDT.

My own pilgrimage this year is scheduled for the end of the month for the 4-game series in Baltimore and a quick side trip to Fenway for a game. Scouserpalooza? Possibly, with a chance to meet Cyn, the inspiration for this little blog, and a reunion with Kelly and Beth from last year's San Diego trip.

Can't. Wait.

... and in the morning, we shall remember them.

Today was ANZAC Day in New Zealand and Australia, a public holiday commemorating, particularly, the military disaster that was Gallipoli, as well as their war dead in lots of other actions.

I had booked a couple of nights in a random hotel in Napier, with the only condition that it should have a sea view. It (the Te Pania Scenic Circle) turns out to be across the road from an NZ war memorial, the scene at dawn today of a service of remembrance, one of hundreds across the country and in Aus.

I was up before dawn to catch the sunrise - Napier is the easternmost city and therefore the first to see the new day - and to catch Justin Masterton's MLB debut, a convincing performance screwed royally by the walking wounded who are the Sox bullpen at the moment. Little Manny in particular apparently looked like death warmed up (by the seventh I'd given up on a flaky mlb.tv and was listening to Joe C and Dave O'Brien on WRKO radio) and Justin's 2-run lead was pissed away.

Napier was flattened by an earthquake and subsequent fires in 1931 and rebuilt mostly in Art Deco style which led to buildings like these:

which has absolutely nothing to do with anything but they're pretty!

Tomorrow's game in St Pete is a more civilised early lunchtime start for me and I've decided to find an Internet cafe to watch the game, in an effort to resurrect my ALDS and ALCS mojo.

Oh, and 15-9, leading the division, Papi getting his groove back, Manny about to reach 500, the kids looking awesome. What's not to love about the 2008 Red Sox?

After a truncated Spring Training, the Sox traipsed all the way from Florida to Tokyo to play a couple of exhibition games and two real games in the Tokyo Dome.


(Image nicked from here)

This place looked like a bigger version of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, including the ludicrous light-coloured roof lining, but with upwards of 50000 noisy Japanese fans.

Then they dragged back to LA to play three exhibition games against the Dodgers, including one in the aging Coliseum, a venue totally unsuited to baseball.

(Image from Diamond Mine Baseball)

This game produced serious revenue for charity and a record crowd for an event involving Major League teams, but it should never have been played in that place.

What next? Off to Oakland for two more real games in the drafty, concrete monstrosity that is the other coliseum.


(Image from Diamond Mine Baseball)

This hybrid is being vacated by the A's for a proper ballpark at the south end of the bay in Fremont sometime in 2010/2011, and not before time.

Finally, over last weekend, three in the SkyDome in Toronto, on the motheaten  carpet-over-concrete surface that MLB should have banned years ago.

(Image from justzoomin.com)

A good number of the errors and runs in the 3-game sweep by the Jays could be attributed to the ragged rug, the bright, distracting field-level scoreboard and the peculiar backgrounds in this cavernous building.

Leaving aside the effects of all the travel and living out of suitcases for three weeks, the Sox had to cope with the disorientation of the mishmash of crap stadiums with awful sightlines, unpredictable bounces and weird dimensions.

The net result of all this? One game under 500 as they finally start the season properly in Fenway on Tuesday.

World Series have been won on much worse starts than that.



 

So there I was, curled up in the back of a rental Nissan Pulsar (trust me, you can't stretch out in the back of a Pulsar), trying to get some sleep, when I discovered Cyn was live-blogging the Sox-Giants game. Exhibition/MLB promo game not withstanding, I couldn't resist and followed the quirky narrative  until my iPAQ's and my batteries nearly gave out.

How, you may ask, had a man of my advanced years come to be sleeping in a rental car in a seaport car park in New Plymouth on Easter Sunday night? Thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

It sort of started three or so years ago when Ben (my younger son) dragged me in front of his stereo and virtually instructed me to listen to In Between Dreams, Jack Johnson's first (?) album. I was suitably impressed, became a fan and have bought all his output since, including the not-so-wonderful Curious George soundtrack.

Anyway, when tickets went on sale for his three-show NZ tour, I opted for the New Plymouth date, on the grounds that it was reasonably accessible compared to Christchurch or Napier and it was on a Sunday. I barely noticed it was Easter Sunday - mistake, as we shall see.

Baulking at the idea of a 10 hour roundtrip drive, I booked a flight with Air NZ and a local rental car to get to the venue from New Plymouth airport. I planned to get into town four hours ahead of the concert to find a motel for the night (there are literally thousands of motels in NZ). Mistakes numbers two and three as it turned out.

The flight from Wellington was cancelled and I was offered a 'reroute' up to Auckland and back down to NP, with, by the way, a four hour layover in Auckland. So I would get into NP as the venue gates opened, with no time to look for a room.

The TSB Brooklands Arena is truly magical: a covered stage built on an island at one end of a small lake with the viewing area a grassy slope just across a small stretch of water. I found a good spot and sat down to wait as the large (by NZ standards) crowd gathered and the sun set.

The gig began around 7:30 with a too-long warm up set from a guy called Matt Costas and Jack Johnson appeared around 8:45.

I watched for around an hour and decided to leave. Not having somewhere to stay was getting me twitchy and sitting on the ground was doing nothing for my back spasms.

As it turned out, I didn't miss too much more music. Around 10 p.m. some of the crowd decided they'd rather be nearer the stage and piled into the lake where dancing and cavorting ensued. The set was stopped while the water was cleared, Jack played a couple more songs and finished with hundreds of kids in the water again.

I. meanwhile, was engaged in a short and fruitless search for a room. A nice lady in the Plymouth Hotel gently reminded me it was the Easter weekend (a four-day holiday in NZ) and "there's the Jack Johnson concert at Brooklands".

Every hotel, motel and B&B for miles around had been booked for weeks. I stood no chance. Everyone and his brother was in town on holiday and all his brother's mates and their girlfriends were here for the Jack Johnson gig.

So it was, dear reader, that I ended up parked at the water's edge in the port area of New Plymouth, gazing at a sky filled with more stars than I've seen in ages, with a full moon lighting the waves, curled up in the back of the Nissan, following the first live blog of the season.

Bliss.

After two meaningless and mildly embarrassing workouts against the kids of Boston College and Northeastern University, ST games got underway today, or yesterday depending where the dateline is, with a big boys' game against the Twins

Matsuzaka pitched two innings for two hits and no runs, with the defence turning two double plays behind him. The offence later came through with back to back homers from Youk and Tek. In the end, 8-3 was good day's work although by the end, most of the guys on the field were unknowns, probably to each other as well as to most of the fans.

Meanwhile, Coco Crisp was hitting and running the bases like a man possessed, or more likely, a man putting together a highlight reel. I'm getting ambiguous about centre field. After September and the postseason, I wanted Ellsbury to start this year because I thought Crisp's offence wasn't outweighed by his D. Now, somehow, I think there might be room for both.

Joshua Patrick had the day off today, so I thought I'd post his street sign. I've driven past this sign at RNZPC every day for more than a year but I only got around to taking this picture last week. No. 19 pitches at 1 p.m. Sunday I think, which is 5 a.m. Monday for me. I suspect he'll be starting  without me.

Three and a half months since Game 4 of WS 2007 and pitchers, catchers, the big truck, Dice-K's Japanese media circus and, no doubt, Wally are all in Fort Myers for the start of Spring Training.

The WS game happened in the NZ Spring and we've had a great Summer which probably still has some legs, so I guess I can look forward to watching at least some games on my deck with a glass or two of wine.

The long wait was punctuated for me by my great Christmas trip (see earlier posts) and a last-minute trip to the UK to visit my son in hospital. Since I got back, work has been getting in the way as it often does, but now I'm ready.

Bring it on.