Steve Reads

I’ve often heard it said that New Yorkers don’t really think about Boston, anywhere near as much as we think about them. That may be true. But it would be hard to spot the lack of interest by the New York Times’s continual tone of condescension. You can almost plot the storylines:

If the Sox had lost to the Yankees:

“the Curse lives on,” etc.

If the Sox had won against the Yankees but lost to the Cards:

“they can’t complete when clutch games are on the line. And incidentally, the Curse lives on.”

If the Sox won it all:

“The Sox will never get used to winning. What will Sox fans do if their team is finally good?”

And of course that’s what we get. (A close second in the Condescension Department would have been, “Sure, you won — but you haven’t won as many World Series as we have.”) Basically, proceed under the assumption that the Times wants to undercut any Sox win — particularly when that Sox win comes at the expense of the Yankees — and you’ll explain the slant on most of their Sox articles.

I like Bill Simmons’s response to that whole line of thought:

Is this how parents feel when they’re about to have a baby? Like nothing has changed, but everything’s about to change? That’s how I felt yesterday. The Red Sox were about to win the World Series. And I was about to become Just Another Baseball Fan again.

Because that’s all we ever wanted. Nobody understood that. Outsiders made up fake curses, called us losers, pointed to a legacy of failure, questioned our sanity. We kept hoping. We kept the faith. We kept passing this team down from generation to generation, hoping it would be worth it. And it was. The last 11 days were the greatest sports ride of our lives: Eight games, eight wins, one championship, a boatload of memories. We crawled through 500 yards of (expletive)-smelling foulness and came out smelling like roses on the other side.

Emailing with my dawg Josh, I was reminded of how great an album Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints is. I was thinking in particular of his song “Born at the Right Time,” which came to mind immediately when I met my niece. The part that struck me is the chorus:

Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to
Born at the instant
The churchbells chime
And the whole world whispering,
“Born at the right time”

So I started listening to the album, and landed on a verse that has always given me chills — this one from “The Cool, Cool River”:

And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
For the mother’s restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: Hard times?
I’m used to them
The speeding planet burns
I’m used to that
My life’s so common it disappears
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

I used to devour the New York Times Book Review every week, mostly for Michiko Kakutani’s reviews. That stopped when I stopped subscribing to the Times.

Now the Bookslut points to a new Kakutani review of Tom Wolfe’s latest. It’s a pretty great evisceration. (Snark has its place — particularly for self-important writers like Wolfe.) It happens to spear Wolfe for precisely the kind of literary failing that irritates me the most: using stock types rather than characters. That was The Glass Palace’s blunder.

I think one of the best functions of a book reviewer is to torture himself or herself reading an atrocious book so that the reader doesn’t have to. Many thanks to Kakutani.

Let me just state for the record that Tim McCarver needs to stop doing sports commentary. He was sufficient to make me turn off the sound on my television during the ALCS and World Series, and instead listen to WEEI while Fox Sports handled the images. I really can’t stand McCarver. Joe Buck  . . .  fine, whatever. Al Leiter? He’s great; we need to make more of him. But McCarver? Just a blubbering idiot.

I think I can speak for a lot of baseball fans when I say that the single dumbest moment of McCarver’s ALCS and World Series tenure this year was his statement that a walk to Hideki Matsui is as good as a home run. I think McCarver may be senile. Or just insane. Or maybe just dumb. It’s hard to figure out which hypothesis best explains the data, but I invite any McCarver Statisticians out there to help me with the analysis.

My friend Jon is hella funny. He writes

CONGRATULATIONS

City of Boston, I wore the Varitek shirt again last night, the shirt sent to me by one of your ablest agents. I notice that your baseball team emerged devastatingly victorious after what could safely be called “a dry spell of some note.” City of Boston, I’m not going to say outright that these things were directly connected, but I must point out that such a thing cannot be logically excluded. In conclusion, please arrange for a cake of some sort to be delivered to my residence, and we will consider it even.

Also, congratulations to Merlin for making me laugh so goddamn hard.

He is very right about the Merlin thing. Here ‘tis, in all its glory:

Five terrible fake articles in Waaaaa!, the notional magazine for hipster Noe Valley mothers

1. Clogs: They’re just so comfortable!
2. Tough Choices: One baby, two dogs or two babies, one dog?
3. Election Special: Which clever t-shirt will you force baby to wear?
4. Busy Mom Discipline: Try hitting the baby with the spaniel
5. Why can’t I name them all “Tyler?”: One mother’s painful journey of discovery

I’ve not had much of a chance to dissect it, but I’d like to point out that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has written another attack on Linux (my cache; via Slashdot). I’d like to read the studies that he mentions in there — such as the one showing that “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 has averaged 7.4 security advisories per month, compared with 1.7 advisories for Windows Server 2003.” Not sure what to make of this without really digging in.

Bill Simmons wrote a piece on the eve of World Series game 4 in which, among other things, he lists what had to transpire in order for the Sox to get to the Series. We can never replay history, so it may be hard to say that he’s right. But these do seem like plausible events that we couldn’t have done without:

1.) The A-Rod deal fell through; 2.) Millar’s Japan deal fell through; 3.) The Expos told them that they didn’t have enough to get Vazquez, so they turned to Plan B (Schilling); 4.) The Yankees trumped them for Contreras; 5.) Nomar turned down two different extensions in 2003; 6.) Anyone could have claimed Manny off waivers this winter; 7.) They almost traded D-Lowe for Loiaza before the Yankees trumped their bid; and 8.) They probably wouldn’t have gotten Cabrera if Nomar hadn’t sulked throughout that 13-inning game at Yankee Stadium, turning public sentiment against him just enough so they could eventually trade him without causing a riot.

Frank Rich has a great gig deconstructing the American political scene into little bits of theatre. He does it again today (my cache) with a brilliant piece on what happens when a president tries to turn his every action into a scene from a movie — landing on aircraft carriers, landing in the middle of a stadium in his helicopter while the theme from Top Gun plays, etc. — while the reality falls apart around him. How well does a leader hold up when he’s all fiction and no reality?

It’s encouraging on another level to read Rich, because he makes the Bush administration seem farcical. This isn’t a group of men that has any control over reality; they can’t orchestrate a new terrorist attack to win the election (my own favored conspiracy theory). They can control the media, control the spin on their own failures, and make their guy look macho. But the reality is ultimately beyond them. This seems to be Rich’s point, and it’s a highly encouraging one during this highly discouraging election.

It took 86 years, but the Red Sox finally won the World Series tonight. I’m more happy than I can say. This entire city is more happy than it can say, collectively — which might explain why it’s planning for 5 million people to parade on Friday. (Anyone who’s within driving distance of this city and doesn’t come is not thinking straight. If you don’t understand the importance of this win to Boston, just come and find out. I promise that you won’t be disappointed.)

So much to say. How about that we won eight games straight after losing three straight to the Yankees? How about that I — along with, I daresay, most of the baseball-aware world — left the Sox for dead after they went 0-3. On top of those eight wins, does it matter that the Cardinals didn’t seem to be playing baseball? I worried that this would turn the Series into an anticlimax, but nothing could be further from the truth: the Curse has been lifted.

Congratulations go to so many people. To Derek Lowe, for being such an outstanding postseason pitcher (and a flake during the regular season, but during the hagiogenesis we ignore that). To Pedro, for pitching the hell out of what may have been his last game in a Sox uniform. To Schilling, of course. To Sox pitching in general, for turning the vaunted Cards offense to mush. For that matter, props to the Sox defense for eliminating the famed “National League baseball” — the “small ball” that we were supposed to be unable to do. Then add in a bunch of solid hitters — Ortiz, Manny, Varitek, Mueller, Cabrera — and we were unstoppable. But the strongest props probably belong to Theo Epstein, the Sox GM who made the Nomar trade that, in retrospect, probably got us to the Series. He made some bold moves and they paid off; this city will probably honor him forever with whatever the opposite of Dan Duquette’s treatment is.

From this vantage point, it looks inevitable. I want to fight thinking that way, because thinking that it was inevitable downplays what an astonishing turnaround this was, and what a nailbiter it was until the last out for everyone — including the Sox, I’m sure. Despite all this talk about how the team goes out there and wins one game, not thinking about anything aside from this game right here, I couldn’t help but notice how gingerly Keith Foulke handled the ball before he tossed it to Doug Mientkiewicz at first, and how carefully Mientkiewicz scooped it up. This is a team that was aware of the Curse, and was taking no chances.

Now the Curse is over, and I’m not quite clear what to do tomorrow. Or next week. This Series is over, and I’m sad, but my team won. And I’ve been very close to crying for three hours, when I haven’t been sticking my head out the window and screaming some variant of “woo” to anyone who would listen — which turned out to be most everyone in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. I love this city. It’ll be just a little bit easier to get through the winter now.

Paul Krugman has a great column in today’s Times (my cache) on the Bush administration’s culture of secrecy. The evidence is now quite clear: a) the Bush administration tried to cover up its failures to secure a weapons site at al Qaqaa in Iraq; b) it refused to kill a terrorist leader when it had the chance, because killing him would have taken away some of the justification for the invasion of Iraq; and c) a new report on intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 (my cache) is being suppressed, at least until the election.

I’m amazed that there’s even the faintest question in anyone’s mind about whether to vote for President Bush. This election pits the slightest hope of democracy on one hand against its wholesale slaughter on the other. Indifference during this election is impossible. So how could the electoral-vote map be so red?

I was trying to find a good transcript of Tom Hanks’ quote at game 1 of the Series, so I googled a bit and found a Cards fan’s blog (my cache of the Google Cache, because Blogger appears to be temporarily down). I’ve not read much about the Series from people who are not Sox fans, so this is illuminating. The Hanks quote, as it turns out, is “I’m an American  . . .  There’s nothing wrong with the city of St. Louis. They are a lovely people, they have lovely colors on their baseball uniforms — but come on! I want Billy Buckner to have a good night’s sleep, for crying out loud!”

That blogger links to a letter from Curt Schilling to the families of 9/11 victims, written just a few days after the attacks. It’s really quite good. One more reason to respect Schilling. Oh yeah, and he’s also one of the best pitchers in baseball.

And now for something unrelated to the Red Sox (for a moment). On the strength of Cosma’s recommendation, I picked up Karl Sigmund’s book Games of Life and can’t put it down. It’s really a delightful read, and I do mean “delightful”; it’s rare for a book to produce in me a feeling of wicked fun, a sense that my mind is expanding, and an appreciation for the author’s literary gifts. Sigmund writes about theoretical biology with the gifts of a poet — this from a man whose previous books include Ergodic Theory on Compact Spaces and The Theory of Evolution and Dynamical Systems. I’ve gone racing to the footnotes at least 20 times by now, really curious about where to find further reading on the various topics he hits in this book. Fortunately, one of my personal gods, R.A. Fisher, is among those whose books seem essential to population biology, so I think I’ll have an easier time getting into it.

One of Sigmund’s main ideas is that a simple model coming from a thought experiment can be worth an awful lot, even if it strips away most of the detail that makes the real-world problem so complicated. At the very least, the model gets you started with refutable answers. Also, stripping away complexity often gives you a view of an actual phenomenon, not just an idealized abstraction. Sigmund uses the approach to great effect. Combine it with his literary gifts, and you get vignettes like this one about the German eugenics program:

The recipe sounds so simple: just sterilize all those with genetic defects. In other words, if someone’s fitness was less than 100 per cent, reduce it all the way to zero. A human sterilization programme is a horrible crime, of course, but quite in line with other Nazi measures. Some Reichsamt für Erbhygiene would see to it, and purge the Volk of all unwanted traits.

But let us compute. What would happen if a top-ranking eugenicist was struck by a violent aversion to albinism, for instance (which is not a ‘defect’, by the way), and decided to sterilize all albinos forthwith? One person in 20 000 is an albino  . . .  But the allele for albinism is recessive. It works only in double dose. From Hardy-Weinberg it follows that one gene in 140 is such an allele, since 140 × 140 is (roughly) 20 000. Since an offspring can receive this allele from each parent, one person in 70 will carry it. Sterilizing all albinos results in sterilizing only one in 280 bearers of the gene. To reduce the frequency of albinism by one half — a rather modest aim for our eugenicist — a rigorous sterilization programme would have to be applied during some 60 generations, which is considerably longer than the 1 000 years planned for the Third Reich.

(Internal footnotes omitted.) Part of what draws me to science and math is summarized quite nicely in the paragraph above. It’s the “let me take your argument and make it into something concrete; then let me eviscerate it” school of arguing. Science, to me, is a way of overcoming modes of thought that are (paraphrasing Steven Pinker from memory) “not even precise enough to be false.” Sigmund takes this approach and makes it playful.

Observant readers of the sidebar (and I know there’s at least one) will note that The Gulag Archipelago has been there for a long time. It’s a great book; it really is. It’s also unbearable. It is story after story about the horrors of the Soviet prison system — the tortures, the starvation, the endless arrests and re-arrests — which I started to read just after I finished a book (The Hungry Ghosts, also a Cosma recommendation) about torture and starvation and endless arrests in China during at least the first half of the Communist era. It is really, really hard for me to get through The Gulag Archipelago, so I read about five pages per month. It’s a great book, though, and eventually it’s going to lead me to a more thorough understanding of the Russian Revolution, the Czarist era, and the structure of Communist countries generally. (I ordered The Road To Serfdom from the library and got the Readers’ Digest Condensed Edition. That will need to be fixed before I start it.)

Finally, I borrowed a copy of D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth And Form from my friend Seth, on Seth’s recommendation and Cosma’s. The latter wrote

Might not something even blinder — more mechanical, more mindless, more unclubbable — than natural selection yet be able to create patterns and organization?

Enter snowflakes. Enter, also, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who in 1917 published a book, On Growth and Form, which has haunted all discussion of these matters ever since. Thompson’s aimed to show that huge chunks of biology are simply the consequences of physics and (less often) chemistry. When he wrote that “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces,’ in this sense at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it,” he meant forces. His accounts of the physics behind morphogenesis were ingenious, extremely elegant, very convincing and, significantly, aimed at very large features of the organism: the architecture of the skeleton, the curve of horns or shells, the outline of the organism as a whole. Most of us are resigned to abandoning biochemical details to crawling molecular chaos, but these are supposed to be more mysterious and inspiring affairs. Thompson tried to explain them using little that a second-year physics undergrad wouldn’t know. (Thompson’s anti-reductionist admirers seldom put it this way.) In particular, Thompson made a point of not invoking natural selection, indeed of leaving any kind of history out of the story. “A snow-crystal is the same today as when the first snows fell”: so, too, the basic forces acting upon organisms, so why bring history into it? The early years of this century are littered with biologists with little use for natural selection; they are now almost all deservedly forgotten. Thompson owes his continuing influence to the fact that his alternative doesn’t beg questions at every turn. (Also, of course, he wrote beautifully, better than the poets of his day.)

How could I not be excited by this?

So you see, my mind really can still concern itself with things other than baseball — anytime before about 7:30 p.m., at least. Thereafter, it’s all over.

My roommate asserts the following: if Pedro wins tomorrow’s game in St. Louis, then the Series is over. I merely post this so that the world knows that the prediction has been cast into the æther.

(This prediction is similar, incidentally, to Kevin Millar’s claim just before game 4 of the ALCS that the Yankees shouldn’t “let us win today!  . . .  We got Pedro tomorrow, then Schilling in Game 6. And you never know what might happen in Game 7.” It’s a bit different this time ‘round, because Lowe and Arroyo are no Schilling, but the dynamics shift such that the conclusion is probably the same: if Pedro wins, St. Louis is down 3-0. After the Sox’ victory from a 3-0 deficit in the ALCS, I’m unwilling to say that recovering from such a loss is impossible. But I don’t expect lightning to strike twice in the same season.)

(And yes: I have been thinking of little aside from baseball recently.)

If the Sox win this Series, I don’t see how Curt Schilling will be able to avoid some pretty tremendous mythmaking. Here’s a guy who has shut down Yankee and Cards offense during two games when he’s had what looks like a godawfully painful right ankle. We see blood on his sock every time he pitches. His ankle is held together with sutures, ferchrissakes.

Almost top to bottom (Manny Ramirez being the exception), the Sox have been a solid team during this postseason. Schilling, Wakefield, Ortiz, Roberts, Cabrera, Varitek, Lowe and Bellhorn (Bellhorn!) all have a legitimate claim for the title of Postseason Savior. This team is a team, not just a collection of superstars. But the primus inter pares has to be Schilling. The guy is a machine.

Incidentally, there are five ways the Cards could win this Series: they could win each of the next four games, or lose one and win four of the next five. Hence there are five possible scenarios in which they could win the Series. Assuming the Sox and Cards are equally likely to win each game (a fair assumption to start with), each of the five-game scenarios has probability (1/2)⁵ and the four-game scenario has probability (1/2)⁴. Hence the probability that the Cards will win is 4(1/2)⁵ + (1/2)⁴ = 3/16 = .1875. The assumptions are only approximations, of course: the Cards have a higher probability of winning in their home field, where they’ll play the next three games. And games are hardly independent: winning one game almost certainly raises the probability that you’ll win the next; I’ve not looked at the numbers, but it stands to reason. These approximations are a good starting point, though . I wonder how closely the actual Vegas betting odds match the .1875 estimate.

WITH FULL APOLOGIES TO ALL THE SWEET PEOPLE WHO POST ON THIS BLOG, I THINK I CAN SAY THAT MY FAVORITE COMMENT WAS POSTED TONIGHT, BY A GUY WHO APPARENTLY GOOGLED FOR “yankees+suck,+t-shirt”. THANKS, CRAZY COMMENTER-GUY.

My friend Mike sent me a link to a great, funny, wonderfully purgative essay by Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone endorsing John Kerry (my cache). Well worth the read, if this entire political season has depressed you. Thompson makes the election sound like it’s in the bag for Kerry. I hope he’s right. Even if he’s not, his article is 10 good minutes of gems like so:

Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents of the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws against oral sex or any other deviant practice not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with farm animals.

Thompson mentions Ralph Nader’s run for the presidency, noting that Nader’s drive to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania prompted a judge there to describe it as “the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court.” Just in case the Thompson gonzo approach scares you away, the New York Times quoted the same decision just a week ago:

He said, “In reviewing signatures, it became apparent that in addition to signing names such as Mickey Mouse, Fred Flintstone, John Kerry and the ubiquitous Ralph Nader, there were thousands of names that were created at random and then randomly assigned either existent or nonexistent addresses by the circulators.”

I see on eBay that tickets to the World Series games at Fenway (this Saturday and Sunday) are going for somewhere around $3,000 on average. This despite the MLB’s fixed prices:

There will be a one-game, two-ticket purchase limit per customer. Ticket prices for the World Series, as established by Major League Baseball, are $190 for Box seats, $145 for Grandstand seats, $70 for Bleacher seats and $50 for standing room. All orders will include a $6 per ticket and $14 per transaction fee.

If I’m not mistaken, prices are fixed and tickets cannot be resold. Airlines do this so that they can price-discriminate: if you buy a ticket near the departure date, the airlines will charge you a fortune even though it’s the same seat that someone else bought months before for much less money. If you were allowed to resell your ticket, the market would probably keep prices fairly low. That’s not totally clear, because it may be the case that early buyers of cheap tickets would buy out an entire plane’s worth of tickets and resell them for exorbitant prices. That doesn’t seem so likely; more likely, it seems to me, is that those who had to cancel a flight for some reason would sell their tickets only to recoup the tickets’ cost.

In any case, monopoly pricing such as the airlines’ is normally accompanied by a prohibition on resale to prevent the arbitrage opportunities described above. So why would baseball charge a fixed cost? Why aren’t the teams selling their own tickets on eBay? And since they’re not selling their tickets there, why haven’t they forbidden online scalping? If the Sox could make several thousand dollars off a ticket that now sells for $190, why wouldn’t they?

One charitable answer is that the teams want to allow “the masses” in. I am not that charitable. I suspect that the Sox sell their tickets in a highly inelastic region: there are probably at least 50,000 Bostonians who want to attend every 35,000-seat game; they’d pay upwards of $150 for a decent seat at a Sox-Yankees game, and would (demonstrably) pay into the thousands for World Series tickets. All populism aside, this seems like a good arrangement. As it is, Fenway has been at 100.7% of capacity this year (?), selling 2,837,304 tickets. At $40.77 a pop, on average, that’s about $116 million. Suppose that under competitive pricing, the Sox would receive even 50% more per ticket. That brings in another $60 million per year or so. (A 50% increase isn’t all that unlikely. With ticket prices among the highest in the majors, Fenway has still sold out an entire season’s worth of tickets.) Imagine what $60 million buys you. If you think he’s worth it, that’s A-Rod plus Randy Johnson plus Albert Pujols plus a bunch of others. It’s $60 million that could go toward renovations at Fenway. A baseball team could do a lot with $60 million to make it better. And as long as more people watch a team when it’s doing well, there’s a multiplier effect in making your team better: put an extra dollar into improving it, and you’ve probably bought $1.10 worth of actual improvement. (Just speculation on my part, but it stands to reason.)

It’s a question of trade-offs. If you could guarantee that the Sox would make it to the Series for the next 10 years, in exchange for not being able to afford their tickets, would you do it?

(There’s another question in here which a friend brought up at the bar last night — namely, whether the Sox would die as a team after winning the Series. The idea, I think, is that the Sox’ constant near-victories — it’s never a bad team, just always a little less than great — draw people to watch them out of curiosity and a strange kind of baseball masochism. If they started to win Series, the allure would be gone. I think this is pretty cynical, but I can’t come up with a good counterargument offhand. I’d use the Patriots in response, but they went from being a terrible team to being a great one, with no stopover at near-greatness. There’s a difference, I suspect.

All I can say is that I hope we’ll have an opportunity to test my friend’s hypothesis.)

It’s fun and irritating to spot the Republican Party’s latest talking points. The new one is that Kerry is a scaremonger (my cache). Then Bill Safire — G.O.P. mouthpiece that he is — picked up the same thread. If I looked hard enough, I’m sure I could find similar quotes from all over the Republican Party. It’s astonishing and brazen and absurd, if you think about it: Bush? Accusing Kerry of fearmongering? This from a man whose presidency was on the rocks before a terrorist attack, and who has spoken about nothing but that attack ever since? This from a man whose presidency is all about the appearance of security with none of its effects? This from a man whose Homeland Security Department’s terror alert system is a transparent attempt to raise his election fortunes? (I’ll find a citation soon, but I’ve read that the standards for how the terror-alert levels are set are secret. That’s a nice way to distract people without ever having to explain yourself.) And this guy has the gall to label Kerry the fear-monger?

Politics is rife with doublespeak, but I hold onto a faint hope that the Kerry administration will be at least a touch more honest.

Thanks to my friend Adam Gerard for introducing me to Bill Simmons’s writing. I’ve been eagerly awaiting his postgame reaction these past few days, and of course he’s exultant after last night’s win. (As is everyone in Boston. Cars were honking from the moment I left Davis Square last night until the moment I fell asleep. I’m sure the honks continued until 4 or 5 a.m.)

Gotta love this paragraph:

The top of the ninth yielded another insurance run of Gordon, who will be covered in blankets, duct-taped and thrown off one of Steinbrenner’s yachts some time this winter. Now Fox was showing the obligatory reaction shots — Yankee fans ready to start sobbing; Cashman frozen in his luxury box; A-Rod’s eyes darting around the stadium, trying to figure out a way to cheat to get on base — and that’s when it felt real.

There’s so much redemption in this win, and we haven’t yet won the Series (go Astros!). Redemption #6 or so is A-Rod. Maybe I’m just deluding myself as someone who lives in Boston, but I like to think that his thuggish slap against Arroyo in Game 6 — which no newspaper or website I’ve read has even pretended to defend — will go down in baseball infamy.

What’s also wonderfully clear about A-Rod — and was clear even before the playoffs — was that the Sox are far, far better off without him. He was a decent hitter and fielder this year, but nothing special. He hit a bit under .300, nailed 36 home runs and had 106 RBIs — good numbers, certainly, but not worth the $21 million salary. We were going to give up Nomar and Manny to get him. Look at how the season played out instead: as much as any one person, Manny is responsible for our presence in the postseason: hitting .308, 43 home runs, 130 RBI, a fun presence in the clubhouse, and a dynamic duo alongside Ortiz. (I tried to dig up the stats on how often the two hit back-to-back homers. The best I can find is that they had done so six times as of September 7.) Nomar ($11.5 million), sadly, turned out to be better for his trade-in value: we got Orlando Cabrera ($6 million) and Doug Mientkiewicz ($2.8 million), who immediately made our defense what our offense had always been. And getting rid of Nomar got rid of a toxic presence in the clubhouse.

Finally, instead of A-Rod we got Schilling. He stepped to the mound and we just had to feel reassured. He just seemed to have our interests in mind: he thought about every pitch, and he cursed more than anyone when he didn’t carry the team. This is a guy you can count on.

The Yankees got A-Rod. They paid too much for him. As the ESPN Page 2 people put it:

David: Here’s another area where I think George’s greed backfired: Despite that $185 million payroll, he didn’t have one good left-handed pitcher on the staff. Everyone knows to beat the Red Sox — with Ortiz, Nixon, Damon and Mueller all worse against lefties — you need a lefty starter and at least one lefty killer in the pen. But he was greedy and wanted Brown and Vazquez and Loaiza and Gordon — oh, and lineup that went about 10 deep in All-Stars.

Eric: Right, and let’s not forget the money spent on A-Rod. That’s, at base, just a vanity pick-up, just a we-can-do-it-and-you-can’t move, meant to crush Boston spirits. One player, one offensive player, even one as great as Rodriguez is, just doesn’t make that big a difference. The money, as you say, would have much better spent on left-handed pitching.

The A-Rod signing was pure hubris, a perfect match for his taking their money instead of Boston’s, a perfect match for his unadulterated greed.

Should this come off sounding like post-victory grave-dancing, I think A-Rod’s, Schillings, Cabrera’s, Mientkiewicz’s and Manny’s performances this season speak for themselves. Had we gotten A-Rod, I don’t think we would have gotten anywhere close to the postseason. The Sox are a team that is strong up and down the order; we’re better off with solid performers like Cabrera and Mientkiewicz than with one mega-superstar.

I can hardly believe what happened last night. The Sox cruised to a 10-3 trouncing of the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. It was never even close, though those of us who watched ALCS Game 7 last year were biting our nails throughout — particularly when Pedro took the mound. (I can’t find a good explanation of why Francona put him there, except for retribution: if Pedro could silence some Yankee fans who insisted on asking him who his daddy was, so much the better. If retribution was the thing, it obviously failed: Pedro was gone within an inning, giving up two runs in the meantime — twice as many runs as Derek Lowe allowed in his six innings of beautiful pitching.)

Now I’m scouring all the usual suspects (mlb.com, espn.com, Boston.com’s Red Sox page) to find The Most Mythic-Sounding Article Of All Time. Even the New York Times, which loves to demean the Sox, bowed down today and admitted an obvious truth: not only did the Yankees lose; they were destroyed. They blew a huge three-game lead. To put this in perspective: even if the teams were evenly matched, so that each had a 1 in 2 chance of winning each game (a fair assumption going into the series, but certainly not what you’d assume after game 3), it is still true that the Sox stood only a 1 in 16 chance of winning the series after their game-3 loss, assuming games are independent. (A false assumption, to be sure, but a good place to start.) They beat the odds in a remarkable way.

So now begins my time at Fenway: this Saturday and Sunday and, if necessary, October 30 and 31. I intend to spend as much time as I can around the park, soaking in the vibe. It is going to be glorious.