American League champions? I’ll drink, eat and dust off my collection of Brendan Donnelly-inspired scrimshaw (“Brendan versus the whale,” “Brendan spears some natives,” “Brendan gets drunk and guts a clam digger,” etc.) to that.
There’s something very beautiful in the fact that Jacoby Ellsbury stepped in for Coco and made some magical sh*t transpire, but Coco still got to come in and say f@#k all to his knees and ankles, catapulting himself into the centerfield corner wall to snare the final out.
And that Dustin Pedroia — so wee it’s safe to bet that Ortiz will drink more than Dustin’s weight in Tecate tonight — went all Bruce Banner on Cleveland when we needed it most.
And that a game that was everything you’d ever want in a Game Seven — nail-biting, ball-busting, and a new hero seemingly born every inning — ended exactly how we’d hoped it would. With this:
F@#k sleep, my brothers and sisters. We’ve got two days to catch our collective breath, then it’s back into the fray. In the meantime, congratulations to the American League champions, who overcame a young, gutsy, admirable opponent in the Cleveland Indians. Now play Royce Clayton!
Side note: Of all the things I’ll miss about the ALCS broadcast, one has got to be the frequent shots of Indians GM Mark Shapiro and his apparently Paxil-addicted trophy wife. Every time the cameras caught these two, they were frozen in the exact same poses — Shapiro furrowing his brow and reflecting on how he’s gonna explain this latest collapse, and the missus looking glassy-eyed at nothing in particular, her thoughts likely shifting between, “If we lose, will we have to sell the hovercraft?” and “Man, do I like vanilla.”
