Red Hot Sox

The title says "Sox", you pervert.

The Sox are absolutely smoking, having won 14 of their last 15 games. They won 12 in row before conceding defeat to the Marlins on Friday night. They threw Jason Johnson on the mound against Dontrelle Willis, the Marlins' ace, in what could only be viewed as a blatant waving of the white surrender flag. I assume that management was hoping Willis would have an off night and the Sox offense would overcome any deficit that Johnson would create. Well, Johnson was as bad as advertised early, allowing five runs in the first two innings. The Sox didn't recover and lost for the first time in two weeks. They did go on to win the last two games of the series. In doing so they managed to tie the all time best mark in interleague play for a season at 16-2.

The NESN broadcast tonight is stuttering as if the frame rate is not what it should be. In the past I had assumed that my Motorola 6412 had simply become too warm. Turns out it's only NESN that's the problem. I just checked my incoming signal strength and found that NESN was only "Fair". ESPN HD, on the other hand, was "Good" and had twice the signal-to-noise ratio. Come on, NESN, don't play me like that. Boost your signal strength. I haven't yet attempted to correlate the problem with the location of the team or the weather conditions. It's perfectly clear and warm here, though.

Yes, I think Schilling was snubbed by Ozzie Guillen in not being elected to the All-Star game. However, I think Francisco Liriano was a bigger Guillen snub. I'm also shocked that Nomar was not chosen for the NL team. Both Liriano and Nomar are eligible to voted in by the fans in the MLB Final Vote.

I would like to propose that in the future the managers of the All-Star game are only allowed to add a single player from their own team. That would ensure that fan and player balloting accounted for the primary selections and the managers would be mostly responsible for electing the representatives from crummy teams. It would also remove much of the nepotism that Guillen and Joe Torre are so found of. I would also hope that baseball either drops the stupid rule calling for each team to be represented, or better yet, finds a way to increase the parity among the big and small market teams.