Lazy Rainy Night

         I’ve been lazily sitting around with the Mrs. for the last few hours, watching Celebrity Duets on Fox.  No baseball on this rainy New York night.  It had a very off-season feel for me.  Just flipping through the channels with the Mrs, watching whatever…  This is what winter looks like for me; not like the hang-on-every-pitch intensity of the Yankee summers.  Anyway, it was an okay show.  They had some surprisingly decent names (Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Michael Bolton, James Ingram) as the duet partners for the “celebrities,” who were the usual D-list fare.  Wayne Brady did a nice job as host, but the judges were tough to watch.  Little Richard.  God bless him, he’s a legend.  But he’s got to be 75 years old.  And he wasn’t so much entertaining as he was odd.  The Simon Cowell-esque music producer guy had less personality than a lava lamp, and was utterly forgettable.  Marie Osmond played a pretty good former star/industry insider, but hasn’t yet found a way to mix constructive criticism with her obvious desire not to offend anyone.  And she talks too much.  That said, Lucy Lawless (who looks a thousand times better as a glammed-up blond than she did during her Xena days), Alfonso Ribeiro (forget Carlton, old-school New Yorkers will always remember him as Broadway's Tap Dance Kid), Leah Thompson (liked her in Back to the Future, found her gratingly annoying in Caroline in the City, back to liking her singing duets with Randy Travis), and Jai Rodriguez (of Que*r Eye for the Straight Guy fame; a borderline ringer) can sing.  Hal Sparks (who, in his starring role on Que*r as Folk, has probably made out with more dudes than Jai Rodriguez), Carly Patterson (an Olympic medalist in gymnastics just two years ago, who looks like her next reality show should probably be Celebrity Fit Club), Cheech Marin (now why wouldn’t he have come out and sung “Born in East L.A.” - that was his only shot!), and Chris Jericho (one of Mike Sherry’s all-time favorite pro wrestlers, back in his Y2J- "lion-tamer" days) most certainly can not sing.  I don’t know how long this show is going to last, but I mostly likely won’t see another one until baseball is done in November.  Jericho got kicked off tonight, and the smart money is on Jai Rodriguez to win.  Just in case any of you thought that I was any less of a loser in the off-season than I am during the season, I hope I’ve made my case.

         I’m also keeping one eye on the Oakland/Red Sox game on the mlb.com gamecast.  It’s at the point now where I’m rooting against the Red Sox out of force of habit, but I’m thinking that it might be time to think about the A’s and home field as the bigger threat right now.  Let’s be honest.  The Red Sox are crumbling violently, right before everyone’s eyes.  Now that Papi, Manny, and Willy Mo are out for the near future, and Wells is on the trading block, clearly Theo Epstein sees the writing on the wall.  If the Red Sox were to lose tonight [they’re down 1-0, bottom 4], they would be 9 games out in the loss column.  With only a month left in the season, that’s not going to do it.  The A’s, on the other hand, are 4 behind the Yanks in the loss column.  They have a very tough schedule, but they constitute a direct threat, as we’ve previously discussed in the BPS.  Not having home field advantage in the first round is brutal, especially when you’re jockeying back and forth to the West Coast.  If the post-season got underway today, the Yanks wouldn’t play the A’s, but you never know how things will work out.  So I’m still up in the air.

         Tony Sherry broke the news to me today about Big Papi, with a voicemail message early this morning.  There was some immediate speculation in the media (and on the BPS comments) that this might be somehow related to performance-enhancing drugs.  It’s very possible.  I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised, as the evidence certainly tilts toward that possibility.  But I have no ill-will towards Ortiz.  By all accounts he is a great guy, a happy-go-lucky personality who is active in charities and a good teammate.  Of course I wish him a safe and speedy recovery, just as I do Manny and Willy Mo and Varitek and anyone else who’s battling an injury.  That’s not how you want to win.  But we at the BPS have been very vocal over the past two years about the Red Sox being so over-reliant on two guys to key their offense.  Right now they have absolutely nothing.  Also kind of interesting that the Red Sox minor-league system, which was fashionably and incessantly declared “abundant” by the national media types over the past two years, has failed them in spades.  The Yankees farm system, panned as “desolate” by the same lot, has saved their season, just as it did last year.  And more talk today about the fed-up Red Sox, once again, setting the stage to trade Manny this off-season.  No one would be more psyched than me.

         Maybe we’ll get some baseball in over the next few days.  The Tigers didn’t scare me in May, and they don’t scare me now.  Look out.