because it has been a few years since a Red Sox manager blew a playoff game by sticking with a pitcher to long

Hafner clearly is swinging for the fences

my question too. i presume he wants to save beckett for god-forbid extra innings or the WS. but he has Paps as well delcarmen ready to go.

at worst, oki shoulda been out after the sizemore AB

wow.

That was like Ricky Vaughn vs. Clu Haywood

So what about Travis Hafner indicates "heat?"

lugo you motherfucker....don't double-clutch the DP ball

i fucking hate you

I sense a very nervous Red Sox nation

swear to god if garko doesn't get out...i'm going to shit on lugo's doorstep

fortunately if paps gets garko he gets the bottom of the lineup next inning ftw

thnx jacoby!

coco crisp woulda made that play too

yikes

close one

but yes yikes...it was decently hit by garko.

not sure why at 0-2 paps gave him a ball to hit...if i'm tek i call a splitter or two there...let him bury it and get garko to chase

Wow if someone had fart behind homeplate that one would of been out of the park that was close.

wow, that was the weakest double in the history of baseball

Let's just put this out of its misery and move onto the world series...

SI

This is the longest 8th inning ever.

I'll take it :)

(BTW, Hi everyone. Did ya miss me? :))

That's got to be a good thing for the Rockies to take with them, that they've already been to Fenway. And there has to be an advantage for a team like that, to come into a World Series well rested. All of the talk of the long layoff is cool and all, but...when you've gone on a run like Colorado has, the rest might be just what the doctor ordered for that team. We'll find out on Wednesday, I imagine.

Meh. Too bad you can't carry these runs over to the World Series. They might need them...

It's going to be a fun series. The Rockies are a hugely hot team.

It was 3-1 Cleveland before this happened ...

It looks like I'll be making the 8 hour drive from Boise to Denver next weekend.

There's never been a team better positioned than the Sox to come back from 3-1 than in this series. I mean, Beckett, then two games at Fenway - they had reason to be confident.

gotta tip your hat to loften tho. hes really had a great career. I wonder if hes done?

Prepare for the towels and the hockey crowd.

I'm hoping to play along, too on Saturday. If the ticket brokers don't beat me to it.

Nice grab to win it, at least.

hope hes ok, looked limpin a lil

There are probably a few people hoping he is alittle banged up so Ellsbury keeps playing.

I was getting worried.

For the Tree's sake

*chuckles* Nope, I actually missed most of game 5 and six due to some RL Issues, and I just got the net back working about 10 minutes ago

FUCK YEEEAAAAAAA!!!

RED SOX WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I almost prefer teams that give all of their tickets away to rich people who can afford them and give a few ordinary people false hope by conducting lotteries rather than this silly free-for-all the Rockies have employed by selling tickets ONLY online. I bet the secondary market was buzzing like nobodies business.

Oh well. I didn't really want to deal with those damn towels anyway.

This is the system the other teams employed (the Red Sox did it too) and to me, it's a much better idea: http://philadelphia.phillies.mlb.com...ixopp_form.jsp

I actually don't get the fascination with 3-1. All it means is the lower seed took one from the higher seed's park, and the higher seed hasn't taken one at the other park yet. When you put 2 games at one, then 3 at the other, then 2 back at the first, results like 3-1 or 3-2 in favor of the lower-seed are not unexpected, especially when two teams are pretty closely matched like Cleveland and Boston were.

+1

The only issue I have with the Red Sox system is that it seems like it would be easy for some tech geek to enter a drawing Ten Billion times.

But, I have more trust in the system now that a friend of mind landed 2 tickets to ALCS game 2 through the lottery.

I can't imagine the scalper market is too out of control though, so maybe I'll try to get something near the park at around the 2nd inning, when prices tend to plummet.

But with the drawing, it'd be easy to figure out for a human what responses were coming from similar IPs and to see repeat names, whereas with this system, the secondary ticket market wins these battles all of the time because of their superior software that's really just aimed at jamming the system so no one else can get in and so, even if they get less of the tickets, they're still getting more than ordinary people.

I can't say I've been that excited about this run, since it's not my team, but it has been nice to be "part" of a pennant race for the first time in over a decade and so, I've just been enjoying the ride since I live out here and would've been nice to get to a World Series game, since it's not far away and yet...it's probably better this way.

It seems a lottery system in Denver would be a lot easier to run than in a real baseball city, because here it'd not be too hard to weed out the contenders from the pretenders and the pretenders wouldn't be interested in wasting their time trying to spoof that system because it's labour intensive. Which is why I can't understand why they thought this was a good idea and yet, it doesn't surprise me at all.

If I score some, great. But no way I pay a scalper when it's cheaper to just sit at home and watch it anyway.

But apparently, it's a big trend that no one can get in to get them. What a clusterfuck.

(http://denver.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=tickets)


What's worse for the Rockies is, they first announced there would be tickets on sale as a few select locations, as well as the team's ticket office and then at the last minute changed their mind and said they'd ONLY be online. They're already eroding goodwill before a pitch gets thrown. How stupid...

Looking at scalper ticket prices always amazes me. I mean, I'll pay twice face value if it's an event I really, really want to go to. But there's two field box seats up there for Game 2 at Fenway: $10,792.00/Piece. I mean, even if you're crazy rich, can't you think of something better to spend $20k on?

Seriously?

crazy rich people don't really think of the cost. If they want to go they will go, price doesn't matter.

Its a market. I know a lot of people who aren't crazy rich who spent big money on the Red Sox World Series tickets - that's just how it is. New England is a well to do area, and Fenway is a very small park.

And why not? If you want to spend $20K on tickets, more power to you.

I even explained why. Was some part of my answer not clear? I just find it inevitable that you can have one off game and get down 3-1 despite being the "better team", as shown by the Sox this time around and lots of times in baseball (CNN or ESPN showed the list of how this was the 11th time or some-odd someone had come back from down 3-1). By the end of game 5, the "poorer" team has had an extra home game. The whole system is set up to generate drama by giving the lower-seeded team some early cracks.

On the scalping thing: tickets are hard enough to come by and expensive enough as-is without a secondary market trying to cash in. Good set of articles last week on how the Hanna Montana concerts have been difficult for parents to buy for because the brokers bought them all within minutes and are reselling them at outrageous prices. Glad to live in a state that limits the price you can resell a ticket for...

No, the part of your answer that is not clear is how it is not so easy to win 3 straight elimination games against a team that only has to win 1 of those 3 to advance. If this is only the 11th time in the history of MLB that a team has come back from 3-1 down to win, that seems fairly rare, doesn't it?

If everything goes to form (home teams winning), the favorite is going to be down 3-2 going into game 6. The Sox had to win one more game beyond that (and Beckett was pitching).

All 3-1s aren't equal. In this case, it was obvious the Sox had a great chance.

Rockies just held a press conference. They're freezing ticket sales at this moment and won't tell us when they'll resume sales...but MLB's ticket vendor was overwhelmed with 8.5 million hits in 30 minutes and of course, while the Rockies didn't admit this, I bet it was all of those secondary resellers and so, they said they sold a few hundred tickets and that's it and so, they're gonna wait until this afternoon to decide what to do about ticket sales, but that almost the entire allotment is still available.

LOL. It kind of fits in with the theme of the series. The uptight Red Sox, who have done all this before, have an orderly, glitch-free ticket distribution.

All the Colorado players do is win - they're completely oblivious to the pressures of the playoffs, and "what it takes". The organization's ticket staff was completely caught off guard by the fact that there might be extra interest in these tickets.

Thanks, that's pretty much what I was trying to say. It's set up for 3-2 going back to the home team's turf assuming everyone wins every home game. And if the away team steals one, it's assumed the home team can steal one as well, and if they can't well they didn't deserve to be here. So by default you expect the higher seed to face 2 elimination games as-is. I know other sports (basketball was it?) have done 2-2-1-1-1 series types to try and avoid putting the higher seed in a hole like this. The travel days drag out the series, though.

I'm not trying to claim it's not exciting, as I'm pretty sure that's exactly why the system is set up the way it is. It gives the lower seed a decent chance to close out at home, and it helps extend a series. Just saying it's not that surprising the Sox got in a 3-1 hole, or that they dug their way out of it. In fact it's borderline expected they'd face a deficit along those lines. I know that having a team come back from 3-1 only 11 times sounds like not a lot, but how often has a higher seed faced a 3-1 deficit? And given that you'd only expect them to have a slightly higher than 50% chance to win the series anyway, how big a deal is it really? And once they win that one game in Cleveland, they were now in the expected 3-2 situation heading to home. The only real issue is that they took the third game in Cleveland instead of one of the earlier two.

Heck, the Sox now have 3 of the 11 times it happened.

From Bill Simmons column:

Ponder this: as of one hour ago, no matter what either man does for the rest of his career or what they've done previously, J.D. Drew is now and forever more beloved in Boston than A-Rod will ever be in any city. Congratulations to Theo on the genius free-agent pickup. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Sorry that cracked me up..

Rockies are a real Mickey Mouse operation. What club botches World Series ticket sales to this magnitude? Goofballs. I gave up after yesterday, but man...way to erode your goodwill in an instant.

There's a funny thread at Sonsofsamhorn.net (Red Sox message board) about everyone's experiences dealing with this nonsense. Not one confirmed sale there yet.

My favorite post:

"If the Soviet Union was still around, this is how we would be buying bread".