The fates are always lying in wait

Shortly before we went off for our Labor Day camping trip, the Red Sox sent their annual demand opportunity to buy tickets for the post-season. Considering what the team's August was like, this seemed terribly ironic.

The deadline for their receiving the money is this Friday. And it's clear that they have no chance. Well, almost none.

So we weren't going to lend them the two grand this year. But, but... we'd feel really stupid if we didn't send in the money and then the impossible (but not unimaginable) happened, wouldn't we? And the guys we share our tickets with would be pissed off, too. And then they went and won the first two games of the series against the White Sox. So, after a little gentle pressure from me, jwg went to the bank to get the cashier's check (they won't take personal checks for post-season) and sent it in... while we were on our way to tonight's game, our first trip to Fenway since before The Great Disaster.

At which game we were promptly brought back to earth, hard. In some ways it was emblematic of the whole season: it looked really promising for the first five batters, but then things went downhill really fast. 4-0 after 2, 8-1 after 4, really not much of interest after that, except for one of those quirky little things that tickle a certain kind of obsessive fan.

Going into the 8th inning I noticed that the Red Sox had exactly three hits -- a single, a double, and a homer, all by Coco Crisp. This led me to speculate on whether it had ever happened that a player had hit for the cycle in a game in which his team got no other hits. Crisp was due up third in the bottom of the 8th, and I looked forward to seeing if he would hit his triple.

But then Alex Cora, batting one spot ahead of Crisp, spoiled it by hitting a single. So of course Crisp flied out to end the inning.