3/25/05 - Shake, Rattled and Rolled

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. School officials at the Merriam School in Acton, Massachusetts have embarked on a project to convince the Red Sox and Yankees to shake hands prior to their season opening contest.

The project was a response to high tensions between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans at the school during the Red Sox’s seven game triumph last year. Jose thinks this is an interesting way to deal with conflict between children over a sporting contest. But Jose has a better idea… deportation. This happened in MASSACHUSETTS… Yankees fans have infiltrated the schools? They’re trying to turn our own children against everything that is good and decent and American. Jose even has it on good authority that there are dozens, if not hundreds of Yankees fans at the State Department and even in the U.S. Army. Jose says to the principal “Have you no decency, sir? Have you no decency?” It is time for us to drive them into the sea. And no, Jose has not been reading too many books about the Balkans. Well, okay… maybe a few too many books about the Balkans.

George Steinbrenner has already endorsed the plan, as one might expect from a big loser who lost. Loser.

To his credit, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter has said that a pre-game handshake “may not be practical.” Adding “I usually do my nails right before the game and they typically aren’t dry until right before the first pitch, so a handshake might mess them up. It just seems really impractical.”

2. In one of the few actual news items from recent days, the Sox traded minor league legend Adam Hyzdu for major league nobody Blaine Neal. But maybe Jose is being too quick to judge the reliever. After all, he can’t be too bad if, after one full year in the majors, he is already the subject of a noteworthy off-Broadway musical “Red, White and Blaine.”

Neal expected to reach the majors earlier in his career, but suffered a serious setback when a big name scout, a Mr. Guffman, failed to show up for the one and only pitching performance of his high school career.

In declaring that he would not play for at least half of 2005 and possibly for the whole season, dope fiend Barry GoldBonds Medicated Slugger told the media “You wanted me to jump off the bridge.'' In related news, the city of San Francisco announced that it is considering waving environmental impact studies and building suicide prevention rails on the Golden Gate Bridge. (Note: Really.)

3. In Jose’s opinion, this is really, really stupid as Bonds finished his statement “I have finally jumped.'' The city of San Francisco would do better to invest its resources in search and rescue.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.