Custerer's Last Stand

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

1. According to the Boston Metro, a well-know ticker custerer was stabbed and robbed at Kenmore Square station by two men just before yesterday’s game. The custer was counting his piles of filthy gangster money outside the turnstiles when he was attacked.

While the ticket reseller’s white T-shirt was torn by the knife’s blade and stained with blood, his track pants are reported to have escaped harm.

The victim was taken to Boston Medical Center with non-life Lugothreatening injuries, where he shares a room in the trauma ward with Tampax Bay pitcher J.P. Howell.


2. Damn it.

Jose could have sworn that he saw a headline this morning in The Boston Metro, (slogan: now Boston’s #2 free subway paper) that read “Man sues bar over missed question.” Jose, or course, thought that this was a story about a fellow who had lost a pub trivia contest on a controversial question and had sued the haughty quizmaster for what was rightfully his. But it turned out that Jose just wasn’t paying attention and that the headline actually read “man sues bar association over missed question” which does not allow one to jump to the same funny conclusion. Rather, it was about a man who sued the Massachusetts Bar Association after he failed the bar by one question when he refused to answer a question that would have, in his opinion, affirmed support for gay marriage. Bo-ring.

Had they written the same story without using “association” in the headline, Jose was going to write about how this was the second most misleading headline of the year, right after the Globe’s “Exciting signs: Red Sox sign Drew and Lugo” on December 6.

Damn it.

3. It was nice of Hideki Okajima to pretend to be surprised about winning the All-Star election last night. Okajima, who was voted in by the fans as the 30th man on the A.L. squad, graciously bowed to all corners of the field to show his happiness at and thanks for the honor. Skilled Japanologists, however, reported that he was not actually surprised. Why would he be? He comes from one of the world’s only truly democratic countries where elections are basically a foregone conclusion.

The way elections work in Japan since 1955 is fairly simple. Everyone casts a ballot and then the Liberal Democratic Party (note: famously called neither liberal, nor democratic nor a party), in one form or another, wins. With the exception of the years between 1993 and 1996, this is basically how it has worked for sixty years. Pretty much for the LDP to lose power they had to be involved in major scandals and fail to adopt political reform legislation. Ergo, with Okajima quite certain that he had had little in terms of dirty dealing with Lockheed, why wouldn’t he expect to win the election?

Nevertheless, congratulations to Hideki Okajima, the best Hideki in Major League Baseball.

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