Sox vs. Yankees: Domination and Submission

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

1. You know the drill.

You should know it anyway. We go through the thing 18 times a year.

Blackout.

Cue Dramatic music. Maybe “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s Planet’s Suite. (Note: If you don’t know it, think of the Imperial March from the Star Wars movies. Pretty much everything in the first trilogy is John Williams ripping off Holst.)

Cue images. Cue voice over.

“Since the dawn of time, conflict has wrought mankind. Great rivalries of tribes of empires and of men. From the battles of ancient Greece, to the warriors of squared circle, battles have been fought, desperate struggles waged to establish supremacy.

Athens vs. Sparta


Ali vs. Frazier.


Russell vs. Chamberlain


Bird vs. Magic


Hogan vs. Andre


Kobayashi vs. Chestnut


Yankees vs. Red Sox


Tonight, the battle is rejoined in the most fearsome gladiatorial arena in the darkest corner of Hades as the Red Sox and the Yankees--

Cut. CUT!!!!

Stop everything. Stop the music. Something’s not right here. Let’s see the music’s pretty dark and tense. That’s good. The pictures capture the moment pretty well. So what is it?

What is it that doesn’t feel right?

Wait. Could it be? Jose thinks he’s got it. The analogy isn’t right. This isn’t a struggle to the death between two evenly matched foes. What was Jose thinking?

Let’s try a different cut.

Blackout.

Cue “Sunshine Day” by the Brady Bunch.

Cue voice over.

In sports as in the wild there are both predator and prey, an uneven match up with inevitably uneven results. From the tiger consuming the gazelle, to the anteater slurping down ants to the lion eating the lion tamer, some contests are inherently and biologically uneven.

U.S. vs. Grenada


Tyson vs. Spinks


Kobayashi vs. Nicole Ritchie


Red Sox vs. Yankees

Tonight the hunt is on, as the Red Sox methodically and inevitably dismantle the New York Yankees.

And… cut.

There we go. Sometimes those stock pieces just aren’t accurate anymore. Good promo.


2. With the struggling Yankees having fallen to eight games behind the eventual AL East Champion Red Sox, the Yankees have turned to the old “anything’s possible” defense.

Yankees Catcher/Little Bitch Jorge Posada told the New York Daily News “It's still possible. We have 30-something games left, so anything is possible.”

Let’s put this in a little bit of context shall we?

The Yankees catching the Red Sox is possible only in the sense that anything whatsoever no matter how absurd is possible. It is possible that the sun will rise in the West tomorrow. It is possible that Mike Gravel will be elected president. It is possible that David Arquette will win a wrestling world championship. Wait scratch that, that happened. It is possible that Jose will win the Powerball.

All of which is to say, the Yankees catching the Red Sox is completely impossible. Actually, this is not totally true. Jose has constructed a few scenarios wherein the Yankees catch up with the Red Sox.

• God, it turns out, is not dead. But He is pissed at Nietzsche for telling everyone he is dead. Unfortunately for God, Nietzsche is no longer around to take revenge on, so he starts looking for surrogates. When he comes across the Red Sox using “Superman” as Jason Varitek’s intro music, he remembers that Nietzsche had this whole “man and superman” deal in “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” So he decides to punish the Red Sox by making them lose the division, possibly due to frogs or boils.
  
• MLB Commissioner, Bud Selig, seeing his beloved Brewers fall to second place, goes mad with power and uses the “best interests of the game clause” to declare that the goal of baseball is to finish with the second most wins in the division.
  
• Laser streams get crossed. Very bad.
  
• Hideki Matsui’s body odor, rumored to be horrible, is so foul that Yankee Stadium is quarantined tonight out of concern that there has been a chemical attack and neither the Red Sox nor the Yankees are allowed out, making Baltimore the AL East Champion.
  
• Two words: opposite day.

So be on the look out for angry God or guys with lasers tonight. Other than that, it’s looking pretty good.

3. The big positive news for Yankees fans is the emergence of relief sensation Joba Chamberlain. Chamberlain has yet to surrender a run in the big leagues and has struck out 15 in just seven innings.

But let’s not be fooled, okay? This is part of a pattern with Chamberlains. You’ve seen it before; we all have. It starts with the impressive resume, followed by the meteoric rise to a position of great importance and then the next thing you know, they’re giving away the Sudetenland.

You just watch. If Chamberlain gets into the game tonight, Jose guarantees you he will be met with a crowd no less ecstatic than the one Neville Chamberlain met at the Heston Aerodome West of London as he waved a piece of paper signed in Munich.

Sure Chamberlain looks tough now, but you know that as soon as he gets in a really tough spot, he’s going to start looking for a way to negotiate it out. He’ll probably cop to some agreement to let Papi hit a homerun off of him provided that it will stop there and Manny will not also hit a home run. Then he’ll go back to the dugout, having left the Yankees in a completely indefensible position and start waving around the manager’s scorecard and declare that he has guaranteed “peace in our time.” And that will be that until his teammates grow disenchanted with him and replace him with Nationals reliever Winston Abreu.

Chamberlain will die a mere six months later. That’s always how it is with Chamberlains.

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