10/27/04 World Series Game 5-- All This Has Happened Before

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

1.  Everyone needs to chill the f-- out.

EVERYONE.

You act like this has never happened before.  Have you really never seen the company screw the ugly, inelegant, blue collar upstarts to try to preserve the dominance of the clean cut pretty boys who “look the right way,” “play the right way,” and represent the business with “class?”

Dear God, it’s like you’ve never even watched pro wrestling before.  

Look, what we saw last night, an exciting game end in controversy is just what they do to amp up the tension and extend the story line. Jose has seen it a million times before.  Hell, the WWF is doing it right now.

Let Jose know if this sounds familiar.

There’s a wrestler named Daniel Bryan, he’s undersized and spend years toiling in the independent federations doing great work while only the most diehard of diehards noticed.  Now he’s on the big stage and he’s doing great.  He’s terrific at his sport and the fans love him.  But his adversaries?  They dismiss him and ridicule him.  They also zero in on his long scraggly beard and compare him to a goat.  Despite all of these obstacles, Bryan works himself into the championship picture and he keeps winning matches to get the title.

Now those of you who don’t follow the squared circle are probably wondering “What do you mean ‘keeps winning matches to get the title?’  Shouldn’t he win one match and then just defend the title?”  Well, sure, if league management wasn’t out to get him.  The WWF ownership, the sinister McMahon family  (Note: Stephanie McMahon--the most distinguished member of Jose’s 1998 graduating class at BU) keeps intervening to thwart Bryan.  They think he’s too small, too unkempt, too unsophisticated and too uncouth to be the face of the company, so they use all the tricks in the book to keep Bryan from carrying the strap, crooked referees, impromptu matches, etc.    And every time Bryan wins the title, they invalidate it on a technicality.  The champion that the McMahons would prefer to have is Randy Orton, a clean cut, utterly personalityless grappler from--ready for this --St. Louis.

And tonight October 27, 2013, the ninth anniversary of the Red Sox claiming the title for the first time in 86 years, Daniel Bryan and Randy Orton will be fighting for the vacant WWF title in a cage (note: technically a cell, since it has a roof) with Jim Joyce… errr….. Shawn Michaels as the special guest (read: crooked) referee.  Jose imagines Orton will win the title on an obstruction call.

But here’s the thing-- though the odds are against him, though the game is literally rigged, in the sense that people write down what is going to happen, Bryan, through will, through skill, through sheer force of personality is going make them, sooner or later, script out an ending where he comes out on top.

And if Daniel Bryan can win a championship in a sport that’s literally rigged, don’t you think his bearded brothers in Boston can win a championship in a sport that’s only figuratively rigged?

Any Bryan fan knows the answer… YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!

2.  Since umpire James Joyce, made the critical call in last night’s game, Jose thought that he would take a look at the umpire/author’s work and see if they could provide any insight into his decisions, and unbelievably, Jose found two quote that provide both insight into last night’s game and into Joyce’s famously dense writings.

The first is “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

Fair enough.  It’s really just common sense elegantly worded, but, in this series where all three games have been determined by sloppiness, Jose is hoping that it will ring in the minds of those makers of errors in tonight’s game.  Salty, one might hope, has learned not to throw the ball away in an ill advised effort to get a runner at third with the best reliever in baseball on the mound and two outs.   Farrell, has perhaps discovered, that the ninth inning of a World Series game is not the best time to give a pitcher his first career at bat.  And Joyce himself, wherever he stands tonight, would do well to make some portals of discovery of his own.

The second quote is downright eerie.  “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.  Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

Seriously. That’s a real James Joyce quote.

James Joyce wrote those words in Ulysses sometime between 1918 and 1922.  He literally declared that he was going to make that call 90+ years ago and then went ahead and made it.

This is why Jose hates literature.  Except for Goethe.  Because Goethe made Jose’s poem about Fausto Carmona possible.  So Jose turns to Goethe for solace and counsel on this dark day, and urges us to remember that “In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

3.  Everyone from Massachusetts knows the old rhyme about the city of Lynn

Lynn, Lynn city of sin,

Never go out the way you came in.

So Jose has taken it upon himself to write a few couplets along these lines about St. Louis starter Lance Lynn.

Lance Lynn, where to begin?

You’re taking the mound to the Cardinals chagrin.

Lance Lynn, where have you been?

Glued to the bench, with a cup of sloe gin?

Lance Lynn, pick up the win?

Not in Game 4, cause your curveball won’t spin.

Lance Lynn, wipe off that grin!

When you’re on the mound, they are all Tony Gwynn.

Lance Lynn, you’re kind of a akin,

To Mitt Romney, in that you are not gonna win.

Lance Lynn,  pitch up and in?

Plunk Victorino, but not on the chin.

Lance Lynn, it’s really a sin

To see your career going straight in the bin.

Lance Lynn, you’re stuck in your skin,

You are who you are and it’s not Tom Glavine.

Lance Lynn, can you hear o’er the din,

It’s playing for you, it’s a sad violin.

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