Like a Locker Room Speech by Marcel Marceau

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

1. It is quiet here. It is painfully, relentlessly quiet. Denuded of the cracks and cheers the air is empty of vibration. All that remains to tickle the tympanic membranes, are those other sounds, the sounds so subtle, so remote, that they do not even exist to a man who is free from anything but the most monastic solitude. The heart thumps its regular rhythm, a metronome, infinite and plodding. Beneath the percussion is the slow gargle of blood tickling arteries and veins on its journey through the French horn of the circulatory system. And then there is the buzz. Like the whir of fluorescent light or the flapping of a mosquito’s wings, the buzz annoys, high and harsh, even as it calms by providing evidence of one’s continued existence.

Jose heard these sounds described once in a radio story about a composer who wrote a piece of music consisting entirely of rests. The composer went deep into a subterranean isolation chamber to hear true silence, the silence that burns like acid in one’s ears, and there, alone, he heard these sounds.

But Jose needs no subterranean cavern, no layer of the Morlocks, to succumb to this bitter silence any more than he needs an orchestra at rest. To him, silence is nothing more than the absence of baseball. And on the treacherous Wednesday off day Jose was left to its cruel neglect, given a taste of what shall come should the Red Sox lose again to Cleveland.

Simon and Garfunkel were wrong; silence does not “like a cancer grow.” Silence is not some foreign growth crushing organs with sheer bulk. It is more insidious than that. Silence like a virus spreads. It infiltrates just a few cells at first, then turns those cells into breeding grounds for its minions of quiet and despair. With each off day, the silence of the off-season penetrates more deeply, overwhelms more perniciously until there is naught but void.

But Jose will not yield to the silence. He will not bow to the bitch goddess inevitability; the silence cannot yet come. He will not allow it.

Sometimes even those sworn to silence, those who’s very being is defined by the absence of sound, must break their vows, must deny their essence to stave off the abyss. In 1976, Marcel Marceau, a man more famous for silence than any other, uttered the lone word “non” in Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie.” More recently, Darryl and Darryl, the silent woodsman in the television program Newhart, are, in the series finale, so infuriated by the grating chatter of their wives that they scream their first word in the series “QUIET!!!” And in comic books, even the Inhuman King, called Black Bolt, who dares not speak because his voice can level cities, will utter a word when the situation is so dire that the silence must be shattered.

Jose cannot fall back upon the shock of the spoken word to rend the silence. Jose is verbose, and a word spoken would have no impact among the hundreds of thousands he has written.

All Jose has to tear apart the shroud of void, is one word, one slender syllable, that can have the impact of the mime aloud, or the mute come to speak. The day is dark, the silence is encroaching and the time for action has come.

I predict the Red Sox will win tonight.

2. The epic poems were nice, perhaps they were even actually epic, but they haven’t brought the Red Sox any wins, so away with them.

Perhaps, as Granny Melendez often suggests and Jose’s brother Sam confirms, these KEYS have been simply too long to read. So to hell with the verses as long as Dustin Pedroia’s swing and as plodding as Doug Mirabelli. Those days are gone. Rather than offering you one grand epic, Jose will offer a few short distinct poems, some merry little couplets for Game 5.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Thank God we’re not starting D. Jonathan Dru.

Roses are red, dead ones are black,
Where is Millar? Let’s break out the Jack.

Marigold’s orange, lilies are white,
Why isn’t Ellsbury, playing in right?

Begonias are red, or their white or pink,
Seriously guys, you should start with a drink.

Grass it is green, bark it is brown,
You will come back, from three to one down.

Outfield is green, in, a burnt umber,
The bats will arise from their postseason slumber.

Poppies are red, they’re used to make smack,
It’s time for Pedroia to show us some sack.

Maples have leaves, in winter they’re bare,
Do you really think Manny just doesn’t care?

Pine trees have needles, oak trees have leaves
We need for our shortstop to pull up his sleeves.

Daises are red, when slathered in paint
Tonight young Josh Beckett will prove he’s a saint.

Hyacinth’s blue, except when it’s not,
Like back in ’04, let’s go drink a shot.

3. The Cleveland Indians’ Casey Blake was sharply critical of Manny Ramirez for celebrating by stretching his arms toward the sky after hitting a home run to pull the Red Sox within four runs in Game 4.

What a jackass. Does Casey Blake not recognize not only step 2, but also step 11 of the yoga movement the Sun Salutation? Or maybe he does recognize it and he just hates the sun. Does he know that the sun is where we get light and heat from? Does he know that plants need it for photosynthesis? It’s like, really, really important. And there he is just pissing all over the sun, like he’s so much better than it.

All, Manny does is give a friendly greeting to Ra or Apollo if you prefer, and Casey Blake gets all self-righteous.

Blake went on to say that Manny’s sun salutation was “so opposite of how I am.” So how is he exactly? Jose’s supposes that means that rather than offering a salutation to the sun, he would say so long to it after hitting a home run. Would he just say but and storm out the door? Would he sit down and have a long talk with the sun? Nah, he seems like the sort of guy who would send a text message to the sun. “SRY I CANT SEE U. KC.”

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

Low Energy Day

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

1. “It was kind of a lethargic day today.” Doug Mirabelli told the Globe. “We just didn’t feel like we had that same energy.”

What? WHAT? What, exactly are you so tired from? From not playing for the last four days? Are you so exhausted by your inactivity, by the awful burden of having to pop out each inning and catch eight warm up pitches (note: unless you can find someone else to do it for you) that you can’t be persuaded to give full intensity to your work on the one our of every five days you do perform?

This was like Jose’s brother, a school teacher, lamenting how he was going to be so tired his first day back from April vacation following Sunday night’s ball game. Not too sympathetic. Sure, it may be technically true, but God knows you can’t actually say it to someone who’s not finishing vacation and expect any sympathy.

You see Doug, some of us, Jose for instance, have these jobs where we actually have to go and work FIVE WHOLE DAYS EVERY WEEK. Really. It’s exhausting. They make you come in every day and, get this, do stuff. What Jose wouldn’t give to have a job where he watched more talented people do stuff for four days, and then did the same thing as them but worse on the fifth. You would never hear him complain about lethargy, if he had that sweet deal. Never. Except if he’d stayed up too late drinking, or maybe if there had been something good on TV late. But aside from that, NEVER!

But let’s say you are really lethargic, maybe you’re not just a lazy bastard, you know there are things you can do about it right? You could meditate, you know get your chakras in alignment. Or maybe try drinking coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts has these big iced coffees full of caffeine and more sugar than a Jamaican cane field. Or you get some of what Julienned Tavarez is using. He’s always peppy. Or what about greenies? You could be just like Mickey Mantle except with one-tenth the skills and ten times the liver. Also you would still be alive.

2. In these tight economic times, wherein they must compete with the new media, most newspapers are pushing aggressively to cut costs by trimming expenditures on luxuries like foreign correspondents and ink. As a fan of newspapers, Jose would like to see them continue to exist, thus he is happy to be able to offer at least one cost saving measure to his colleagues who put pen to pulp. Don’t delete those Boris Yeltsin obituaries from the hard drive quite yet. Sure he’s dead, he’s even dead officially now, but those obits may be useful again soon when John McNamara dies.

John McNamara and Boris Yeltsin were, for all intents and purposes, the same person. Had McNamara been born in Ural region of Svredlovsk there is every reason to believe he would have become the first elected president of Russia, just as if Yeltsin had been born to she-goat in the fires of Hades, as McNamara was, he most certainly would have become manager of the Red Sox. Flip sides of the same coin.

Just look at these quotes from the obituary in today’s Globe with “McNamara” substituted for “Yeltsin” and “Red Sox fans” substituted for “Russians.”

“Mikhail Gorbachev… referred to Mr. McNamara as one ‘on whose shoulders are both great deeds… and serious errors.’”

“Red Sox fans look at the [McNamara] era as chaotic and humiliating”

“McNamara was widely ridiculed in his later years in office for a halting walk, a puffy, pasty complexion, and a slurred way of speaking that led to rumors of more heart trouble, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, alcoholism or a combination of the four.”

Of course, the analogies are not perfect. For all of the corruption and cronyism, even with the needless carnage of Chechnya and the disaster of economic “shock therapy” never, never did Yeltsin do anything as foolish as failing to use Dave Stapleton as a defensive replacement.

Boris Yeltsin addresses accusations that he was

too chicken to make Calvin Schiraldi his lead

economic advisor.

3. Okay, with yesterday’s quiet dignity out of the way, Jose is prepared to give a brief assessment of what exactly does and does not warrant a halt to beer service at Fenway Park.

Does: Moment of silence for fallen heroes (Note: Not really, they serve right on through it.)
Does not: Moment of silence for fallen centerfielder when he misplays a shot over his head.

Does: National Anthem
Does not: National League opponent.

Does: End of seventh inning
Does not: Mike Piazza’s outing (Note: This is not homophobic, it is long rumored and Belle and Sebastian have a song about it and everything.)

Does: Good Friday.
Does not: Good infield defense.

Does: Strike by teamsters.
Does not: Strike to batter.

Does: Cancellation of game due to inclement weather.
Does not: De facto forfeit of game due to (In)Clement pitching.

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