Jose is a Wasteful Glutton

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

1. As he does whenever there is an event of historical important at the little gem in the Fenway, Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy pulled out the “fans will lie and say they were there” card in his Sunday column about Clay Buchholz’s no-hitter.

“Years from now, there will be hundreds of thousands of folks who'll say they were there,” wrote the curly-haired human recycling center. “Memories will dim and wannabes will exaggerate and it will be impossible to prove who really sat in Fenway Park Sept. 1, 2007, and who watched it on television or heard it on the radio.”

But Jose will not be any wannabe whose claim is in doubt. Jose will be able to prove he was there. When threatened with well-honed accusations of lying, Jose will unsheathe his two section 17 tickets, in what the comic book collectors call mint condition, from their Mylar scabbards and wave them like a sword of truth at any who dare call him a wannabe. These tickets, a part of Jose’s duly purchased cut of a local notable’s season package, are proof of Jose’s slightly obstructed view of history.

Yes, for all those empiricists who believe in truth, Jose will rebut your most deeply cherished ideas when he proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was at a game he never attended.

Jose should have attended, sure. He had the tickets; he had the time. What he did not have was the good sense to check his calendar on Friday to see whether he had tickets for the weekend set. Oops. Jose knew he had no remaining tickets for August. But what he did not know was that as of Saturday, August had gone the way of the mastodon. Thus, for the second time this year, Jose missed a game for which he had purchased tickets-- the Mother’s Day Miracle and the Buchholzno-hitter. Jose must, like so many natives of Baltimore, be desperate to avoid seeing the Orioles.

Jose’s behavior is inexcusable. It is a failure of the over-privileged. Like a great, large gourmand throwing a leftover pound of veal to the dogs while children starve outside his door, Jose’s waste is a sin.

Jose has always thought of himself as a modest and humble man, not prone to excess or waste, but he has proven his self-image is not more than that, an image, a pleasantly twisted reflection of the wasteful glutton he has become. Whatever he believes now, the instant Jose wins the lottery, it will be gold-plated toilet seats all around, except Jose will pay for them and then not even bother to pick them up front the gold-plated toilet seat store.

There are, at day’s end, only two legitimate excuses for twice forgetting one has tickets in a single season: if one has Alzheimer’s’ or if it is 1997 and Steve Avery is the Red Sox prized free agent acquisition. And, for better or for worse (note: for better), Jose has neither excuse.

2. With Clay Buchholz having pitched a no-hitter, this seems as good a time as any for Jose to remind everyone that he came up with the term “claymydia” (note: or clay-mydia) first to describe the burning… umm… competitiveness of the rookie pitcher and the fever and discharge… of emotion he may cause in people exposed to his pitching. Of course, in many people claymydia presents no symptoms, which makes it even scarier.

The only exception to Jose’s ownership of this term is, arguably, scientist Kerry R. Buchholz, who shares the name Buchholz and seems to write an awful lot about a disease called Chlamydia, which Jose assumes is some weird strain of Claymydia.

There is also an identically named, yet completely unrelated disease called Claymydia, which presents in patients becoming fans of androgynous singer Clay Aiken. It is unrelated to the Buchholz disease and is classified as a mental illness.

3. In the sixth inning of yesterday’s Yankees-Mariners game, the Bronx crowd, reports the Boston Globe, began to chant “Let’s go squirrel” in response to a squirrel climbing on the screen attached to the right field foul pole. This was all well and good until rodent-faced catcher Jorge Posada took this as a call for him to come out and tip his cap.

This was the most embarrassing mix up for a Yankee since third baseman Alex Rodriquez insisted that the entire musical genre known as the “blues” was about his freakishly colored lips.

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

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.