From SoSH: Re: August 23rd - PedroKsDelgado.....Part Deux.

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

1. We had a breakthrough this morning. Jose rolled out of bed at about 8:25, five minutes before he had to leave for work. He rushed furiously to brush his teeth comb his hair find socks that were at least reasonably close to matching, but then he was stopped dead in his tracks.

“I had a dream about the Red Sox,” said the Melendezette.

For Jose, a dream about the Red Sox is completely unremarkable. It is a regular occurrence over the course of the year, like dreams about playing craps or driving a flying car and is, as Jose has written before, an excellent predictor of what will happen in the next game. Jose’s sports dreams are also almost always wrong. But for the Melendezette this was something new and exotic.


“Did they win? Did they lose? Anything the gambling community should know?” Jose enthused. (Note: Jose is not much of a gambler. He is way too cheap to risk money on games of chance.)

“They were at my house in Hawaii,” replied the Melendezette. Clearly this was a very different sort of sports dream than Jose is accustomed too. Rather than telling of glorious wins and heartbreaking losses, the Melendezette’s account touched on the more human aspects of the team.

“Well, what were they doing?” Jose inquired.

“They were just sort of hanging around enjoying the house and chilling. Manny was there, and Ortizle and Kevin Millar, maybe a few others too. No Johnny Damon though.” She recounted with disappointment.

“And they were just hanging out?”

“Basically. Except Manny went in to the bathroom and when he came out it turned out that he’d used a lot of my really expensive facial scrub, which sort of pissed me off. It just struck me as very rude.”

“Wait…Manny used your facial scrub?”

“Well, he does have good skin,” she replied. “I bet he uses a good facial scrub.”

“So what happened next?”

“I guess then I realized it was a dream so I decided that I could fly and would fly around the island.”

So the unanswered question is whether the Melendezette’s Red Sox dreams predict the future, or predict the opposite of the future, like Jose’s. So tune in tonight to see if Manny’s skin has a lustrous glow or looks pale and wan.

2. Jose knows that a blister on his pitching hand has been a major problem for DLowe the Paranoid Android this year, but we should be thankful. He could have been Lenny DiNardo. DiNardo has been out of the big leagues with a blister for almost two months now.

Jose knows that cynics would say, DiNardo’s blister isn’t really so severe. These cynics would claim that he’s only been kept out of action for so long because the Red Sox must keep him on their major league roster or return him to the Mets under Rule V draft regulations. Shame on them for assuming the worst about people!!! Jose just has a hard time believing anyone in the Red Sox organization would be that disingenuous. After all, Jose is pretty sure that he read somewhere that blisters are like the 750th or 751st leading cause of death in the U.S., somewhere in between floor burns and poltergeist attacks. Besides, we need to hold onto this guy. He reminds Jose a lot of another Rule V guy Vaughn “Eshel K” Eshelman, and you wouldn’t want to give him away, would you?

3. Earlier in the season, Jose reflected on the Sox use of the Liiiiiilllyyyyyy chant against Ted Lilly in the playoffs last year and talked about having used it to taunt actress Lilly Tomlin. But Jose had used it at other times as well. In the early 1990s, he used to hang out at the Indianapolis research labs of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and heckle the scientists. “Liiiiiiii-llllllyyyyyyy…Liiiiiiiiii-llllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Hey Lilly you call that a carboxyl group? Hey Lilly you’re so stupid, you think a double blind study is one where Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are your control group. Losers.”

Trust Jose, it’s awfully hard to focus on titrations with that in the background. Jose doesn’t want to take too much credit, but he does like to think that he delayed the development of a drug for gout. At the very least he gave his boys at Bristol Myers Squibb a boost. (Note: Can Toronto trade Ted Lilly to the Tigers already, so Jose can start making What’s Up Tiger Lilly Jokes?)

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