All History's Been Building to This

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

1. Careful readers of KEYS may have noticed a distinct lack of intensity in Jose’s Yankees columns this year. The standard bile-laced invectives have been curiously absent, as have the demand that all identify “Whose side are you on.”

The reason, of course, is that Jose has been saving the anger and invective for the series beginning today with the ancient and hated rival the Tampax Bay Rays.

Already, Jose is slipping on his “Kazmir Sucks” shirt, and placing orders for ones that read, “Crawford is a Little Bitch,” and “Pena Sucks Hinske.”(Note: Those guys are traitors, damn dirty traitors. How can you leave the Red Sox and go to the Rays? It’s like defecting from Paraguay to Uruguay in the War of the Triple Alliance.)

So to get fired up Jose is going to review some of the great-moments in the Rays-Red Sox rivalry.

September 6, 2000: Pedro Martinez hits ham ‘n’ egger Gerald Williams on his fourth pitch of the evening, prompting Williams to charge the mound. A cowed Martinez then shows his fear by refusing to hit any of the next 24 batters, or let them hit him.

Opening Day 2003: Rays beat Red Sox on walkoff—In what remains the greatest win in Rays history, the then Devil Rays come back on opening day to beat the Red Sox, as Chad Fox blows a save. Tampax starter Joe Kennedy is so emotional that he dies four years later.

March 27, 2006: Julian Tavarez cold cocks a sliding Joey Gathright at home plate in an exhibition game, moving him past “Rockin” Robbie Simms on the list of Massachusetts’ greatest pugilists.


Can’t you feel the history? Can’t you smell the animosity? Screw Fred McGriff! Wade Boggs is a traitor! It’s like Istanbul or was it Constantinople. It’s like Salonika or is it Thessaloniki? This rivalry is where history ends, where possibility clashes with reality. It’s Rays-Red Sox. And this time, it counts.

2. Sine the Rays have enjoyed such wonderful benefits from abandoning the devil and embracing the Ray, Jose thought it would be nice to pay tribute to all of the great Rays by cracking out the old, Top 10 good and evil bit. Today, the Top Ten Good Rays of all time, later this week, the bad

1. Ray Charles—Even if he did nothing else in his career, the man was in Blues Brothers. (Note: Ray is dead, when Stevie Wonder goes, who will continue the chain of blind black pianists who are awesome?)
2. Ray Robinson—Pound for pound the best ever… except for Julian Tavarez.
3. Ray, X—Much better than the old system of cutting the leg in half to see if it is broken.
4. Ray Allen—A champion! Also, number two on the top ten good Jesus list.
5. Ray Magliozzi—Leads Dane Cook in the race to be Arlington’s funniest person by 42,387 people
6. Ray Bradbury—Even in his futuristic novels, could not imagine the Rays in the playoffs.
7. Ray Babbitt—The man was a gambling genius!
8. Ray Jay Johnson—OK, Jose will be honest, he has no idea who this is, but he’s been mentioned on The Simpsons a few times. Of course, if Simpsons mentions were a good metric for skill, Steve Sax would be in the Hall of Fame.
9. Stevie Ray Vaughan—He died in a plane crash. That makes him the Corey Lidle of rock.
10. Allan Ray—Maybe the Celtics couldn’t be bothered to play Ray Allen and Allan Ray, together, but Jose will be damned if he misses the chance.

3. The Red Sox are at last getting healthy, with Mike Lowell, Sean Casey and St. Josh a Beckett returning to the team, and even DJ Dru talking about playing against the Rays. There is even good news on the Big Papi front as the designated hitter told the Globe “My Hand is Not OK.” Now, Jose knows what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That sounds like bad news.” But you are totally wrong. Being not ok, doesn’t necessarily mean bad, it could mean really good.

For instance, let’s say you won the lottery and someone asks you “Are you ok?” You’re going to answer “no” because, you’re not ok. You’re awesome. And Jose can only assume that the same thing is true of David Ortiz.

In related news, Jose is pretty sure that when they say Tom Brady has suffered a catastrophic knee injury, they mean that it’s not that bad and therefore will catastrophic for Patriots opponents.

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

Reforming MLB

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

1. 1978. NINETEEN SEVENTY EIGHT. ONE… NINE… SEVEN… EIGHT.

Isn’t that what we should be hearing from the Bronx right now?

Come on guys, show some heart. It’s September, the Red Sox have a healthy lead on the Yankees; shouldn’t you guys be telling us how it’s 1978 all over again?

Please? It just doesn’t feel right without it. And it makes Jose worry that something terrible is going to happen. Jose needs you folks to tell him how the collapse is imminent, how Ron Guidry and Bucky Dent are coming to get us. Can’t you please tell Jose how Don Zimmer is going to ruin everything?

Jose knows, Jose knows. You don’t feel like you can, what with the Yankees being terrible and all, but don’t you worry what will happen if you don’t? Sure, everything COULD be fine. But will it? How do you know?

If you don’t start talking about 1978 soon, will the harvest ripen or will the locusts descend? Will we freeze in the winter or snuggle safe and secure? If you don’t start talking about it soon, Yankee Stadium may be razed to the ground. Don’t laugh; it could happen.

We don’t know, because every time the Red Sox are in playoff position at this time of year, and the Yankees aren’t, you guys start talking about 1978.

So please, for Jose, can you give it a try? Jose will get you started.

This is just like 1978. Boston choked then and they’ll choke now. They suck. The Red Sox are chokers and they always will be. They haven’t even won a World Series in almost a year. Losers.

2. When Jose went off to graduate school, the main reason he cited in these very pages was that he had simply run out of bullsh*t from his undergraduate days, and needed brand new bullsh*t to fill his intellectual gas tank. (Note: Does bullsh*t count as biodiesel?)

Three weeks in, Jose is happy to say that he is already topping off, squeezing the meter toward 00, if you will.

After just two weeks of studying global policy, Jose is prepared to offer a compelling vision of how Major League Baseball should be restructured in order to learn the essential lessons of the United Nations.

For starters, it should be apparent to anyone now, that the governing structure of baseball does not reflect the underlying power dynamic in meaningful way. One team one vote on League decisions? That’s crazy talk. What we need is a “Security Council” led by the five most powerful teams (note: Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs, Dodgers and Cardinals) who can take the lead in deciding for everyone what is best for the game. Of course, it is possible, that in 30 years the Red Sox might recognize the White Sox as the legitimate representatives of Chicago and remove the Cubs from the seat and perhaps even the league.

“But what about the small market teams?” fans in Pittsburgh and Oakland will say. “What about us?”

Well, you guys can elect a member from each of the six divisions who will get to join the Security Council, where your representative will look pretty and fetch coffee. Occasionally, they will be allowed to nod their head in agreement or say “Good idea.”

In addition, it’s not like we are going to get rid of the old MLB Board of Governors, or whatever it’s called. We’ll just strip it of all its responsibility. Do not worry; there will still be complementary lobster tails at meetings. Also, you can play a role in determining what teams get recognized as parts of the Major Leagues. For instance, if the Durham Bulls want to secede from the Rays and form their own major league club, you would get to vote on that. Of course, if you vote no, the Red Sox will just recognize the Bulls anyway, thereby stripping the Rays of a valuable source of talent. On the downside, this might prompt the Yankees to lay claim to the entire Cincinnati Reds outfield. But do not worry if you are a Reds fan. Jose is pretty sure Dick Cheney wants to give the Reds NATO membership, which is good, because Jose is absolutely prepared to fight and die to defend Corey Patterson.

But governance is not enough. Major League Baseball needs strong and vital institutions as well. They need organizations to coordinate trading policy, labor policy and environmental issues leading to the decline of the ash bat. (Note: Can the Red Sox bring that absurd Nady/Marte trade before the WTO? That’s got to violate a dumping treaty or something, doesn’t it?) Also, someone needs to order the lobster tails. To manage this formidable bureaucracy, Jose proposes that the Office of the Commissioner be abolished and replaced by the office of the Secretary General of Baseball, whose primary qualification be that he has an awesome name. (Note: Every UN Secretary General has had a cool name except Kurt Waldheim. U Thant may be the coolest name ever.) While this would make Bud Selig ineligible for the office, past commissioners like Kennesaw Mountain Landis and Bowie Kuhn would have been eligible. Jose’s recommendation for Secretary General would be Ugueth Urtain Urbina. Sure he is a dangerous criminal, but so was Kurt Waldheim. The Secretary General would be in charge of a set of bureaucracies called The Secretariat, which, Jose imagines, would be staffed entirely by horses.

Another nice thing about the new system is that baseball could implement all sorts of important rules and then not enforce them. Take the new instant replay policy. Under Jose’s proposal, if there was a home run in question, umpires could simply refuse to call it “a home run in question,” thereby making it ineligible for review… sort of… like… now.

Obviously the system is not perfect, but Jose thinks it is well worth a try. After all the United Nations has a decent track record at replacing failed Leagues.

3. Among the subjects Jose is studying this semester is statistics, and as a part of its curriculum, Jose is using a program called STATA to run various kinds of statistical analyses. The program is useful, Jose supposes, but it is also immensely frustrating. After two weeks of working with it, Jose has still not found the command to calculate slugging percentage. He won’t even talk about range factor.

Another problem is in Jose’s microeconomic theory class. In studying preference and consumer choice, Jose’s professor keeps talking about WARP, and Jose cannot, for the life of him figure out what Wins Above Replacement Player has to with anything. The best Jose can come up with is that if a player has a better WARP than a competitor, a general manager, as a consumer of baseball talent, would chose the player with the better WARP. That makes sense right?

Another thing that bothers Jose is that his economics professor keeps talking about Jacobian Matrices, which makes no sense to Jose. Jose had no idea that Jacoby Ellsbury was a mathematician, and it wouldn’t have made any sense for him to be in The Matrix. Of course, it didn’t make any sense for Cornell West to be in The Matrix either, and that didn’t stop him.

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

Vestigial Belts

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

1. It has come to Jose’s attention recently that baseball players are the only athletes in any major U.S. sport who wear belts. Jose thinks that football players may wear belts too, but he thinks those are built into their pants, so they don’t really count. What Jose is talking about is an honest to God, ass whippin’, Michael Huthcence-style autoerotic asphyxiation belt. Hutchence never could have killed himself with the belt in a pair of football pants. Even boxers, who are forbidden to hit below the belt, do not, technically, wear belts.

So baseball players are unique among American athletes in wearing a proper belt. The question, as always, is why?

The answer is clearly not “to keep their pants up.” A significant percentage of major leaguers are of sufficient girth that having their pants fall off is not an issue and they still wear belts. Another counterpoint to the “keep their pants up hypothesis” is Manny, who wore a belt and yet constantly seemed to have his pants falling off.

So Jose has come to a conclusion. The belt on baseball players is a vestigial structure dating back to when players needed them in the old days of baseball before nuclear science gave us the elastic waist. It is something left over from a distant past when it had use, like the appendix or Mike Timlin.

So, we have established that the belt on baseball players serves no purpose. This troubles Jose. It strikes him as wasteful. Isn’t there something that could be done?

Yes. Yes there is.

While attending a minor league game last week, Jose had an idea. He became frustrated with the fact that he could not tell which players were former major leaguers and which had yet to visit the show. And then it him… belts were the answer, and for once he was not talking about belts of scotch.

Baseball should take a cue from karate. Each player should wear a belt reflecting his highest level of baseball achievement. Little leaguers would wear white belts, high school players yellow belts and rookie leaguers orange belts. A ball gets a green belt, AA a blue belt and AAA players would wear brown belts. Only a major leaguer would have the honor and esteem of a black belt. Once in the majors, a player would get a degree for each All-Star Appearance. For instance, Scott Cooper would be a second-degree black belt.

Wait, scrap the whole idea. Jose is pretty sure that the karate equivalent of Scott Cooper is not a second degree black belt, but Daniel LaRusso before he met Mr. Miyagi.

2. As the Red Sox come down the stretch run, Jose has to confess that he feels remarkably confident despite the Sox having only a slim lead for the wild card and approximately three quarters of the team on the disabled list. Jose isn’t exactly sure why he feels confident, but he’s been thinking about it, and he has developed a theory.

Here’s what Jose’s come up with: Jose feels completely confident because the Red Sox now have Jonathan Van Every on the team.

At first Jose didn’t really feel that way, after all was there any evidence that Van Every would make a difference? Had he made a huge difference in AAA? Had he demonstrated any real aptitude for Major League Baseball? Was there any evidence that he was ready to succeed DJ Dru in right field right now should the need arise? After all, his experience was mostly in center and left, which is totally different from right. The answer to all of these questions is no.

A week ago this would have unsettled Jose profoundly rather than elating him, but not anymore, not after the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President. What the joyous reaction to Gov. Palin’s nomination among social conservatives has shown Jose is that preparation and aptitude are irrelevant, provided you belief in the right things and represent a critical interest group.

So does Van Every believe in the right things and represent a critical group? Well, Van Every believes in both hitting the ball AND catching the ball. Moreover, he is guaranteed to capture the critical demographic of Mississippians of Dutch extraction. That’s huge. And who cares if prior to making the majors, his only real success was in AA?

Sure, Jose was supporting the Red Sox prior to Van Every’s call up, who else was he going to support, Tampax Bay? But his support was wan and unenthusiastic. Now that we have Van Every, Jose feels confident and fired up. Besides did you know that Van Every has exactly as much Major League experience now as Ted Williams had after his first four At Bats? Of course, Ted Williams probably didn’t strike out in three of them.

Ready to Lead?

3. Instant replay begins Thursday in all Major League ballparks and Jose for one, says it’s about time. Jose is sick and tired of having to go through the laborious process of getting a “conventional” replay. It will be much nicer to just add water to the replay, toss it in the microwave and get it back in 45 seconds.

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

You Have No Idea

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

1. Jose has finally answered one of the great imponderables of life.

Which one is it, you say?

What is the meaning of life? Nope.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Nah. Jose answered that back in 2006.

What Jose has answered is whether relief pitchers get really bored in the bullpen.

Last night, Jose attended his first Durham Bulls game, and had the good fortune in the late innings to sneak down one of the picnic areas where he got to chat with Evan Meek, who was at the time, the only member of the Indianapolis Indians (note: not affiliated with the Cleveland Indians, Cherokee Indians or sub continental Indians) bullpen who spoke English. Meek, a pudgy fireballer, who has been unimpressive in his 13 innings in The Show, turned out to be fairly desperate for someone to talk to. As Meek lofted a high arc and drained his third wad of gum into a trash barrel ten feet away, Jose asked the only question he had ever really wanted to ask to a reliever pitcher: “Do you guys get really bored out here?”

“You have no idea,” the mournful reply slipped through weary lips below glassy eyes.

What Jose regrets now is that he didn’t offer any suggestions for how Meek and his colleagues could liven up the bullpen experience. Relievers, of course, have spend a century developing ways to amuse themselves, from spitting seeds competitively, to the Red Sox bullpen drum corps to David Cone’s unfortunate experiment in bullpen self-gratification. But perhaps, these fellows are deep in the system, too stultified by dreary repetition to come up with anything inventive.

Thus, Jose offers a few ideas.

• Memorize the Koran. When you memorize the Koran then you earn the title “Hafiz.” Jose would enjoy hearing the announcement, “Now pitching for the Red Sox… number 50… Hafiz Mike Timlin…Timlin.”
• Pursue the X prize for the 100-mile per gallon car. At $10 million, that’s still enough to motivate a major leaguer. Just ask Manny.
• Start a crystal meth lab. Not only is it profitable, the product will make the games go faster. Better still, amphetamines are part of baseball’s cultural heritage, so it’s kind of like a throw back thing.
• Plot a revolution in your native country. (Note: Americans, do not do this. Jose in no way advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government, unless U.S. stands for Upper Silesia, the government of which is crap.)
• If you plan on attacking employees with a machete in the future (note: see Urbina, Ugueth Urtain) prepare defense strategy.
• And of course, finally, what every reliever coming up through the minors should focus on is what his entrance music will be.

Not paying attention?

2. A Red Sox fan in Jose’s program revealed to Jose yesterday that her English-American Catholic brother named his son Kapler, in honor of Gabe Kapler, “The World’s Most Perfectly Sculpted Jew.”

At first Jose was going to write about how this had to have been the first goyish child on earth named after Gabe Kapler. But then Jose thought about it and realized, that this is probably the first child anywhere named after Kapler. The only people who would likely want to name their kid after him would be Jews, but Jews famously, do not name their children after living people. To do so, is extremely bad luck for the person from whom the name is taken. Which raises an important question: Why does Jose’s classmate’s brother want Gabe Kapler to die?

3. The Red Sox begin their final trip to Yankee Stadium this week, and Jose is awash in memories. The Slap, clinching in 2004. There was probably some other stuff that happened before 2004, but Jose doesn’t really remember. Funny that.

But Jose wants to share one special memory with you, the story of his first and only trip to Yankee Stadium. The only time Jose made it there was in 1989 as the terrible Yankees played the slightly less terrible Red Sox, in a meaningless late season game. It was rainy that day in the Bronx or perhaps it was the odor hanging thick in the air. Jose’s predominant memory, as part of a group of 80 seventh graders there, was that there was a Yankee fan, perhaps 18 or 19 who wanted to fight us. What strength! What nobility! What courage a man must have to take on 80 children accompanied by several middle aged ladies!

And that, more than anything, is what Jose will miss about Yankee Stadium—
the passion. The passion that drives a man to threaten students. The passion that sends D cells flying into the field. The passion that encourages New Jersey brats to interfere with balls in play. The passion that demands that the police come on to the field to protect players following a correct call.

So long Yankee Stadium. Next year you may be gone, but Jose knows a lot of Bostonians who will keep you alive in little plastic bags, filled one October night in two thousand four, year of our lord.

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

Running Mates

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

1. As Jose has watched Senator Barack Obama stretch out the vice presidential search process, it has made him think about some of the issues in his own life, namely, the fact that it will end. Someday Jose will die, and he needs to think about succession planning for KEYS. If something were to happen to Jose, what would happen to KEYS and all of the people who depend on it? What would become of poor Tiny Tim?

As a result Jose has gone through a lengthy vetting process, for identifying a nominee for Vice Blogger. Here are the leading candidates.

Manny Ramirez
Pros: Funny, beloved, understands the Red Sox, sure thing Hall of Famer.
Cons: Possibly retarded.

Dario Veras
Pros: Obscure Latino relief pitcher, understands what it is like to fail as a Red Sox, cool first name.
Cons: Only second best obscure Veras in Red Sox history.

Grady Little
Pros: Also lives in North Carolina, folksy, no competition for his services.
Cons: Possibly retarded

Gov. Bill Richardson
Pros: Red Sox fan, Tufts alum, savvy diplomat, popular Governor.
Cons: If he’s not good enough for Obama why should he be good enough for Jose?

Gov. Mitt Romney
Pros: Telegenic, charismatic, from Belmont.
Cons: Might only be claiming to be a Red Sox fan in order to get the job, less military experience than Tim Johnson.

Alex Cora:
Pros: Genius, likely to be unemployed next year.
Cons: Should never get time over Jed Lowrie.

Dodgers Owner Frank McCourt
Pros: Must like KEYS since it used to be good and has something to do with the Red Sox.
Cons: Parking lot attendant (note: thanks Plaschke) inadequate training for writing blog.

So as you can see there are a lot of appealing, yet flawed candidates. If you want to know who Jose selects, just sent your number to Obama for President and Jose will be sure to text you as soon as he makes a decision.

2. Jose would like to make (note: gasp) a correction. Well, more of a clarification (note: smaller gasp).

In the previous KEYS, Jose told a story about Derek Jeter having herpes, which some readers may have interpreted as a suggestion that having herpes is shameful. A colleague of Jose’s who works in public health pointed out that this was wrong and inappropriate. Herpes is a very common, non-fatal disease, and people who have it (note: or any other sexually transmitted infection) should not be stigmatized. Except for scabies. Scabies is gross.

What Jose was attempting to do in the piece was not to suggest that people with herpes deserve to be stigmatized. Rather, he was attempting to suggest that they should NOT be stigmatized by the fact that they share a disease with Derek Jeter.

So please allow Jose to be as clear as possible: Just because someone has herpes DOES NOT MEAN that they have no range at shortstop. There are many people with herpes and other sexually transmitted infection who have excellent range to both their left and right.

Jose hopes this corrects any confusion.

3. After pitching brilliantly last year, Clay Meredith has struggled in Boston and has again been send back to Pawtucket. While this is regrettable, Jose thinks it is ultimately for the best. Not only, can he work on his pitching, but with Bartolo Colon there rehabbing, there is the possibility for Buchholz and Colon to form a fat man/thin man comedy team, along the lines of Laurel and Hardy, Spade and Farley or Hatch and Kennedy.

While one drawback to this plan may be that there is no particular evidence that either of the pitchers is funny, Jose is pretty sure that watching Buchholz stand next to Colon will, at the very least, be way funnier than watching him stand on the mound in Baltimore.

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

Jose is off with Susan Sarandon

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

1. Jose comes to you today live from his brand new home in Durham, North Carolina, where he expects to be engaged in light bondage with Susan Sarandon while listening to Edith Piaf records at any moment.

Truth be told, while Durham (note: disappointingly not named for Ray Durham) seems nice enough so far, Jose is having some trouble adjusting. For starters, Jose is completely unused to living in an environment where he is not surrounded by Red Sox fans. Of the 30 or so people he’s met so far, only 10 of them are Red Sox fans. Seriously, what is wrong with people?

Second, Jose is a bit uncomfortable living in any state that could produce Grady Little. Jose sort of imagined, based on Grady, that North Carolina would be a dangerous place. He expected to see drivers going right through obvious stop signs.

Third, Jose has already had a run in with a Yankee fan a classmate wearing a Derek Jeter shirt.

The conversation went something like this:

Jose: Did you know Derek Jeter has herpes?
Classmate: What?
Jose: He has herpes; he gave it to one of the Jessica’s.
Classmate: How do you know? Have you been looking at his @#$@#$?
Jose: (stunned silence)
Classmate: Have you?
Jose: The herpes probably have great intangibles.

So Jose is off to a great start on that relationship. Jose must have missed the chapter in How to Win Friends and Influence People where it says not to point out that someone’s hero has herpes.

Now many of you may wonder what sort of affect this move will have on the KEYS. Can Jose continue to produce a quality product while so far removed from the motherland? The answer, of course, is no. Denuded of his comfortable stories about how the Red Sox club house resembles the Middlesex County Registrar of Deeds office, Jose is going to have to develop a whole new set of analogies.

For instance, Jose will have to raise important questions such as “How are the Red Sox like biscuits and gravy?” They are both predominantly white and will eventually cause heart attacks.


2. The news emerged yesterday that St. Josh a Beckett’s next start will be pushed back due to a lack of feeling in his pinkie and ring fingers. (Note: Is this a good excuse of adultery? “Honey, I didn’t cheat, I just forgot I was married, because I didn’t feel the ring on my finger.”) In light of this, Jose thinks he has the perfect theme music for Beckett. Jose saw this movie called The Squid and the Whale, and this kid in it wrote a wonderful original song called “Comfortably Numb.” It would be perfect.

While it sound like the numbness is a bad thing, Jose would differ with the conventional wisdom and suggest that this is a blessing in disguise. After all, how will Beckett feel his famous finger blisters if he can’t feel his fingers?


3. In more serious news, Yaz, the Red Sox legend/birth control device underwent emergency triple bypass surgery yesterday. It was the slugger’s first triple in 25 years. While the surgery is distressing and Jose is concerned about the legend, you can rest assured that even in his current condition, Yaz remains a better hitter than Rococo Crisp and a better left fielder than the dearly departed Manny Ramirez. Of course, the same can be said for Ted Williams.

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

Jose's Routine

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

1. Last night, Jose had the privilege of watching, or even listening to a baseball game, for the first time since Jon Lester’s no hitter. Jose has had periods of absence from the game a couple of times in the past (note: actually Jose disappears every six years, he is like the opposite of a Senate candidate.), but he has never had a spell like this before.

Sure, Jose tried to keep up, but it was difficult, so he created a basic routine. It went like this.

6:00 AM Wake up.
6:05 AM Start coffee brewing
6:10 AM Log onto to dial up Internet service. via sketchy Chinese box.
6:15 AM Type “Red Sox” into Google window in Firefox.
6:20 AM Wait five minutes and pray that the score shows up in the Google Web search.
6:25 AM Swear because the score has not shown up in the Google Web search
6:30 AM Enter “Red Sox” in Google news.
6:35 AM Wait five minutes, get coffee.
6:40 AM Swear some more because there was no game the previous night it turns out, so Jose wasted 25 minutes searching for nothing.
6:50 AM Check Google news for Yankees score.
7:00 AM Dial up disconnects.
7:15 AM Get Yankees score
7:20 AM Celebrate over latest Yankees injury
7:30 AM Check Tampa Bay score.
7:35 AM Get no results because Jose googled “Devil Rays”
7:45 AM Get “Rays” results
7:50 AM Go into shock from feeling obliged to check Rays scores
11:45 AM Come out of shock
12 Noon Lunch

So as you can see Jose enjoyed, for the most part pretty full mornings that combined the excitement of waiting with the philosophical depth of contemplating the Tampax Bay Rays.

2. Jose got something nice in the mail the other day. It was an ad for the 24th Annual Three Apples Storytelling Festival in Bedford. At first Jose thought it was in New Bedford, but then he noticed it was not written in Portuguese nor did it smell of kale. (Note: Just kidding New Bedford. Jose loves you and was just there the other day. Also, Jose would have liked it better if the mail had smelled like kale soup.)

Among the performers appearing at this cultural event is Tim Van Egmond, who, as we all know, must be the guy who once pitched for the Red Sox. Jose has mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, good for him for learning a craft, unlike that bum Nate Minchey. On the other hand, perhaps if he had spent more time on his curveball and less name on his dance calling and hammered dulcimer playing, he would have had a better career ERA than 5.96. Of course, to beat on Minchey again, Minchey does not play the hammered dulcimer or even the limberjack, and his ERA was 6.75.


3. On a more somber note, just a reminder that today is the Jimmy Fund Telethon, and Jose urges you to kick in for this great cause.

In order to ease any concerns you might have, Jose reminds you that not one dime from the fundraiser goes to Jimy Williams. Yes, Jose knows that you knew that. Relax, it was a joke. Obviously, the money doesn’t go to Jimy Williams. It is reserved for the needy people, the true heroes among us, who spell their name Jimmy, like Jimmy Key, Jimmy Rodgers and on the rare occasions he is feeling frisky, Jimmy Rice. Also, cancer. It fights cancer too.

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

What Day Is It?

It’s time for Jose Van Winkle’s KEYS TO THE GAME.


1. Yawn.

Yawn.

Sttttrrrreeeeecchhhhh.

Yawn.

What time is it where is Jose?

What day is it? May 23rd? No?

Twenty-fourth then? No? Really?

August 12th? Are you serious? August? How can that be? The last thing Jose remembers is that he was taunting some gnomes, some place in upstate New York, it might have been Dustin Pedroia, and the next things he knows he’s here and now.

Oh woe! Oh terrible woe! The things Jose must have missed. At least he’ll still have a chance to vote for Hillary Clinton for President. He won’t? Oh wow.

He’ll just have to try to put up with watching Kobe and the Lakers try to repeat as champs. No? Not that either huh?

Well, at least there are the Red Sox to fall back on. How’s Jon Lester doing since that no hitter? Still walking the park? He isn’t? Wonders of the future Jose guesses.

Jose can hardly wait to see Papi and Manny slug back to back again. What do you mean that’s not going to happen? Is Papi hurt again? We traded Manny?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!


Dear God the things Jose’s missed, the loss, the horrible loss. The future is a sad and evil place. Woe! Woe! Woe! (Note: Woe!)

Wait. They didn’t trade him for Aubrey Huff and Mike Cameron did they?

This is brutal. Jose needs to try to chill out. Maybe there’s a new Bernie Mac movie out that he can watch?

What about a new Isaac Hayes album?

Oh the things Jose has missed! Oh the time that has gone by? Is nothing still the same? Is there no constant in Jose’s world?

There is you say? Praise the Lord! What is it? What has remained the same?

Julio Yugo is still not contributing in any way?

Good to know that some things never change.


2. As Jose returns after nearly three months without seeing a baseball game, there is one question the burns in his mind: Why isn’t this team better?

Jose does not mean why aren’t specific players better, or why isn’t the team as a whole putting up better numbers. What he wants to know is why, after a cursory look at team statistics, the Red Sox don’t have a better record. If you had told Jose at the beginning of the year that the team ERA would be 3.79, that St. Josh a Beckett would have the worst ERA of the regular starters at 4.08, that Youks would have 20 home runs and DJ Dru 19, Jose would be sure the Red Sox would be in first place, or would at least have a comfortable lead in the wild card.

And yet here we are in August and the Sox are four games behind Tampax Bay and just a shade ahead of the Twins for the wild card.

How is this possible?

Jose has done a lot of thinking on the subject and he has come up with a theory: The Red Sox ERA team ERA is actually, 379.000, but the Red Sox, following the lead of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, have decided to cut off some zeros. For the few of you who may not have been following the economic crisis in the troubled African nation, inflation there has, for some time been in excess of one million percent. The result has been a nation of impoverished billionaires. The highest bill printed, technically a “Special Agro-Cheque” rather than actual money, is for 100 billion Zimbabwe dollars. However, at the beginning of August, Dr. Gideon Gono, Chair of the Reserve Bank decided to slash 10 zeros from the currency, issuing new one dollar notes equal to the old 10 billion dollar notes.

Jose is pretty sure the Red Sox must have done something comparable, slashing three zeros from the team ERA to come up with the officially reported number. Jose hopes they have taken one more innovation from the big brains at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. The RBZ remonetized old coins that have for years now been worthless. In other words, one dollar coins, sitting in Zimbabwe’s sock drawers that had fallen in value to less than one-ten billionth of a U.S. dollar are now back to being worth about .10 U.S. dollars. Jose hopes that the Red Sox have replicated this and remonetized Pedro Martinez’s 2000 ERA.

3. Jose does not keep up with the golf news, as he generally regards golf as a sport for rich jerks (note: unlike baseball?) But one tidbit from Sunday’s Globe did jump out at him. Apparently, a golfer named Heath Slocum missed the cut at the PGA Championship after double bogeyed in the 15th and quadruple bogeyed in the 16th. Apparently, this is bad.

What surprises Jose, however, is that he was still competitive in the 15th. Jose would have expected Heath Slocum to implode in the ninth.

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

What We've Lost

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

1. Today is a day for mourning.

All over New England the church bells toll a melancholy minor, the old Irish granddads saddle up to bar for one more shot of Jameson’s and the clouds hang dark and heavy in the sky.

He is gone. They are gone.

It is the "they" part that is the most troubling. With the trading of Manny Ramirez for Jason Bay, the Red Sox have lost one of the greatest players the game has ever known. This is sad, but this is also something that happens. We have lost brilliant players before. Ted and Yaz retired. Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs defected and Jimmie Foxx we waived away. We mourn, we grieve, we progress. But today the Red Sox fans have lost something far greater, than a Hall-of-Fame outfielder, and we share a pain that very few can understand.

Let Jose tell you a story.

Once, there was a back-to-back power combination of unbelievable skill. Managers didn’t know whether to pitch to one or the other and pitchers feared them. They led their team to multiple championships. But there was grumbling. While one of the stars was diligent, the other was a dandy, eccentric and defiant.

“He is childish,” said some reporters.

“He makes some incredibly foolish plays on the bases and in the field,” said others.

“Who cares, let him hit,” said the wisest.

And hit he did, hit they did, putting up dazzling numbers year after year.

And then it was over. The “childish star” left for a National League team and the magnificent pairing was severed.

The story sounds familiar doesn’t it? It is, of course, the story of Manny and Ortiz.

It is also the story of Gehrig and Ruth.

That is what we have lost today. We have not lost a star; we have lost one of the two greatest parings in baseball history. The only ones who can understand what we are going through, the only ones who can empathize with our loss are the fans of the 1934 Yankees, and Jose doesn’t want to identify with them, Jose doesn’t want their sympathy.

This may have been the right move. It may be good in the long term. It may even be good in the short term. But that doesn’t make it feel any better. We had Gehrig and Ruth, we had Astaire and Rogers, we had Davey Boy Smith and The Dynamite Kid, we had Laurel and Hardy, we had Siskel and Ebert. And now we just have Ebert. Will Jason Bay be Roeper? Is that good or bad? Jose does not know, all he knows is Roeper is not Siskel, and Jose cannot watch that show without thinking of the tall bald jerk.

And that’s how it will be when Jose watches Papi from now on. With every at bat, with each plate appearance, Jose will look in the on-deck circle for that tangle of dreadlocked hair and that tangle of mangy neurons within, he will look for Manny Ramirez, and Manny Ramirez will not be there.

2. As Jose recalls from his ninth grade English class, pretty much all of literature, ergo all of human narrative, falls into one of four archetypes: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. Jose is hard pressed to come up with anything that crosses into all four categories, save romantic tragicomic farce of Manny Ramirez.

Romance: The story of the hero on a quest. The hero starts out naïve, he faces some adversity, he accomplishes his quest and he learns a little. Examples of romance include Star Wars, Don Quixote and the A-Rod/Madonna saga.

How does Manny fit into this archetype? He entered the Red Sox as something of a pup, so naïve that he wanted to bring his clubhouse guy with and so innocent that he imagined he could escape from his contract almost as soon as it was signed. Along the way, he faced some adversity (note: the Joe Kerrigan era) and eventually completed his quest to be World Series MVP, just like he said in that commercial for, office supplies Jose thinks it was, in 2004. At the end he came out wiser and less naïve… umm… right?

Tragedy: An archetype wherein the hero sufferers a calamitous downfall due to some fatal flaw, often hubris. Examples include, Macbeth, every episode of Behind The Music, the 2001 Red Sox.

Manny had everything going his way. He had won two championships, he was a sure thing Hall-of-Famer and he had fans who loved him so much that they would overlook any quirk, any unexplained disappearance into the wall, any failure to hustle to first. But he had a fatal flaw: Greed. Manny could see the future and he did not like what he saw. He saw a contract ending, he saw two one-year options that gave the team all the power, and he could not abide. So he shot his way out of town, slacking and whining until many of his fans had deserted him (note: not Jose). The tragedy of Manny Ramirez has not yet had its final chapter. That part will come when he is stuck on a bad team bemoaning his fate. It will be sad. That’s why they call it tragedy.

Comedy: In the comedic archetype the hero conquers adversity. This is different that romance for some reason, but Jose doesn’t remember why. Maybe it is because there is no quest or because it does not include the famed “topless Juliet” scene that we saw in class in ninth grade. Examples include, The Divine Comedy, As You Like It, and Police Academy 1, 2, 5 and 6.

How is the story of Manny Ramirez a comedy? Well, he grows up in the literal shadow of evil, beside Yankee Stadium, and advances to purgatory in Cleveland before ascending to paradiso in Boston. Never mind everything that has happened in the last few days.

Satire: Satire is mockery of human vice and foibles. Examples include Aristophanes’ The Knights, Gulliver’s Travels and Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

Perhaps more than anything, the saga of Manny Ramirez was satire. Yes, it had its comedic elements, its romance and ultimately, today, its tragedy, but what defined Manny, what made his story different from all other players’ were his quirks, the mirror that he heal aloft to reflect the strange image of baseball in modern society. From his self-involvement, to his seeming indifference, to his consumption, to his brilliance, Manny Ramirez was a caricature of a modern athlete, and a spectacular one.

The point is that Manny was everything. He was everything Jose loved about baseball and everything he hated. Talented, aggressive, arrogant, stupid, funny and endearing. You can write any story you want, any play, song or sonnet, but if it’s about Manny Ramirez, Jose wants to see it.

3. Jose supposes that he is obligated to say at least a few words about the return in this trade, outfielder Jason Bay. Unlike the rest of you who watch most Pirates games, Jose hasn’t watched much of the Bucs, so he doesn’t have much to say. So let’s leave it at this. When Bay gets the inevitable back injury from crashing into the monster, Jose would like to lay claim right now to calling him Jason “Back” Bay.

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

How a Blind Man Sees the Red Sox

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

1. For the past few weeks Jose has been away from the Red Sox, isolated far away from his beloved Boston on a continent that both begins and ends with the letter “A.” (Note: Sorry Europe, everyone else stays in the game.) While being away has its share of hardships, being unable to attend games foremost among them, it is not without its advantages. Most notable Jose has the rare opportunity to view this Red Sox team with fresh eyes, or more accurately, no eyes.

Remember the parable of the blind men and the elephant? A few blind men are feeling up an elephant and they each get a dramatically different idea of what an elephant is based on the part of the beast they are fondling.

The man feeling the elephant's flank says, “Ah, an elephant is like a tree.”

“No, no,” says the man feeling the tail. “An elephant is like a stalk of wheat.”

“You’re both wrong,” says the man touching the trunk. “The elephant is like Ron Jeremy.” (Note: Kapow.)

While Jose, as a general rule is no better than equal to one blind man or two deaf-mutes, at this level of remove, Jose has the opportunity to equal at least three blind men, making him the equal of an entire NBA officiating crew, but without a gambling problem.

So how would a group of blind men see the 2008 Boston Red Sox at this juncture, you know, assuming that they actually weren’t blind at all, but were just really, really narrow minded so they could only see part of the team at a time.

The first blind man, let’s call him Ray, would feel up Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz and say “Ah, the Red Sox are like a locomotive, powerful and right on track.”

The second blind man, named Stevie, would grab hold of Jacoby Ellsbury, Rococo Crisp, and Julio Lugo and say “The Red Sox are like a Dalmatian that mated with a brown-haired thoroughbred horse, black white and brown and fast as hell.” Stevie does not have a great grasp of speciation.

A third blind man, called Usher (note: Doesn’t some African-American musician have to learn to play piano and then go blind once Stevie is gone, or maybe even now, since Ray is gone. Aren’t they like the Sith, there are always two, no more, no less? And you know it won’t be 50 Cent, unless he gets shot in the eye. Who already plays piano?) would grab hold of the middle relief and say, “No, no, you’re wrong. The Red Sox are like a vacuum cleaner, they do nothing but suck.”

But then a fourth sightless companion would come along, let’s call her Helen. Helen would grab hold of the starting rotation. She’d run her hands carefully over Beckett, Dice, Lester, Bartolo, Clay and Wake. Somewhere, Derek Lowe would be watching, lamenting his Sox days gone and wishing that the hot blind chick would be running her hands over him. And then Helen would pause thoughtfully and, twinkle in her glassy eyes, offer the true essence of the Red Sox. “Mmphellesss,” she would sagely state. “Mmmmphelless, waaaattaaahhhh.”

And that friends, is what the 2008 Red Sox, truly are.

2. Okay, that’s great. Now that Jose has made a Helen Keller joke the day after sending a link to KEYS to a prospective employer, he will have plenty of time to write. Good thinking Jose!

In the country where Jose is currently stationed, let’s call it Freedonia, there was recently a failed coup attempt and the former president alleged to be involved, let’s call him Groucho, was sent off to jail. While Jose is, as a matter of principle, deeply opposed to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, he does kind of wish that this sort of “Freedonia model” might be exported to Major League Baseball.

Yes, Jose knows that Buddy Leroux tried it once before, but he made a fatal mistake, he failed to get the army behind him before overthrowing Jean Yawkey and declaring himself Owner. If Buddy had stormed Yawkey Way with three highly trained and loyal divisions, there is no way, Mrs. Yawkey could have taken the team back. She was just a little old lady. There’s no way she could have handled more than two divisions.

But just because it failed once, doesn’t mean that it will fail again. Jose, of course, does not wish to see a coup in the Red Sox organization. We are blessed to be ruled by a benevolent triumvirate that keeps us up to our necks in wine and orgies. Well, keeps the players up to their necks in wine and orgies anyways. Or maybe, Jose was just thinking about Derek Lowe again. (Note: Apologies to DLowe the Paranoid Android, there is no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife with more than one woman in a single sitting or that he was a wine drinker. DLowe always seemed like more of a vodka drunk.)

No, Jose would kind of like to see a coup inside the Yankees organization. The way Jose sees it going down is that former Yankees GM Bob Watson using the armed divisions he must get as MLB’s discipline czar, would overthrow Brian Cashman and Hank Steinbrenner and appoint himself GM for Life, President of the New York Yankees, First Citizen of Yankee Nation and Lion of the Bronx. Then for a façade of legitimacy, he would replace Hank as principle owner with Hank’s own father, the recently deposed George Steinbrenner.

George would call a press conference to declare his dramatic return. As he looked directly into the camera, a twinkle in his glassy eyes would offer the true essence of the Yankees. “Mmphellesss,” the senile old man would sagely state. “Mmmmphelless, waaaattaaahhhh.”

3. Jose would like to offer a hearty thank you to Hillary Clinton. Yes, Jose has been kind of tough on her these past few months, but he now wants to put aside the bitterness and offer a heartfelt thank you.

Thank you, Hil-Rod (note: remember you said wrestling fans can call you that) Thank you, thank you. Hil-Rod. Thank you because by comparing the Democratic Party’s refusal to recognize the votes in the meaningless, non-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries to Jim Crow and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, you have now made it totally acceptable for Jose to compare any event in baseball’s preseason to historical events such as the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Katyn.

Just as your husband made it socially acceptably to receive oral sex from interns under a desk, you have made it acceptable to trivialize monstrous events in human history by comparing them to contests that don’t count.

Thank you so much. Already, Jose is writing the story explaining how Julian Tavarez punching Joey Gathright in the face in a preseason game a while back is the same as the Darfur crisis.

Again, thank you for this wonderful contribution to our public discourse.

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

5 vs. 1

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

1. Should Julio Yugo continue as the Red Sox starting shortstop? That’s the question on everyone’s lips like so much dried spittle these days isn’t it?

The easy answer is “No of course not. What are you a moron? He can’t hit and now he can’t field either.” But that answer is only easy in the sense that Madonna is easy—everyone has used it. But that does not necessarily mean that this exhibitionist whore of an answer is correct.

Jose would like to offer an alternative answer, more chaste and refined, and therefore, more alluring while ultimately far less satisfying: We should keep Julio Yugo as the shortstop.

Now, Jose knows this isn’t the answer you want to hear, but stay with him for a moment. Jose is not proposing that the Red Sox leave things exactly as they are. That would be crazy.

What Jose is proposing is that they adopt a strategy more appropriate for our disposable, throw away, “Screw you Al Gore” society. Back when Jose was maybe 13 years old, he got the brilliant idea that rather than buying one nice car for say $15,000 (note: quite a bit in 1989 dollars), one could buy five Yugos for approximately $3,000 each and get more total years of use. Instead of driving a Toyota Camry for 12 years, you could get three years a piece out of each of the five Yugos and come out ahead.

This is what we should do with Julio Yugo. Rather than hoping to get a full 12-year career out of Jed Lowrie, we should just take five Julio Yugos. Perfect right?

There is, however, a minor hole in this plan. Julio Yugo has the price tag of a nice car and the performance of a Titoist spin on the Fiat.

2. Following another excellent game in which he hit a triple and a two-run homer, Rococo Crisp, once the odd man out in the Boston outfield, told the Boston Herald “I’m just going with the flow.”

Jose always expected that Crisp would one day start peppering his press conferences with product placements, but he always imagined it would be for breakfast cereals, you know, because his name sounds like Crispix…

Jose never thought that he would jump into pharmaceutical advertising and start promoting prostate products like Flomax. Obviously, Flomax advertises constantly during games, but Jose just never saw them doing direct product placements in post game press conferences. But we should probably just get used to it this is probably the start of a trend.

3. In other Julio Yugo news, the embattled shortstop underwent a CT scan during Saturday’s game. According to the Boston Globe, the scan came back negative, which is no big surprise as “CT,” Jose is pretty sure, stand for “catching” and “throwing.”

Jose is pretty sure that Lugo’s SLG scan will come back negative too.

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

Hell is...

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

1. We are now more than a month into the “Jose will not be an every day writer” era, and Jose has to be honest, it’s not going great.

Jose thought it would be terrific. Less work = more free time = greater happiness. By the transitive property of equality, that should mean than less work = greater happiness. And yet, it hasn’t gone that way. Ergo, mathematics is bullsh*t and 1+1 probably does equal 3, and Sir Isaac Newton is a jerk. Instead of enjoying life, sipping wine on the banks of the Seine or possibly the Tiber and the like, Jose has ended up with nothing from the whole exercise save for greater empathy for “The Coral Axe” Alex Cora.

Jose used to have the life of Manny Ramirez. He was in the game pretty much every day except for when he didn’t feel like it. It was a good life. But now, Jose is removed from the game, lonely and distant, participating only when things line up perfectly, like when you are given the field sobriety test but are actually sober.

How does Cora do it? How?

The answer, Jose believes, is that he fills up his free time with other pursuits, studying architecture, epistemology and the classics, doing all of the things that make him, as Tito says, “the smartest player in the game.” But Jose isn’t smart like Alex Cora. He can’t understand spherical trigonometry or read lesser novels of Dostoyevsky in the original Russian. So instead he sulks like Achilles in his tent or A-Rod without shemales, and slowly, slowly goes mad from the boredom of it all.

And then, when at last the call comes, when Jose’s services are once again needed and he must join in the game, Jose remains Cora-like, aloof and disengaged, unable to participate in any meaningful way. It is awful. Even worse it is ungodly.

Which brings us to the nature of hell. Dante will tell you that hell is a horrifying combination of fire and ice and if you are really bad, a three-headed beast gnawing eternally on your head. Dante Bichette will tell you that it is a diet. The Pope claims it is a sense of total separation from God. And old J.P. Sartre? He will smugly refer you to No Exit, and after you have squandered a few hours, you will learn that hell is other people. But they are wrong. They are all wrong.

Jose knows the truth. He does not know what he did to deserve the bitter knowledge, but know it he does.

Hell is being Alex Cora.

But you already knew that didn’t you? Here’s the really weird thing, though. Heaven is being Joey Cora. It’s right there in Paradiso; in the ninth sphere you get to be Joey Cora, but no one knows that because the only part of the Divine Comedy anyone ever reads in Inferno.

2. How manifold are the delights of the Roger Clemens debacle? Really manifold. Really, really manifold. But of all of the delights, there are none more delightful than the news that he once hit on the wife of wrestling legend Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake.

Lot’s of people have gotten in their little jabs at Clemens for this small immorality, but none have had Jose’s unique qualifications to comment on the matter. As a result, the typical analysis is something like “Well, they’d better settle this inside a steel cage.” Pathetic. You call that insight?

What would a steel cage match settle? Nothing. If wrestling has taught Jose anything, it’s that women are basically chattel to be won as the result of fake combat, more or less the same lesson as he learned from the crusades. So clearly, Clemens and Beefcake should have a match with the love of Mrs. Beefcake on the line. Since Clemens claims to be from Texas even though he is actually from Ohio, it would have to be a Texas bull rope match, wherein the two combatants are lashed to each other with a thick, braided rope. The first man to touch all four corners of the ring in succession is victorious.

This is a good deal for Clemens, because inevitably, the guy who is not the husband wins these matches. Then Roger would get Mrs. Beefcake who would hate him for a while, but then eventually come around and start loving him and talking in the ring about how he was a much better lover than Brutus. For a guy whose testicles are probably shriveled from years of steroid abuse, this would be a nice touch. Even better for Roger, Debbie Clemens would have to end up leaving him for Beefcake as a result of the debacle because that’s just how these things go.

So Clemens would get the woman he hit on, and loose the bedazzling Mrs. Clemens. Why wouldn’t he do this? And better still, he would be moving into a sport where his use of steroids is socially acceptable, and even if he killed his wife and K kids, which is about the only thing he could do now to get more unpopular, he would still get a full length special on USA Network.

3. As Jose wrote all of this in a café in a major American League metropolis, a bunch of protestors marched by ending a demand to 60 years of terror. At first Jose thought they were demanding an end to the Yawkey Era, but then Jose remembered that he’s not in Boston and that it’s not 1993. Also, the crowd seemed to really hate Jews, so they’d probably be pro-Tom Yawkey right?

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

Red Sox Nationalism

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

1. Nationalism is a problem.

Yes it can offer benefits, a sense of unity and purpose, a desire, as John McCain has said, to become part of something greater than oneself. But it also leads, almost inevitably, to arrogance, elitism and prejudice. Anyone who has spent as much time in the Balkans as Jose (note: four weeks) knows exactly how destructive nationalism can be and will come to view it with a fearful mix of respect and loathing.

And yet, without nationalism, can a nation ever truly be forged? Could Italian city-states have become one kind of resolute and more or less stable nation without nationalism? Could the United States have formed a nation out of a mélange of peoples without creating a nationalism based not on ethnicity, but the idea of Americanness? Could hundreds of German states… wait… okay let’s skip that one.

Since 1967, we Red Sox fans have slowly become a nation. We know this because Leisure Suit Larry Lucchino tells us so. But marketing aside, at this point it is undeniable. However, it is equally undeniable that we could not have become a Red Sox nation without a Red Sox nationalism.

Prussian thinker Johann Gottfried Herder reframed the idea of the nation as a Volknation a “folk-nation” motivated by the Volkgeist, “the spirit of the people.” Does the Red Sox Nation have a Volkgeist? Herder would certainly say so. He looked to language and cultural traditions to form the chalky outlines of the people’s divine form. Language, folklore, music, dance, we have them all. Every time a drunkard yells “A-Rod you wicked suck,” he is feeding into the Volkgeist. Dance? The wave is nothing more than the undulating heave of a nation in motion. Music? From Jess Cain’s Yaz Song, to Red Sox Mabmo #5, to Tessie, to Sweet Caroline, to Dirty Water, Red Sox nation can compete with any of that Bach or Mozart the Germans used to define themselves, provided Bach and Mozart dumbed down their music by 99% and later confessed to some weird feelings about Caroline Kennedy. And folklore? What is the “Curse of the Bambino” if not our version of the Brother’s Grimm, an absurd and terrifying account of things that are almost entirely fictional.

These are all good things, except for the Shaughnessy book, these symbols of our nationalism, but we would do well to remember that nationalism is not all good, to be vigilant against excess. There was an incident in New Hampshire several days ago wherein a fan of the New York Yankees, (note: Jose was going to write the Russia to our Germany but that made him a little sick. Then he was going to write the Germany to our Russia, but that also made him sick, so he settled on the Norway to our Sweden), responded to the “Yankees Suck” chant, the ancient cry of our people, with violence. This Yankees fan used her motor vehicle as a weapon, literally running down a group of Red Sox fans, murdering one. First, allow Jose to say that this is messed up. Really sick, horrible stuff, like worse than Roger Clemens horrible. Second, let’s not let the Red Sox Nationalism take us to those dark places.

We are not like Germany or Russia; we are better than them. We are fueled not my hatred of the other, but by love of our fellow citizens.

Let us not let Red Sox nationalism take us down the twisted path to madness, violence and death. It is all well and good to talk like a nation, think like a nation and act like a nation, but to destroy like a nation? To war like a nation? If that is the price of Red Sox Nationalism, Jose would be just fine being a Red Sox City-State.


2. The Red Sox blew a dramatic come from behind victory last night in part due to the 10th error of the year by embattled shortstop Julio Lugo. Lugo is one of those Red Sox players Jose has never managed to come up with a nickname for, but at last, after a good fielding horribly hitting 2007 and a better hitting but horrible fielding first month of 2008, Jose feels obliged to come up with something. Also, he didn’t see the game last night, so he is better off working on names than commenting on actual performance.

Here’s what Jose has come up with after three, perhaps even four minutes of work: Julio Yugo.

At first it seems obvious, crappy shortstop, crappy car—perfect.

But it is far more nuanced than that. The Yugo was introduced with great fanfare as a useful little thing that would fill a variety of needs, not flashy, but effective. Sound familiar? But it never settled into the U.S. market, and is ultimately regarded as one of the great disasters in automotive history.

The history of the Yugo is the history of Julio Lugo.

That said the comparison is not perfect. The Yugo, for all of its flaws, was at least cheap.

3. KEYS TO THE GAME fanboy Curt Euro took a major step in his rehabilitation from a shoulder injury this week, when he took a turn throwing from 60 feet (note: 20 yards). If he is able to throw at that distance without pain, he will immediately be the leading candidate for quarterback of the New York Jets.

Euro’s apparent recovery comes after he followed a routine of rest and rehabilitation recommended by the Red Sox. Euro and his doctors had insisted that surgery was the correct course of action. While Euro conceded that time has shown that the Red Sox recommendation was correct, his friend, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, insisted that this proved, more then ever, the need for surgery.

“I don’t care if he needs to have 100 surgeries,” said a defiant McCain. “Our objective is for Curt’s shoulder not to hurt. And we will keep cutting into his shoulder until it does not hurt anymore. Only then, will it be safe for have further surgeries.”

McCain continued “His surgeries, will of course, be covered under my health insurance plan, provided that they are not for an actual injury.”

With his recovery underway, Euro’s next task is to figure out how to meet the weight incentives included in his contract. Euro is unlikely to make weight due to the weight gain that is a well-known side effect of arm injuries.

As an alternative Euro has suggested a buoyancy incentive (note: credit to Dr. Katz Professional Therapist).

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

Defamation of a Character

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

1. Every day, it seems, a new Roger Clemens girlfriend is revealed. And each time, just as it appears that there could not possible be another, we hear of a new lady emerging as unexpected and slathered in make up as a clown from a VW Beetle.

This begs the question, who’s next? It can’t just be three, can it? There must be more. So in the hopes that Roger will sue him for defamation of character, leading to even further public humiliation for the Rocket Man, Jose, gives his list of women who have had affairs with Roger Clemens:

• Rue McClanahan: Remember her character on Golden Girls? She was a really slutty southern dame, which seems to put her right in Clemens’ wheelhouse. Also, if you balance her out with Mindy McCready, that gives him one appropriately-aged mistress.

• Margo Adams: Clemens and Wade Boggs were having simultaneous affairs with Adams. This resulted in an awkward instance wherein Adams got pregnant, and Clemens insisted it was a Boggs error, but Boggs countered that Clemens should not have “pitched inside.”

• Trot Nixon: No wait. He f*cks Roger Clemens, not the other way around.

• Suzyn Waldman: You heard the tape of her. What else could it have been?

• Mata Hari: Traitors run in packs.

• Kim Khardasian: With all of those Ks in her name, how could Roger resist.


2. In a bit of a surprise, Hideki Okajima blew a save last night, allowing an inherited runner to score in the eighth on a sacrifice fly following a double. He ended the inning with two strike outs.

Manager Terry Eurona’s decision to bring in Okajima after Manny of the Carmen had allowed a lead off single puzzled some fans. Jose agrees that departing from Okajima’s normal usage was an unwise move that led, at least indirectly, to the run.

There is no way Tito should have brought Okajima in until it was bases loaded no outs. How could Oki have been expected to perform with only one man on base?


3. While many major league teams might be encouraging players to back off from spring training shenanigans in light of the Clemens Affair, the Red Sox have refused to change anything.

“The one thing we don’t want to do is lose the intimacy of spring training,” said Red Sox Chief Operating Officer Mike Dee.

While Dee’s comments were reported by Nick Cafardo to be in response to a question about moving the spring training home to Sarasota, Sarasota is believed to be baseball slang for “sex with aspiring country musicians” just as “stick” means “bat” and “shooting beaver” means being a peeping tom.

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

Yeats on Clemens

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

1. Into the Twilight
By William Butler Yeats
Adapted by Dan Duquette

Out-Worn arm in a man out-worn,
Unclear of the rules of wrong and right;
Career descends into grey twilight,
Why couldn’t he just have purchased some porn?

The country singer was too young,
He was unfurling to twilight grey;
Forkball went flat and fastball decay,
Burning inside with each curveball he hung.

Stomach where fat was heaped upon fat:
A modern Narcissus, growing old
‘Til H and G and H let him hold
The pitch that let him miss the bat;

Toronto, New York, and Houston too,
His chemical arm stayed strong at his right;
But “love” is less kind in the grey twilight,
A cheater who lied with each pitch that he threw.

2. Jose has an extra ticket for tonight’s game and try as he might, he just can’t unload it. His best guess is that it is either because it is raining or because Jon Lester is pitching. If Jose were forced to guess, he would go with Jon Lester, mostly because he has never heard Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue publicly pray for Jon Lester to come to Atlanta.

On the other hand, there are a few American Indian tribes who do Jon Lester dances when their crops are withering, so who knows.

3. For among the first times in his life Jose can say, without question, that he loves God way more than he loves the Red Sox. (Note to God: It’s a joke, please don’t damn Jose to the Bronx.) And it’s not just sucking up. We are incredibly, incredibly fortunate that God made the world and not the Red Sox.

Because God made the world in six days and then took a day off, we get Sunday off. This is pretty great. Had the Red Sox been tasked with making the world, the Major League schedule makers would have forced them to do it for 20 consecutive days before getting a day off, so we’d all have to work nearly three straight week before having a day of rest. You know, unless Tito promised us one, or we got ejected or both.

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

Flu-like Symptoms

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

1. Can’t you get a flu shot for like five dollars at CVS? You can and you can get some ice cream while you’re there… unless you go with Joe Girardi.

For the past week the Red Sox clubhouse has been devastated by what must be the worst clubhouse plague since Derek Jeter sent herpes around the Yankee clubhouse in 2005. But it is all preventable.

Not only could the Red Sox have just sent players to CVS for a flu shot, they could have adapted this thing from big business where they invite people to come in and actually give their employees free flu shots.

Come to think of it, that is so obvious that Jose is almost sure the Red Sox must have done it. They’re not stupid. The question then is why didn’t more players get the shot? One explanation is that after the Mitchell report, no one is taking a needle in the clubhouse for any reason. A better explanation would be that Red Sox players as stubborn as Jose’s cousin Sherry. (Note: Dustin Pedroia has something else in common with Sherry—being 4’11”.)

Jose called Sherry a few months ago because he was going to visit her in North Carolina. When she picked up the phone, she sounded, to be generous, like death. She had the flu, it turned out.

“Ummm…. Don’t you work at a hospital? Couldn’t you have gotten a flu shot?” Jose pointed out in his “Jose told you so” voice.

“Yeah ,” she conceded.

“So why didn’t you get one?”

“Well, I was thinking about it, but then they made it mandatory, and I was like ‘you’re not going to tell me what to do.’ So I didn’t get one.”

Sound logic from a health professional!

And if its good enough for her, why wouldn’t it me good enough for noted health experts like Jason Varitek and Manny of the Carmen?

Jose can absolutely see a few Red Sox being all for the flu shot right up until they were told they had to get one. In fact, Jose is pretty sure that the union insists that getting flu shots be negotiated into the contract. Don Fehr insists that in return for major league players to receive a flu shot, they should each receive a cigarette boat, three pounds of mackerel and the complete works of Sinclair Lewis.

2. Aside from the general awfulness of Red Sox middle relief, the big story emerging from yesterday’s game was the sharpness of rookie pitcher Justin Masterson in his six inning, one-run major league debut. Masterson benefited from the fact that his sinker was working well and there is a vacant, ready made gimmick available for him.

Masterson is said to be preparing to take the “masterpiece” gimmick from professional wrestler Chris Masters, formerly of the World Wrestling Federation. (Note: If he takes this gimmick, he needs to avoid the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as there is a good chance he would be kidnapped by guys posing as cops.) Accordingly, Masterson, will enter the field wearing a cape and no shirt, do a little pose down, and dare anyone to hit his special pitch known as “the master lock.” He will probably also be required to get a Master’s Degree, be certified as a Master Electrician, play golf at the Masters, spent time in the clubhouse playing Master Blaster or watching Master and Commander, listen to Metallica’s Master of Puppets or Depeche Mode’s Master and Servant and eat only products of the Masterfoods company.

3. The Red Sox have their first game of the season tonight against the Tampax Bay Rays, formerly the Devil Rays. (Note: If they were going to change their name, they should have changed it to the Dres, for some Yo! MTV Raps/NWA cred.) While rumors have abounded that the club dropped their name in response to concerns that their affiliation with Satan was hurting the gate, those rumors have been largely discounted among pastors not advising John McCain.

The real reason for a name change is part of an ongoing, nationwide tribute to the future 2007-2008 NBA Champion Boston Celtics. Tampax Bay changed its name in order to honor Celtics guard Ray Allen. Other teams from around the country changing their names include The St. Paul Saints becoming the Paul Pierce Saints, The Brown Bears, becoming the Brown PJs and the Perkins School for the Blind becoming the Kendrick Perkins School for the Blind.

When reached for comment, Northwestern University expressed relief that Delonte West is no longer on the Celtics, as having the Delontes as a mascot would not help recruiting.

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

Jose Chooses Not to Run

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

1. Jose was all excited that he got to go to his first game of the year yesterday. And then when the game got out he got to spend sometime watching mediocre marathoners trot along towards the finish line. Good for them!

Jose has always wanted to run the marathon, but he never found it realistic. He has cranky knees, shaky ankles and poor self-discipline.

But what Jose does have is an idea. He has been inspired by, believe it or not, the Tampax Bay Rays. Seriously. Why can’t Jose complete a marathon? Sure he’d be horrible, sure he’d be really, really slow, but every year the Rays are horrible and they still go out and play 162 games.

Here is Jose’s Tampax Bay Rays theory of marathon running. Next year, after doing no training whatsoever, Jose will head up to Hopkinton, run the first mile or so and then walk the rest of the way. Jose figures that using this approach he could finish the marathon in under 10 hours as long as he doesn’t stop too often for beers.

Now some of you may be saying “Jose that’s not doing a marathon! That’s a total fraud.” Nonsense. When the Rays limp to the end of the season 40 games out of first, no one says “Hey, you guys didn’t really play a baseball season.” People just point out that the Rays played an entire season but very poorly.

The way Jose sees it, walking the marathon is basically the same thing. If Jose finishes, he can absolutely say he did the marathon. He went the whole 26.2. He can get the boost in self-esteem without all of the hard work and self-discipline.

And if the Rays are any model, then next year, there will be at least a few dozen people claiming that “this will be the year that Jose breaks five hours.”

2. Jose would be remiss if he let last night’s WWF Monday Night RAW go by without comment. Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain appeared on RAW via videotape to court the all important semi-illiterate vote.

In theory, Jose should not be writing about this, as it has nothing to do with baseball, but he can’t help himself. Besides, since the election is about America, and baseball is America’s national pastime, it does kind of have something to do with baseball in the same sense that elections for Governor of Massachusetts impact Tollhouse cookies, since they are the official cookie of the Commonwealth.

So as the rare commentator who knows both something about wrestling and politics, Jose feel obliged to break down each candidates comments.

Hilary Clinton

“Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton. But tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hill-Rod.”

Where the hell does the nickname Hill-Rod come from? Is she confusing A-Rod with wrestling? This only works if it is a vague reference to “Hot Rod” Roddy Piper. If it is, look for her to break a coconut over Obama’s head at the next debate. The sad thing is that, it would be one of her most dignified and human attacks to date.

“This election is starting to feel a lot like “King of the Ring.” The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman."

Does someone running on the strength of her husband’s name really want to be invoking monarchial comparisons? Also, does this mean that if she wins she will start wearing a cape and crown like Harley Race, Randy Savage and Booker T did after she wins?

“The truth is, this election is so important. The next president will facea stack full of difficult challenges right from the opening bell. To fix the economy, bring our troops home from Iraq, and make college more affordable. You need a president who will go to the mat for you. And that’s exactly what I’ll do.

I’ve been knocked down, but I’ve always gotten back up. And I know how to take a hit for the American people. And if things get a little tough, I may even have to deliver the “people’s elbow.”

Because this country is worth fighting for.”

There are an awful lot of “issues” and not much wrestling talk in here save a few bad metaphors. Still, Jose questions whether she would really drop the people’s elbow. First, Jose doesn’t think she could pull off the little dance, and second, she seems more like the type to drop the move’s predecessor, “the corporate elbow.” Also, if one Clinton was going to pull off a wrestling move involving a little dance, Jose says it would be Bill doing the John Cena “Five Knuckle Shuffle” or possible Scotty Too Hotty’s “Worm.”

“Now, I promise to stick to the political arena. So don’t worry Randy Orton you’re safe… for now. When it comes to standing up for the American people though, I am ready to rumble.”

She is probably right that she would have an advantage over Randy K. Orton. Orton is known as the legend killer, so presumably he could only win an election against FDR or Lincoln, and would have all sorts of trouble against a historical footnote like Sen. Clinton.

Barack Obama

“Hey WWE fans – I hope you’re all enjoying the program tonight. You know, this is a historic time for America. It’s not just that the reign of Randy Orton may soon be coming to an end. It’s that at this moment, in this election, we
have a chance to finally end business-as-usual in Washington.”

Is Obama right? If Orton loses the title at Backlash on Sunday, it will reveal that once again he has the superior judgment he claims for opposing the Iraq war.

“For a long time now, we’ve had a politics where our leaders go after each other like they’re competing to become King of the Ring instead of coming together to provide universal health care, fix our economy, and solve our other
problems. That’s what I’m running for President to change.”

Now this is a better analogy than Hill-Rod’s. Obama knows that he can’t actually be King of the Ring, but he does know what it is like to take five chair shots in a row.

“So to the special interests who’ve been setting the agenda in Washington fortoo long – and to all the forces of division and distraction that have
stopped us from making progress for the American people – I’ve got one question: Do you smell what Barack is cooking?”

Okay, all in all this was a disappointingly substantive comment, but you really can’t beat his use of “Do you smell what Barrack is cooking.” Obama, of course, has a lot in common with The Rock. Both are of mixed race, both are remarkable charismatic and what Hilary has attempted to do to Obama is quite like being attached by a forklift driving Mankind in an empty arena.

John McCain

"Looks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to celebrate their
differences in the ring. Well, that's fine with me, but let me tell you: If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man.”

At first this sounds fantastic. Really fantastic. But then you look at it a little closer. First, isn’t Ric Flair’s “If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man” more appropriate for an incumbent? Why does McCain get to be the man? They’re all just Senators. Beside, is it really wise for McCain who faces age questions to be up citing Ric Flair, a recently retired 60 year old wrestler? Is that going to make him seem younger?

“Come November, it'll be game over. And whatcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on you?"

Now, he mixes in a reference to HHH, a Greenwich blue blood aristocrat and Hulk Hogan currently embroiled in a nasty divorce. Are these really the connections McCain wants to draw, to the economic elite and a man who has rejected family values? (Note: If McCain were a wrestler would his finishing move be the airplane spin? Wow, the man’s a war hero and Jose just said that? Shame on Jose.) Shouldn’t he have saluted John Cena for his service in “The Marine?”

On the upside, at least Mitt Romney is gone, it would have been sad watching him imitate Jake “The Snake” Roberts. (Note: And Dennis Kucinich would have been Doink the Clown.)

In the final analysis, Jose sees Obama as the winner. Perhaps he didn’t have the most substantive presentation. Perhaps he’s not the most experienced wrestling fan, but he won Jose over with his simple, provocative questions “Do you smell what Barack is cooking?” And Jose does. He really does. Jose smells what you are cooking Barack and he will stand with you, at least until someone can come up with something as good as Bill Clinton’s appropriation of The Honky Tonk Man’s “I’m cool, I’m cocky, I’m bad.”

3. Angels centerfielder Tori Hunter is questionable tonight after he sustained mild injuries when his Bentley was rear ended last Friday. Hunter explained the accident saying “It was really my fault. The problem is I had no idea I’d purchased a car. I could have sworn I’d bought a small business college. On the upside, this explains why I was having such a hard time getting credits. I really should have bought a Babson instead.”

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

Why Obama Should Come on KEYS

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

1. Jose read last night that ESPN had decided not to allow Bill Simmons to interview Barack Obama on his podcast because ESPN doesn’t do politics. What a shame. This probably means we won’t see Hilary Clinton on the Budweiser Hot Seat (note: owned by Cindy McCain) either.

This is terrible as it means we will have no way to learn how 90210 influenced Obama’s position on the estate tax or whether he would consider sending Rocky to fight Al Qaeda’s top boxer in the caves of Afghanistan. (Note: Jose doesn’t know how much 90210 would influence anyone’s position on the estate tax, but certainly The Simple Life should.)

So to make matters right, Jose though he would extend a formal invitation to Sen. Obama to be interviewed right here on KEYS TO THE GAME.

Obama should accept for the following reasons:

• It will help him with the critical Hispanic vote, provided no one realizes that Jose is actually a Japanese-German Jew.
• Because Jose is an Obama partisan, he can be counted on to not ask tough questions about lapel pins and people he may have once sat 30 rows away from at a White Sox game.
  

If Sen. Obama accepts the invitation, Jose would like to be prepared so he has tried to come up with some good questions. He encourages you to send additional ideas.

• You are a fan of the Chicago White Sox, a team that 80 years ago included members who did business with organized crime as part of a plot to throw the World Series. Do you renounce and disavow them?
• You have stated that you would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran if elected. Does this include the Iron Sheik, who once said, and Jose quotes “Amereeka? Ha Ptut”?
• In what ways does the “surge” in Iraq resemble Grady Little’s decision to leave Pedro in?
  Which baseball player are you the most like a) Derek Jeter (multiracial) b) Benny Agbayani (Hawaiian) or c) Bruce Chen (confusingly Chinese but Panamanian?
• Which team does your opponent, Sen. Clinton most resemble a) The 2004 Yankees (looked like a lock but then completely choked) b) the 1996 Red Sox (off to a terrible start, but then coming very close to taking the division with the help of gritty white “dirt dogs” like Darren Bragg c) the 1919 Cincinnati Reds (winning because of massive corruption on the South Side of Chicago or d) the 2006 Washington Nationals (Not very good and secretly born in Canada.)

2. Jose supposes that he is now obliged to mention that the Red Sox are playing the Yankees and whatnot but as Bartelby the Scrivener would say, he would prefer not to. To be honest, Jose is starting to think that the pundits are right and the Red Sox-Sox Yankees rivalry is really tired and overplayed.

Think about it. The rivalry was fun but after the Red Sox won the World Series, it was like, who even cares any more? It’s like when you’re looking to have sex for the first time. You keep wanting it and wanting it and then once you finally have sex, and you’re like “Okay that’s done, I never need to do that again,” which is why the human population is dwindling at an alarming rate.

Let Jose give you another example. You now how sometimes you find a $20 bill just sitting there on the sidewalk? It’s pretty great right? But now imagine that you found another $20, you probably wouldn’t even want to pick it up; you’d be so bored with the whole thing. Maybe you’d pick up a five for novelty, or even a penny (note: The Devil Rays of American currency) but a 20? No way.

That’s why Jose isn’t even going to watch the game tonight. Nope, tonight Jose is going to go to a show. He will save his TV watching for when the Red Sox are playing a fresh and exciting team like the Baltimore Orioles thank you very much.

3. One of the big political stories in the last few weeks has been Barack Obama’s gaffe at a San Francisco fund raiser when he suggested that many small town Americans are “bitter.” Hilary Clinton, in an ever more desperate effort to remain in the race, has latched on to the issue as she campaigns in Pennsylvania, going so far as to hand out stickers to people attending her campaign events reading “I’m not bitter.”

Ummm… Jose hates to be the one to raise the issue, but… has she ever been to Philadelphia or any of the towns that fall within the Phillies/Sixers/Eagles/Flyers catchment area? The people of Philadelphia and environs are pretty much the bitterest people on Earth, way more bitter than oppressed Tibetans. Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania and former Mayor of Philadelphia was once photographed throwing snowballs onto the field at an Eagles game. That’s bitter.

When she forces Philadelphians to wear “I’m not bitter stickers” she is making liars out of every single one of them. It’s like forcing citizens of China to wear a sticker saying “I’m not Chinese” or members of the 2004 Yankees to wear a sticker saying “I’m not a choker.”

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

Change of Life

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

1. One of you asked, on Friday, where Jose had gone, why he had forsaken you, if you will.

It’s a good question, and as is the case with many good questions, there are a variety of reasonable answers. For instance, if one were to ask why Joe Borowski is still the Cleveland closer, the answer could be that he is Eric Wedge’s illegitimate son (note: this is not that realistic as the WWF has taught Jose that most illegitimate sons are midgets), that someone got confused after hearing his name only through the first syllable of his last name and thought they had Joba rather than Jobo, or something as simple as Eric Wedge suffering from a severe form of retardation. In the case of the good question of why Jose missed an all important April series against the hated New York Yankees, he can, likewise, offer a variety of answers. Perhaps it’s because of something you did or perhaps it is because an April series against a team that hasn’t won a championship in eight years seems unimportant.

Either of those answers would be a good answer, but neither of them would be a true answer. The true answer is that Jose is preparing for a major change of life. How big a change? Think of it as bigger than converting from catcher to first baseman, but not as big as menopause. (Note: Jose really didn’t want to bring up menopause, but as soon as he used the phrase “change of life” he kind of had to.)

Jose is leaving Boston.

Okay. Maybe it’s bigger than menopause, or even bigger than Menopause the Musical.

Jose is not leaving Boston because he wants to. Far from it. He is leaving Boston because he has to. He is doing it for you.

When Jose started this blog in May 2004, he was armed with nothing but the stunning grasp of cross-cultural minutia that only a liberal arts education combined with tens of thousands of hour of watching television ranging from the cartoon “Wheeled Warriors” to “Cop Rock” can provide. (Note: This is a lie. Like everyone else who ever lived, Jose never watched Cop Rock.) These tools served him well. They served him long. But, to stick with the tool metaphor, with repeated misuse cutting low branches off of Christmas trees, even the sharpest steak knife will grow dull.

The KEYS, and frankly the Red Sox, have grown tired and redundant. Year after year, it is the same. Jose makes quips about wrestling and comic books; the Red Sox win the World Series after a spectacular ALCS comeback. Lame. Just boring, repetitive and lame. (Note: Not lame.)

Thus, Jose has made a decision that it is time for him to get some new tools, possibly a jigsaw of allusion or a nail gun of enjambment. Jose is going back to school.

Staring this fall, Jose will be attending one of the several worthwhile universities in the country that is not in Boston and studying new and varied fields, reading texts exotic and subtle so he can more accurately compare their authors to Alex Cora.

But what does this mean for the KEYS? How will this affect you the reader? Well, there are a few ways this could play out. The one that appeals the most to Jose is the Keyser Soze option wherein Jose simply walks away and then all of a sudden starts talking in the first person, thereby undermining everything you thought you knew about him, and then gets in a car with Indians reliever Masahide Kobayashi and is never heard from again. The other possibility is that Jose will simply cut back to a reduced schedule, writing a couple of times a week, rather than at his current, grueling pace.

The truth is, Jose is not sure what will happen between now and the end of the season, or even when he will leave Boston. Perhaps he’ll stay until September, or perhaps he’ll open a small mission is rural Laos and teach the villagers that David Oritz is more powerful than their so-called gods. It could really go either way.

2. Among the stories emerging from the first 2007 World Series Champion Red Sox vs. 2000 World Series Champion Yankees series of 2008 was the strange tale of a David Ortiz jersey churned in with the concrete at the new Yankee Stadium. Apparently, a Bronx construction worker who was a Red Sox fan mixed it into the concrete in order to curse the new building. After an absurd five hours of jack hammering, the Yankees found and removed the jersey.

While the news reports have largely fixated on the mystical aspects of the story, Jose is far more interested in the architectural angle. What this story reveals is the dramatic conceptual flaws in Yankee architecture. The biggest single flaw is the decision to build the stadium out of concrete. That is just foolish. By building the structure out of hard, heavy, inflexible concrete, the Yankees guaranteed that any response to this sort of mischief would be a debacle.

Compare this to when the Red Sox built the new Fenway Park. By refraining from using concrete and instead opting to use supple, flexible abstract as the principle building material, the Red Sox ensured that they would avoid all of the problems that the Yankees are facing and would not place a burden on the taxpayers.

If some idiot Yankee fan tried to mix a Jeter shirt in with the abstract that makes up the new Fenway, you can be certain that it wouldn’t take nearly five hours to find it.

3. Jose keeps seeing advertisements for this new vaccine called Zostavax which prevents shingles. Why anyone would invest money in a drug that is specifically designed to help lisping pitchers combat base hits is beyond Jose, but he will confess that he doesn’t really understand the pharmaceutical business.

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