With the entire city of Cleveland walking around with a look of beaten disbelief akin to the bikers from ‘A Bronx Tale’ after Chazz Palmintari’s thugs pounded them at gun point, I have to make the admission that I did this to you. I did this to you and I knew better.I knew better than to start searching StubHub for World Series tickets. I knew better than to send my one friend who is a fan of the Red Sox a cocky text message after we went up 3-1. I knew better than to start writing a column for this Web site on Friday afternoon called ‘Why the Indians Deserve this World Series.’ I knew better, I knew better, I knew better!
But I failed you and the Indians. After so many disappointments, I somehow still had the hubris to think that this team would prevail. That was my mistake and I will take the scorn from my fellow Indians fans. Just as Fox helped J.D. Drew use his waffle ball bat to hit a grand slam by constantly showing that he had recorded zero RBIs in the postseason, I prompted this embarrassing failure with my own shortcomings as a loyal fan. I’m sorry.
With that in mind, when I sat down at my computer after the game last night, I started to type out some notes for this morning’s column. Here are those notes.
- C.C. made me cry.
- If Sizemore is going to be called one of the most underrated players every time he appears on national television, shouldn’t he play like someone who isn’t overrated?
- How could it be that in the course of one year Travis Hafner went from a guy knocking on the door to my Mental Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame to a complete assbag do deserves a flaming Cox Cable box on his front lawn?
- If I had a million dollars, I would spend it all to punch out Josh Beckett and then shave his face
- Are you F*cking kidding me? 3 to F*cking 1!
- Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but Kenny was safe at second. And I would have sent him home from third. Maybe it would have given us two more runs and changed momentum. Maybe we still would have embarrassed our sad city on national television.
As you can see, there is a running theme with these points. They are all negative, as if pulled from a sports tragedy. In order to keep myself together this morning, and perhaps make up some ground with those fans who have realized this is all my fault, I have penned down a few more positive thoughts that I think we can all enjoy to help pull us out of our funk. So wipe your eyes with your It’s Tribe Time Now! hanky and take some comfort in these random thoughts. They are put together randomly as my pain has cost me the art of transitions for this morning. If this doesn’t work, remember that we still beat the Yankees and it basically got Joe Torre fired.
A Little bit of Solace on a Sad Monday Morning
- We will no longer have to see Dane Cook, Dane Cook’s awful haircut or his terrible veiny neck when he let’s us know there is only one October – something most of us have known since we learned the 12 months of the year in first grade. Hey, Dane, there is also only one November. And December. I’m getting Double C to check into how many Januarys there are.
- For those of us that don’t commit a great deal of time to television, we may be lucky enough to stop seeing that terrible Taco Bell commercial with the older brother telling his younger brother the rules to being a man. This commercial featured everything that I hated about advertising: A giant corporation trying to seem edgy and hip; a douchebag main character who drastically overestimated his own acting ability; a lap dog; and poor use of irony – oh, the guy has a lap dog and a dragon tattooed girlfriend after advising his little brother against it? What a plot twist. Did M. Night Shamalamalamalalonnon (purposely misspelled because I don’t respect him) direct this?
- We don’t have to listen to Tim McCarver tell us that a breaking ball is usually the pitcher’s slower pitch or that baserunners planning to steal will take a bigger lead. Moreover, we won’t have to listen to McCarver and Joe Buck run the same story lines into the ground over and over again. Did you know that the Red Sox had come back from a 3-1 deficit before? Yeah, apparently it was recently. Did you know that the crazy, violent head motion from BoSox reliever Hideki Okijama is used on every pitch? Wow. These stories are hot off the presses.
- Those of us refusing to tune in for the World Series or watch SportsCenter for the next week or so won’t have to hear the phrase Red Sox nation again until next season. Here’s a bit of information for national media members out there: sports teams’ fan bases do not constitute a nation. There is no governing body, they cannot make decrees and they effectively have no leadership powers. There are a lot of things to call the large group of Americans who consider themselves Red Sox fans – douches, nuisances, poor academic performers, self-important assholes who are undeservedly rewarded with a highly paid and successful baseball club – but a nation is not one of them.
-MoneyMike will spend the next week crying on the inside. If you want to send him some internal tissues, contact him at cottrill.m@gmail.com
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There is only one MoneyMike.
I feel the venom and I love, adore, and appreciate it.
In all seriousness, I’ve been there before, on the opposite end of this spectrum. I remember walking around until around Christmas time saying “Aaron F***ing Boone” under my breath in socially inappropriate situations.
I remember Pedro staying in after he reached the 100 pitch count (which his ERA is like 1000.79 after the 100 mark).
You may hate me, but I’ve been there.
But, since a lot of you were talking a lot of shit when we were down 3-1, I’ll pose the same question to this group that I posed to Crowell on his facebook wall.
Who was the ALCS MVP? I’ll go multiple choice for you:
A) Josh Beckett
B) C.C. Sabathia
C) Cleveland Bullpen
D) J.D. Drew
E) All of the above
That sucks guys. The one thing we can all hope, to make this feel better, is Tom Brady breaks his fucking ankles after Bellichick leaves him in shotgun, up 42-7 against the worst team in the NFL. If that happens, we can all smile from now until next baseball season.
*fingers crossed*
AHB - it’s a toss up between Beckett and C.C. for Boston’s ALCS MVP - which is what I would have said about the Cy Young Award before the playoffs started…
I was just going to bounce this e-mail back to you to remind you of happier times, when you were all cocky and gloating. But then I figured it would be more fun this way, if only to further prove that the Indians (now storied) collapse, was all your fault.
An e-mail from MoneyMike to me sent 10/11/07:
Josh Beckett is not attractive.
Big Papi is overrated and unintelligent.
Manny is at best a home run machine without a brain, at worst a distraction who gets lucky in spots.
Terry is a girl’s name.
Do you guys still have that centerfielder with all the hair and the beard?
Nobody can spell your best rookie’s last name.
Coco Crisp is a cereal. And it gets really soggy before you can eat it all.
W.W.J.D.S.S.M - Why would J.D. Drew strikeout so much?
Dice K isn’t even an adequate replacement for Andrew Dice Clay.
Curt Schilling is a faker and a blowhard.
My fastball: 81 miles per hour in high school. Tim Wakefield’s fastball: 80
miles per hour at, what, 46 years old?
Language lesson: Gagne is French for he blew the f*ckin’ game.
Buckner! Legs!
…I’m on Southwest.com searching for plane tickets to Arizona for games 3-5 of the World Series - you know, since I’ll already have tickets to the four games at the Jake.
Ouch… I thought that was a private e-mail…
That does make me look quite the fool. I can’t believe I ever thought Arizona would be the site for games 3-5 of the World Series. Shows what I know.
And, come on, that Gagne comment was funny. I did take three years of French in college, that’s what Gagne means!
MoneyMike I thought you were better then that. That is something a Boston fan would do.
Seriously what were you thinking… an entire taunting email and not one Youkilis joke. Unacceptable!
Well, Trouble embellishes the story a little bit. This e-mail was not sent in cockiness after a 3-1 lead. It was the follow-up to a pre-ALCS e-mail from her where she said we were enemies and I probably wouldn’t be able to handle her wrath. To prove that I could, I gave her a full dose of how I felt about Boston. If you look closely, all of those things are still true - regardless of our choke job.
I’m a red sox fan and i too hate the “red sox nation” aspect of being a fan. its quite annoying knowing that pathetic bandwagon jumpers are getting to the games when hard working, true diehard fans are stuck home watching these frauds at the game. i went to grad school down the street from fenway park and the metamorphosis of these females and males who dont know a thing about baseball if it was gift wrapped to “true fans” was disgusting. i can understand why a lot of other mlb team fan bases hate the sox. oh well, at least the sox won the world series 2 times in my lifetime.