Blue Jays 1, Red Sox 0 (F/11): You Love Brett Lawrie. You Love Him.

Hey awesome it's Chris Woodward over there on the left!

It's only right that Geddy Lee was in his customary seat behind home plate on a day when Brett Lawrie sent everyone home happy with a walk-off home run in the eleventh, because he is awesome and so was this. And it is only fitting that Geddy Lee was not at all in his customary seat behind home plate, but in fact nowhere to be seen when that mighty wallop was indeed walloped, because this game took forever: the Red Sox insistence on dragging out every last god damned pitch has gotten to the point that Geddy can't take it anymore. That's how dire this situation has become: the way the Red Sox play baseball is too long and drawn-out for a guy who plays in Rush. 


It was a relief, of a kind, when Josh Beckett left the game early with an apparent leg strain or something. Sure there was going to be that massive delay that happens when a pitcher comes in from the bullpen completely cold to replace an injured starter and is given as long as he needs to warm up, but at least then things would start humming along after that, right? Well, they did, sort of, until Papelbon. Until Papelbon. For a minute there, and by a minute I actually mean about half an inning, it seemed like Blue Jays radio ace Alan Ashby was about to join Geddy, wherever he was. Ashby was so sick of Papelbon's shenanigans, you have no idea. Utterly disgusted, and completely unwilling to hide it in any way. Misses outside and I can't effing believe we're going to have to wait another eighty seconds before he throws again. (That is not a direct quotation or in fact a quotation of any kind.) The inning was only rescued for me by my wife's observation, "Papelbon jeans; boots with the fur." 


Anyway, Jerry Howarth noted about an inning before it happened that, with everything else that has gone Brett Lawrie's way in his brief time with the club, it's almost surprising that he had yet to get a walk-off hit of some kind. And then there we were, bottom of the eleventh, watching the ball sail out to centre, just below where there once was a restaurant called Windows but now there are only windows, an ideal finish to a nail-biter that saw five innings of shutout relief after the young arm of Henderson Alvarez went a scoreless six. If only Geddy had stuck it out . . . 


KS