World Series Game 3: For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)

Final Score: Boston Red Sox 10, Colorado Rockies 5

Stand up and be counted /For what you are about to receive /We are the dealers /We'll give you everything you need.

Here we are once again. On the precipice of greatness, on the cusp of ultimate victory, on the forefront of… you know… GOOD THINGS. Anyway, the Red Sox are close to achieving the same goal they reached in 2004. They are one victory away from being champions of the baseball world!

The strange thing is that I’m just not feeling the same excitement I found in 2004. Maybe you can’t go back to the tip top of mount awesome once you’ve reached that summit. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Rockies aren’t really putting up much of a fight. They try to look all tough (and even gave me a scare in this one), but the mountain men are rolling over even quicker than the red birds did 3 years ago (which is actually impossible, cause we swept them too).

Game 3 had all the makings of a blowout in just the 3^rd inning when the Sox bats sent Josh Fogg running like a scared woodland deer. Ellsbury rocking doubles (he had 4 freaking hits!!), Pedroia spraying singles and Lowell driving them all in. When Dice-K has 2 RBI along with a fantastic pitching performance… let’s just say Sox victory was a foregone conclusion.

Or so I thought…

With a 6 run lead I was so busy making fun of Rockies players (we had a great Yorvit Torrealba as the Swedish Chef joke going) that I forgot to focus on the near bullpen collapse. After Dice-K was yanked in the 5^th, Lopez and Timlin did a great job not doing much of anything, so in saunters Okajima to cool off the suddenly hot Rockies. Thank God cause Holliday was up and he can really… crush… oh… wow… um… yikes… that… oh wow… that’s not coming back.

Ok, so they made it close for a few innings and managed to suck the life out of the room at the same time. Not fun at all. We had to routinely check pulses and buy more beer. Was the earlier gloating out of hand? Was the collective Sox Nation hubris suddenly catching up with us? Yeah… not so much.

We're just a battery for hire with a guitar fire /Ready and aimed at you /Pick up your balls and load up your cannon /For a twenty-one gun salute.

After limiting the damage from the Fogg disaster, the Rockies bullpen finally came apart in the 8^th and 9^th. The last two insurance runs completed a metaphor I was working on earlier in the game.

“See this was like a great Chinese food dinner. It was awesomely delicious staring off (the 6 run lead) but it left you feeling nauseous and sick (suddenly 6-5) and everything feels better once you take a big dump (4 insurance runs).”

Too visual? Sorry.

So in the end, Papelbon locked it down, the Sox are up 3-0 and we are all about to return to the land of milk and honey. Just thinking about that parade is giving me the chills that this series is lacking. We are about to rock… and it’s gonna be great.

For those about to rock, we salute you
For THOSE about to rock, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee salute YOU!