"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

So, yeah, I guess I haven’t exactly been so much on top of shit in terms of the blogging but it was actually for a good cause. I fell off the radar because I literally did not have more than 3 hours a day that weren’t already consumed by the launch of XALKORI, indicated for the treatment of ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer.

The FDA approved it on Friday which means that for about another 5 days I have my life back. I’m sure DDMAC will time it so I lose it again right around when the playoffs start, not unlike what they did last year with the launch of ARICEPT 23 mg.

But I digress. The point is, I returned from the 7th circle of drug launch hell just in time to watch Fatso do work, and just in time to see the Yanks follow Cervelli’s lead in his deliberate march to insanity at the expense of the Red Sux.

Where to begin?

Alright, I’m a little rusty so I gotta ween back into this. Let’s go old school bullet style. ‘Sides, it’ll be a refreshing change of pace to write a bulleted list that doesn’t have to be supported with published studies.

• The game starts and there’s approximately zero people in the viewing world who are thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I got a feeling this is a gonna be a quick one. Boston…Yanks….what could possibly go wrong?”

Just to confirm that this sentiment is about as rational as Gus Johnson, the game begins with Granderson getting hit by a pitch (of course), but instead of taking a base, he gets EXAMINED BY THE HOME PLATE UMP FOR BRUISES. And not in a motherly kind of way. In a teacher who doubts you were really out with the flu and hence demands to see a note from the doctor kind of way. No sufficient enough bruise was procured and Grandy ends up striking out.

• Tubbo.com retaliates by drilling Ellsbury but OF COURSE no one checks to make sure his spinal cord is misaligned enough to grant his admission to first base. Biased officials….cough….biased officials. Whatever. Fatso’s f’n awesome. But wait for it, because he gets even awesomer in innings to come.

• I reallllly hate the fact Pedroia is batting clean up. He’s good, I’ll concede that. But there’s just so much I don’t like about him, and I think I don’t need to explain myself really, given my audience. And if—among this audience---there’s the contrarian, then just imagine how you’d feel if Jeter was batting clean up. Irrationally pissed. However, I’d like to point out one (of many) glaring differences between Jeter and Pedroia. As far as I know, none of Jeter’s relatives have been convicted of sodomy.

(THAT KILLS ME, btw. The fact that bringing up this story is like “taking it too far” but Arod allegedly plays poker maybe, and you’d think he was caught with child porn.) Man I missed ranting about the maddening collection of Sux Double Standards. (Don’t judge me, but I just definitely spent about 20 seconds trying to figure out how to put a T-word into that phrase, so that I could make some reference to the Sux having STDS.)

• The Yanks put up 1 early, with Round Boy doing work. Chavez drives in a run because Pedroia sucks and missed a “seeing eye grounder” as Kay excitedly put it. Cano brings in another because Cano has effectlvely turned into the unassailable fortress of awesome that’s defined by how consistently he exudes confidence.

>When I was little and playing softball, my dad used to say that fielding was easy as long as I just didn’t let the ball get past me. He said, “It doesn’t matter how hard they hit it or how good the batter is. All you have to do is stay in front of it.”

(To be clear, I can’t throw farther than 5 feet and when it comes to batting, I couldn’t hit water if I fell off a boat, but fielding…I’m ok with that.) And Cano walks onto the field like his dad told him the same thing. Because he plays like he knows how good he is.

And even more importantly, he plays like it’s easy to him.

• Chavez comes back 2 innings later to make it 3-0. Yes this game makes total sense. Chavez pulling a Kobe-esque “ok whatever y’all Ima just go ahead and win this shit MYSELF.”

• Carl Crawford who I still can’t believe betrayed me after all I’ve done for him, puts the Sux on the board with a solo bomb. Saltamacchia [sic and I don’t care] scores on Scutaro’s double, and just like that it’s the 4th inning and I feel like this game has already gone on for about 29 hours and it’s 3-2. Shockingly, however, no warnings have been issued. I didn’t know this was possible.

I thought it was like when I had a radio show in college and we had these ridiculously strict station format rules like playing 3 songs from 3 different pre-determined playlists an hour, no more than 5 songs in a row without a PSA, station ID every 15 minutes, etc. And similarly, I assumed issuing a warning was practically a station requirement within the 1st hour. I’m chalking this up to the ump who thinks he a bruise-diagnosing-doctor (and cheers to the YES booth for being merciless in making fun of him for that.)

• Shit gets real interesting real fast when Cervelli goes long for the 2nd time in his career. (That stat is important.) He runs around the bases a la Super Mario with flower-induced invincibility (I swear on everything that’s holy if I knew one iota about making youtube stuff/manipulating videos, I’d 100% be making some kind of Nintendo tribute/mix to this game’s highlights.)

He concludes his trot around the bases with a move that’s on par with—nay, trumps—the relentless Manny freeze-frame-immediately-after-going-deep moves. Our little Ital stomps down on home plate with the same fervor as I did in puddles during this past weekend’s hurricane. Except I wasn’t compounding that with an aggressively smug hand clap while squaring up to the catcher.

• Yeah he got beaned at his next at bat.

• So Super Mario gets beaned and stares down Lackey like he’s freaking Gary Sheffield or something and not Gary Coleman. Honestly, for a second I thought he was just going to take the bat, turn around, and club Saltawhatever over the head with it. As it turns out, I wasn’t too far, given Cervelli’s take on this in the post-game interview:

“At the time, I forgot English. I not a problematic guy.”

Yeah, because had he had a better command of English he could have more reasonably explained to Lackey his disappointment in getting hit by a pitch. Instead, his lack of language mastery manifested itself in an uncharacteristic shift to “problematic.” Well, for what it’s worth Cervelli, I’m 100% comfortable with your problematicness. Seriously.

• Another thing I have zero problem with is Lard’s uncharacteristic shift to playing the “I’m a 300 pound badass and will stare menacingly to underscore this point” card. You don’t see him do that a lot, and I can only assume he trotted out in this game out of anger over being made to get up for a stupid brawl.

• Still, no warning. Whatever. All that means is we’re spared the hackneyed analysis on what issuing a warning “really means” and how this “really will impact the outcome of the game.” Oh, and the whole “well that takes the bullet out of the Yankees chamber now!” commentary.

• It’s a tough call, but I think what GGBG did next was even more f’n hardcore than Super Mario’s thwomping on the koopa troopers right in front of Salty. GGBG gets up, Lackey tries his pathetic hardest to pitch inside and hit him, but all he does is get him to a 3-0 count (all the while, Super Mario’s hustling to 2nd). And then, THEN, in the ultimate “you wanna play it like that? I’ll play it like that, I’ll play it like Lionel Richie, baby, all night long” move, GGBG lays down a perfect bunt on 3-0.

• I think Jed Lowrie, who never seems to be all quite there to begin with, could not have been more confused at 3B when he sees #11 zipping over to first (safe) while Super Mario’s moving to 3rd (safe), all after Lackey thrice attempted to brush our boy off. 3-0 bunt. Yeah, that’s about as awesome as it comes. I’m really not even kidding.

• I think a lot of what the Yanks were doing was just confusing the Sux a lot, actually. Like when Grandy played a ball off the Green Monster, when everyone KNOWS the only people who know how to do that are Red Sux and that’s why Fenway is such a home field advantage, etc etc, knuckleball, Adrian Gonzalez, etc etc. Vomit. Vom dot com.

• Jeter makes it 5-2 with a double-play ground out. That’s the Jeter way of looking at things. The I-know-he-hit-3000-but-I’m-sorry-I-just-cant-continue-the-lionizing-in-good-conscience group of us are looking the other side of the coin which is that he grounded out no less than 5 times.

• Mo comes in to save the game, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous when I saw who he’d be pitching to the 9th. Ortiz, Lowrie, Crawford. In a 3-run game. Blech. But Mo does work. All of our pitchers did, actually. It was so inspiring to see. Like they all knew how important this was and none of ‘em wanted to let anyone else down.

• Fatso let up 2 runs and whiffed 10 and threw 128 pitches. Boone Logan looked very D-Rob up there, (so much so that he was a Player of the Game—I think Boone’s mom must know someone in the clubhouse because I sort of get that nepotism vibe from him), and Mo came through for us too, earning his 35th save of the season.

• It was a little terrifying though for a minute. Ortiz doubles. Fantastic. Lowrie strikes out and was so articulate in his annunciation of the slew of curses, that I’m surprised it didn’t show up on my closed captioning. [“That was fucking bullshit. Not even fucking close."]

• Crawford quells our fears by popping out to short, and this was hilarious because the second the ball leaves the bat, Mo throws his arm up as if to say “yeah that’s you, someone back there get it.” Or as my sister so perfectly compared it to: “It’s like when the phone rings at home and Dad is lying on the couch watching war movies and he just shoots his arm up in the air and yells “PHONE!” Yep, it was exactly, exactly like that.

• So the last of the terror moments comes when Saltafuckthis SWINGS INTO A PITCH AND HITS HIS HAND AND GETS TO TAKE A BASE, making it 2 on, 2 out, and the tying run at the plate. Girardi has a shit fit and gets thrown out, prompting my sister to muse that there really should be some kind of manager brainstorming meeting about varying the “I’m-pissed-off-and-i-want-the-world-to-know-it-but-without-touching-the-ump-because-that’s-wrong” moves that managers make when they’re fighting calls.

• There’s throwing down the hat in disgust, the ticking off the fingers, the flapping arms, the frantic circle-drawing with arms, the who-can-tilt-their-head-to-the-side more contest, etc. All are overused. There’s gotta be a new move somewhere between the hat throwdown and the base-stealing.