Having messed up my sleep this weekend due to watch The Guns of Navarone on Friday until 3 am (I was in need of watching something where the right team won after the Sox choked after being up 2-7), I spent a rich and rewarding day napping and watching sports with half an eye.
In a nutshell: Syracuse was really bad in the game that started at noon and the Sox were really good in the one that started at four. And over steak and kidney pie (punchline: “No, I didley!?!”) out visiting, it became clear that the young guys and the bench on the Sox are maybe a bit better than the young guys on the Yanks. Though no pup anymore, Hinske did a good number on Posada:
“[Third base coach] DeMarlo Hale said I’m going on contact,” Hinske said. “I’m trying to score a run. I realize I’m going to be out. The only play is to try to run [Posada] over. I hit him pretty good. I think it pumped up the team a little bit.” Hinske, who gained more than 1,000 yards as a running back at Menasha his junior year, once dreamed of playing football for the University of Wisconsin. But when his Badgers didn’t recruit him, he went to the University of Arkansas on a baseball scholarship. Years later, the football mentality has never left. “I put my shoulder down – I hadn’t done that, I think, since the minor leagues,” he said. “It felt great. I had fun playing high school football. I asked Posada my next at-bat if he was OK and he said he was fine.”
To be fair, he said fine like a man who was trampled by an ox on national TV says he’s fine – though Posada did hold onto that ball.
And to be entirely fair in relation to the headline above, I listened to the Syracuse game on 100.7 FM as much as I watched it on the five hundred cable TV channel universe, that wonder that provides what the internet has given only promises about for a decade. It was not prettier audio-unvisually. Getting the first field goal was a balm to their emotionally fragile offense. A great hit on a receiver just about to take the corner was apparently a surprise in the class of the child who first gets to the pool’s edge without assistance. Apparently a win against Buffalo is now even in doubt.