 Great move on paper. Not only did Oogie settle down the bullpen, he gave us a closer named Oogie. Can you put a price on that kind of fun? I think not. On the flip side... 39. "You told me to make you dinner!"v 40. "Hey, bah fangul, huh?
41. "Ah, bah fangul you!"
To Urbina... who nearly started a brawl on Monday night after Wakefield and Nixon asked him to turn his boom box down on the airplane to Tampa Bay -- maybe my favorite "Dopey Clubhouse Incident" of the season. Did any team in the history of baseball have worse chemistry than the Red Sox this season? I keep waiting for them to sign Shannen Doherty and Janeane Pettibone for the final week. (Speaking of the Bah Fangul scene, isn't it disorienting to see Adrian Balboa get slapped around like that? I keep waiting for her to scream at Carlo, "You can't win!" or "Hit me all you want, but it's not gonna bring Apollo back!") 42. "Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times' sake?"
43. "Can't do it, Sally."
To Bichette, O'Leary, Lansing, Arrojo, Nomo, Rod Beck and David Cone... That's about $30 million-$35 million worth of veterans coming off next year's payroll. Now if we can only find the right person to spend it. Just for the record, I'll miss Coney (the classy veteran who mistakenly thought he was joining a playoff contender, never realizing that this was "General Hospital" with bats and gloves) and Beck (the perennially overworked reliever who allowed an impossible 15 homers in 80.2 innings before his arm finally fell off last week -- he's having Tommy John surgery this week). Two guys that I didn't mind rooting for... they were few and far between on this motley team. (And if you think we've reached the section in this feature where I offer advice to the next GM and throw out names of free agents like Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon... well, you have another thing coming. Seems inane to discuss the 2002 Sox when the franchise hasn't even been sold yet, when we don't know if Pedro and Nomar will be healthy and we don't know about next year's budget. I don't even feel like thinking about it yet. You'll just have to wait.) 44. "Whaddya think, this is like the army, where you shoot them a mile away? You gotta get up close like this... BADDA-BING... you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy league suit!"
One of my favorite quotes goes to one of my favorite moments of the season... Pedro's eight-inning, four-hit, 13-strikeout shutout of the Yanks at Fenway. Those are the Fenway nights I miss most -- Pedro with his fastball crackling, the crowd behind him, a no-hitter or a 15-strikeout game waiting to happen. And we savored every inning even while it was happening, maybe because we learned from the all-too-brief Bird/Orr Eras that greatness in sports is truly ephemeral. We'll be back on the "Sports Reporters," after this. (Unfortunately, that was Pedro's final A-One performance before he injured his shoulder one week later, ending his unforgettable 26-month run as the "Dominican Larry Bird" -- 71 starts, 511.1 innings, 708 strikeouts, 341 hits, 87 walks, 27 hit batsmen, 104 earned runs, a 48-11 record and a 1.83 ERA. I can't even talk about this without getting upset. Let's just move on.) 45. "Now you listen to me, you smooth talking son-of-a-bitch! Let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is. Johnny Fontaine will never get that movie! I don't care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork!"
46. "I'm German-Irish."
47. "Well, lemme tell you something, my Kraut-Mick friend. I'm gonna make so much trouble for you that you won't know what hit you."
The goofiest exchange of the movie goes to the goofiest moment of the Sox season... Everett ripping into Jimy Williams during a clubhouse meeting in Oakland (the beginning of the end of the Jimy Era). That nearly replaced Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla playing cards in the Mets clubhouse during a '99 playoff game as the "All-Time Clubhouse Moment You Wish Had Been Captured On a Surveillance Camera."(Note: ESPN needs to create a reality-TV sports show and throw Everett in the same house for six weeks with Bryan Cox, Isaiah Rider, Derrick Coleman, Bill Romanowski, Arvydas Sabonis' wife and Martina Hingis, to be held at Cedric Ceballos' summer house on Lake Havasu. We could even get Rickey and Bobby Bo in there for a guest appearance to re-enact that card game. I'm telling you, I should be running a network...) 48. "I forego the vengeance of my son. But I have selfish reasons. My youngest son was forced to leave this country because of this Solazzo business. I have to make arrangements to bring him back safely and clear him will not forgive."
My favorite monologue in the movie goes to my favorite game of the season... Nomar's improbable "2-for-4 with a dinger" comeback at Fenway in late-July. Positively Brando-esque. 49. "They want to have a meeting with me, right? We'll set up a meeting. It will be me, McCluskey and Solazzo. Let's set the meeting. Get our informants to find out where it's gonna be held. Now we'll insist it's a public place -- a bar, a restaurant, some place where there's people so I'll feel safe. They're gonna search me when they first meet me, right? So I can't have a weapon on me. But if Clemenza can figure a way to have a weapon planted there for me... then I'll kill 'em both."
Michael Corleone's breakout moment goes to Trot Nixon... who had a breakout moment of sorts as the de facto leader of the Red Sox down the stretch (he was the only guy willing to express his dismay/disgust with some of the malingerers and troublemakers, through the press, on the record). A Nixon-Everett brawl in the locker room would have had Luke-Darth repurcussions in Red Sox Nation.... I'm still rooting for it, frankly.. I'll explain... Jimy made so many bizarre/ludicrous/inexplicable moves and turned himself into such a unique "Peter Sellers in 'Being There' "-type character that he deflected everyone's collective focus away from the matters at hand -- that the 2001 Red Sox were an aging, limited, dysfunctional team that couldn't run, couldn't play defense, couldn't get along and couldn't function without its three best players (Nomar, Pedro and Varitek). Was this Jimy's intention? Of course not. By all accounts, he pulled the same routine in Toronto back in the late-'80s. But the "Rain Man" act worked for this particular team -- you can't have a rational person managing a bunch of lunatics. And we found that out the hard way. Anyway, it wasn't Jimy's fault.... I didn't know until this day that it was Duquette all along. Bonus quote: "How did things ever get so far? I dunno. It's so unfortunate, so unnecessary..."
Translation... there's always next year. Bill Simmons writes three columns a week for Page 2.
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