The Boston Massacre

Come with us back to our teenage years, will you? Then, the only visiting teams that drew any supporters to M's games were the Yankees and the Blue Jays.

Damn it was annoying, to have Mariner fans outnumbered--and we mean this literally--outnumbered--at home games. The Jays no longer draw well, now that, in the A.L. East, they are basically impotent onlookers as the powerful teams battle for supremacy. (Call them the Canada of baseball).

Now (teenage years are over, thank God), the new annoying team is Boston, ever since they became America's darling and everyone who'd ever set foot in a Store 24 decided they were "long-suffering" Red Sox fans. Shhhyeah.

With their $150 million payroll, the Red Sox are about as underdoggish as fire.

So it was with no small amount of anticipation that we and our friends got blotto at the Triangle before Monday's game, girding ourselves with the twin buttresses of companionship and alcohol as we prepared to yell juvenile and idiotic things about Boston at high volumes for nine innings.

"Hey Big Papi--When was your last injection?"

"Manny, clean your helmet, you look like a Rastafarian coal miner."

"Hey Boston fans! You're losing TO THE MARINERS!"

And lose they did. LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, with the bulk of the credit going to the M's bullpen.

We can't decide which was more improbable--Willie Bloomquist hitting a home run on Tuesday, or the Mariners sweeping the best team in baseball while the first-place Angels were getting swept by the 2nd-worst.

Whatever it was, the confluence of these two events pulled the M's three games closer in the standings, they are only five back of the apparently vincible Angels.

As it turned out, we didn't last nine innings on Monday--with the M's comfortably ahead, we left early, figuring that a Red Sox comeback would be too soul-crushing to endure. As we headed down the stairway, our friend Jason stopped, turned back to the crowd, and delivered a drunken coda to the evening.

"Hey Red Sox fans! You're just like Yankee fans, only uglier!"