Plain and simple, what a game, as once again, the Red Sox fall short of winning their first World Series since 1918. To make matters worse, the team that beat them is the team that took the Great Bambino from them for cash that started the silly curse way back when.

I stayed up and watched this one, and despite hoping the Red Sox would win it, I wasn’t dissappointed. The Yankees had a ton of heroes. Jason Giambi, who was dropped to 7th in the lineup, kept them close with two solo shots. Jorge Posada came up with a big two run double to tie things up. Mariano Rivera came in and shut the door and turned the lock, pitching three shutout innings. And then finally, in his first at bat of the game in the 11th inning, Aaron Boone, with brother Bret Boone watching in the announcer’s booth, simply crushed a Tim Wakefield knuckleball to win the game.

I was terribly dissappointed in the announcing. 17 years to the day, Roger Clemens won game 7 of the ALCS for the Red Sox, and against the Angels, to put them into the World Series against the Mets. Roger Clemens is arguably the greatest pitcher of all time. He’s definitely one of the top 10, if not the one of the top five, greatest pitchers of all time.

And in what could have been the last game of his career, the announcer (I’m not sure if it was Buck or McCarver) doesn’t bring up all the Cy Youngs. He doesn’t bring up the 300 wins and 4,000 strikeouts. He brings up the fact that Clemens manager accused Roger of pulling himself out of a pivotal game 6 of the 1986 World Series because he had a paper cut. Clemens denies the story, but, even if true, this isn’t how you send off one of the all time greats.

I also didn’t like how they questioned Grady Little’s decision to keep Pedro Martinez in the game, and this is something they kept coming back to. “Why didn’t they put in Embree?” Simply put, Pedro is one of the best pitchers in the game today. They went out to see if he was okay, Pedro gave him the nod, and he kept them in there. He was still hitting the mid-90s when he wanted too, and his pitches were still moving well.

I was pleased when, in the 8th inning, they didn’t jump all over a fan who interfered with a Matsui double down the right field line. Had it not been interfered with, and if it didn’t bounce into the stands (it didn’t look like it would to me), Bernie Williams would have scored easily. Instead he was stopped at third base. Fortunately it didn’t matter, because Posada got the double in the next at bat. But, the Fox announcers didn’t even acknowledge that it happened, much less point it out 15 times like they did for the Cubs game.

The World Series starts on Saturday. At first I thought I’d have little interest in a Marlins/Yankees World Series, but with the dramatics of last night, I’m definitely going to check it out, and predict the Yankees in 7. Not only that, but after next weekend, this will be the last baseball until March. Sigh.

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