Someday, when Johan Santana and Jacoby Ellsbury are on the same Hall of Fame ballot, we're going to think back to the time when one was almost traded for the other. And then we're going to remember nights like last night, and no matter how many wins, K's and Cy Youngs Santana racks up over his career, we're going to thank Theo Epstein for keeping Ellsbury in Boston.

Jacoby ruled the day last night in the 7-6 win. He hit two home runs, and scored the game-winning run on a bunt single and a 0.00004 second sprint from first to home on a Pedroia double. This capped yet another Sox comeback, as they fell behind the [Your City Name Here, $200] Angels 5-1, with spot starter David Pauley (Beckett's got a stiff neck) looking good for a while, then not so good for a while. The Sox punched out a couple of runs in the 4th and 5th innings, then tied it at 5 on a Youkilis homer.

Ellsbury and Casey Kotchman traded solo shots to make it 6-6, then with one out in the eighth, Jacoby laid a perfect bunt down the third-base line to get aboard. Angel reliever Scott Shields, rattled by Ellsbury's big leads, served up a pitch for Pedroia to rip down the left-field line for the game-winning RBI. Papelbon incinerated Gary Matthews and Vlad Guerrero, then got Garret Anderson on a popup to end it.

One Red Sox note: scanning the team's batting averages, we see that everyone who has played in at least 10 games so far this season is hitting over .300, except Varitek (.262) and Papi (he'll come around). Hit like that, and it almost doesn't matter who's pitching. But, still, come back soon, Josh. Also interesting: Dustin Pedroia was prepared to come in as an emergency backup catcher, if something happened to Cash while Varitek was home with the sniffles. Luckily, so far, so good.

He'll probably get shafted when the MVP vote is announced (it's all politics, man. Politics). But even though the real prize in Kevin Garnett's mind is weeks away, he does feel pretty good about the hardware he picked up yesterday as the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year. KG, naturally and correctly, deflected a lot of the praise onto his teammates and coaches for stressing defense all year. The C's will try to stuff Atlanta again tonight in Game Two.

Atlanta's Mike Bibby is trying to get things going in the series. Not on the court, where he was a crappy 2-for-10 in Game One, but running his gums, saying that Boston fans are bandwagoners, and "I didn’t see three-fourths of [the fans]" in years past. While we do consider frontrunning unforgivable, and have noticed a lot of new faces in the crowd this year, Bibby's still a jerk. Though if he's doing this to focus the booing on him and take some of the pressure off his teammates, it's kind of a savvy veteran move, and we tip our Celtics hat (bought in 1998) to him. And we assume that when the series goes to Atlanta for the last two games, only the 547 people who regularly attended Hawks games in the past will be there.

In the NHL, Washington and Calgary were sent home from the playoffs by Philly and San Jose, respectively.

Rare photo of Ellsbury not moving, and Sean Casey, from Flickr photos tagged "bostonist", courtesy of Paul Keleher.