Sports Redux: Jim Rice Will Belong To The Ages Now

It's been a while since Red Sox fans invaded Cooperstown (you are going to invade Cooperstown, right?). Orioles fans and Cubs fans and Cardinals fans and the Padres fan have gone to honor their own (Ripken/Sandberg/Smith/Gwynn, respectively) in recent years, but it's been a while since a lifelong Red Sox player was immortalized.

So congratulations (48 hours early) to Jim Rice, who waited and waited as season after season went by before he finally got that phone call in his last year on the ballot. You can chalk it up to perseverance, or to seeing his candidacy in the light of the steroid era that came after him, but as of Sunday, you won't be able to call him anything but "Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice". You can get retrospectives on his HOF career from The Globe, from NESN, or from ESPN, especially if you also want to remember that magical 20-minute stretch where Rickey Henderson, also Cooperstown-bound, played for the Sox.

Anything to divert our attention away from the product the Sox have put on the field in the past week, right?

Elsewhere in baseball, the Yankees ran off their 154th straight win, growing their lead to 2 1/2 in the AL East. And Mark Buehrle of the White Sox threw the first perfect game in the bigs in over five years, with a home run bid by our old friend Gabe Kapler pulled back over the wall by ChiSox outfielder DeWayne Wise to keep the miracle safe.

Elsewhere in sports, Chad Finn of the Globe looks at the rough week ESPN has had, with its star sideline reporter Erin Andrews in the news for all the wrong reasons, and the controversy over the network's burial of bad news about Ben Roethlisberger. In other news, the dunk video LeBron James didn't want you to see is out. Not that exciting, actually.

Image by Paul Keleher, from photos tagged "bostonist" on Flickr.