Sports Redux: Nothing Good Happens After Midnight

This ain't the Orioles any more, brother.

The toughest week of the Red Sox' 2009 schedule began last night, and Game One ended with a thud, as two home runs by Evan Longoria led to a 4-2, 13-inning, five-hour Tampa Bay win over a dismayed Boston team.

The Sox staked Jon Lester to a 2-0 lead on solo homers by Youk in the second and Pedroia in the sixth. The Rays scratched out a run in the seventh, then Red Sox killer Longoria homered off Daniel Bard (the first HR the youngster ever surrendered in the bigs) in the eighth to tie it. Both teams had chances; the Sox bullpen created and escaped three jams in the late innings, while Tampa Bay squirmed out of a bases-loaded situation in the tenth. So that delayed things until Longoria came up again in the 13th, deposited a Takashi Saito pitch deep into the left field stands for the walk-off win.

Longoria has been killing us all year; at this pace, he'd finish with 103 home runs and 353 RBIs for the season if he got to play the Red Sox 162 times. Both of those would be records. "We seem to bring out a lot in him," said a grim Terry Francona afterwards. A happy Longoria analyzed his game-winner: "I've faced Saito before so I kind of knew what he was featuring. He left the ball up in the zone." And then it went flying.

Brad Penny goes tonight to try to split the short series before the Sox head to New York. They're assured of arriving in New York in second place, since the loss and the Yankees' win in Toronto dropped our boys 1 1/2 back in the East, and now just 4 ahead of the Rays for the wild card. (Texas is 3 back in the WC race, but come on.) The weirdest news in baseball came after the Dodgers' 17-4 rout of Milwaukee, when the Brewers' Prince Fielder, incensed over being hit by a pitch, tried to muscle his way into LA's locker room to exchange views with the pitcher who hit him. Any excuse to relink to our favorite Onion sports story of all time.

The NBA released its schedule yesterday, so Celtics fans suffering from championshiprunnus interruptus can start figuring out what we're....um, they're....most looking forward to. The C's open the season at LeBron/Shaq/Cleveland on October 27th, then have their home opener the next night against Charlotte. They get their first rematch with those pesky Bulls on 10/30, their first shot at the season-spoiling Magic on 11/20, and their first shot at the Lakers on 1/31. There's also a Christmas Day game in Orlando, and Rasheed Wallace goes back to Detroit for the first time on January 20th. Full sched here.