Time to bring in the big guns. We need what's left of the 2004 Red Sox to make a conference call from the Bronx. We need Terry Francona talking to Claude Julien, David Ortiz talking to Zdeno Chara, Curt Schilling talking to Tim Thomas. Call Dave Roberts and Kevin Millar and get them involved, too. Maybe even Curtis Leskanic is available. Because the '04 Sox are about the only team who knows what the Bruins......

Yesterday was a bad day for Boston teams to play in cities associated with French exlorers. First, we'll blame Samuel Champlain, who established a fur-trading post on an island in the St. Lawrence River in 1611. That post eventually grew into the city of Montreal, whose major industry changed over the years from fur-trading to Bruin-beating. It was, truth be told, the best Bruins-Canadiens game of the season; the B's even escaped with a point......

You'll have to forgive the Celtics if they felt like they arrived in Portland having lurched their way up the Oregon Trail. Three losses in a row doesn't quite compare to running out of buffalo meat and spilling a wagon into the Big Blue River, but combine that with the debacle in Phoenix, and you can understand why some of the team felt like they died of cholera. Things reached the lowest of the low......

--Terry Francona will stay with the Red Sox through 2011. [Boston Globe Extra Bases] --The New York Times glad-games the Greenway, asking if it was worth the trouble given the issues of the Big Dig. [New York Times] --A student at Bentley College is being treated for bacterial meningitis. Last year, a Bentley freshman died from bacterial meningitis. [WCVB] --If you feel the need for speed, squelch it if you are passing through Marshfield,......

With the best year EVER in Boston sports coming to a close, it's time to do a little reviewing. We've come up with a series of lists from the highs to the really highs to the lows, and we'll be sharing them for the next few days. Here's a list of Boston sports' 10 Biggest Disappointments of 2007: 10. Coaches' wardrobes. Our hopes for a delayed winter were shattered, which meant two things, (1) snow,......

Major League Baseball has decreed that managers will be fined if they wear pullovers over their uniform tops. The rule seems to be pointed squarely at Terry Francona, who loves his pullover. Deadspin beat us to it when they joked, "You're next, Belichick!" Like hell. The NFL will have to pry that hoodie out of Belichick's cold, dead hands before he'll let it go. What's the big deal? Baseball players are not exactly beauties.......

We weren't surprised to see Manny Ramirez selling a car on eBay, but the news that someone was selling Red Sox manager Terry Francona's chewed gum on eBay thoroughly disgusted us. The fact that people were bidding on it disgusted us even more. And how are you going to know it's Terry Francona's gum, anyway? That's like selling Britney Spears' Dorito Dust. The seller told the Inside Track that she got it from the dugout......

Well, the Red Sox proved that they can win even when Colorado finds its offense. So it's 3-0, and teams coming back from 3-0 is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. (We're engaging in a little post-2004 thinking, but don't think we're not engaging in all the superstitions, wearing the same cap, drinking the same coffee, wearing the same underwear, etc., in the meantime). The Sox came out blazing, slapping Rockies starter Josh Fogg around for six in......

If what they say is true, and Curt Schilling truly pitched his last game as a member of the Boston Red Sox last night... Let there be no mistake. The dividing line between the Sox' Era of Perpetual Failure and the current Golden Years can easily be geotagged; it's somewhere between Theo Epstein's Thanksgiving dinner in Arizona and the first time Curt posted on the SOSH message board. Somewhere in that stretch, the Red Sox......

The Red Sox have been linked time and time again to reality television this season. There was "Sox Appeal," of course, but there were also calls for the jigging Jonathan Papelbon to Riverdance his way onto "Dancing With the Stars" and the segue FOX used last week to link the Boston bullpen band (the Black Pearl) to what looks like a God-awful new series, "The Next Great American Band." Sox bloggers, however, just might be......

Game Seven was a perfect little microcosm for the 2007 Red Sox, wasn't it? It left you laughing, and crying, and reaching for the Mylanta, and reaching for the whiskey, and jubilant, and terrified, and when it was all over, you looked back and wondered how you could have possibly ever doubted the final results. The story coming into this was whether Daisuke Matsuzaka would be able to reach deep inside himself and find whatever......

We sure hope Josh Beckett found time during yesterday's off-day to watch High Noon. If you haven't seen it, the plot is that Sheriff Gary Cooper has one day left until retirement, and a pack of mean outlaws are coming to town to wreak havoc. He tries to round up a posse to meet them, but everyone in town has a dentist appointment, or their hair is drying, or they don't roll on Shabbos, or......

As Northeast-centric as we are, we kind of assumed that the other LDS ended the way it did because the Yankees had porous starting pitching, a weak bullpen, an aging core, and a superstar still yet to prove himself in October ("Yankees suck", in the parlance of our times). But maybe Cleveland really is that good. Their bullpen has matched or bettered our bullpen (and that's not even counting Gagne), their hitters are getting timely......

Maybe someday, when all this is over, we'll sit down with (or maybe without) Terry Francona and we'll all have a good laugh out of all of this. Because when it became obvious that Curt Schilling didn't have it (and he was OK, but clearly didn't have his A game, or even the B+ game he's been getting by with), maybe a different manager would have gone to Jon Lester, or Julian Tavarez (whoops! he's......

Congratulations, Sox fans! You made it through approximately three minutes of the Red Sox Rally Monday festivities at City Hall Plaza before the first chants of "Yankees Suck" filled the air. New record! Well done! A few thousand fans descended upon the plaza early Monday afternoon to cheer on their hometown baseball team (and decry the arch rivals) for the Boston version of the shindigs going on across the country. Rally Monday was a tradition......

Forget for a moment the questions still lingering around the Red Sox. We know about those. Let's take a brief look at the angst-ridden article in today's LA Times about the myriad questions swirling around our first-round opponents, the AnaheimOrWhatever Angels. They don't know who's starting when (OK, neither do we). Two of their key sluggers, Vlad Guerrero and Gary Matthews, are nursing injuries and may not be 100% (hey, just like Manny!). Will their......

In between the drama of a pennant race and the pressure cooker of the playoffs, comes a day like today. A day when absolutely nothing is up for grabs. Yesterday the Red Sox won and the Indians lost, guaranteeing the Red Sox the best record in the AL (they'd win a tiebreaker with Cleveland) and Fenway-advantage throughout the postseason. The win yesterday (you might want to sit down) came largely thanks to J.D. Drew, who......

Thomas Paine said, "These are the times that try men's souls". Hamlet said, "To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them." Dr. Peter Venkman said it a bit pithier, as above. All true. The Red Sox are in St. Petersburg tonight to play the Devil Rays, and if they don't treat the Rays like the second coming of the Big Red Machine, they're going to find themselves in serious hot......

We were appropriately nervous when Manny Ramirez sustained the left oblique strain. Our concern came partly due to the fact that we wanted one of the Red Sox big bats to deliver during the home stretch. But it was mostly because we worried that Manny would once again have us where it feels like he always wants us: freaking out over a gap in both offense and outfield defense, hoping and pleading with him to......

When Bostonist were kids, pitching the tennis ball against the chimney for five hours straight, we often dreamed of the day we'd get called up to the Red Sox, in the heat of a pennant race, tabbed for a sudden start, and then go out and throw a no-hitter in our big-league debut. Clay Buchholz is a slacker. It took him until his SECOND Major League start to have a piece of memorabilia suitable for......

We don't need to tell you what happened. The Red Sox blew the White Sox off the face of the earth, then arrived in New York and started playing like a bunch of corpses. At least yesterday was an afternoon game, so we could do other things with our evening. Amid the carnage, we have to salute Curt Schilling, who pitched pretty well, considering he really looks like he's going on fumes these days. He......

Technical difficulties plagued yesterday's Redux. We'll cover both weekend games here. Sorry. Not since Mrs. O'Leary's cow had its legendary bout with Restless Legs Syndrome has Chicago been so utterly and completely flattened. But this time it wasn't fire, but the relentless bats of the Red Sox, woken from their August slumber, who pounded the Pale Hose into a pinstriped pulp. (We miss a day, we lay it on a little thick the next day.......

Frankly, we'd like to know what Daisuke Matsuzaka did to alienate his teammates. Does he play "Gyroball" constantly in the clubhouse? Mix wasabi in with the Ben Gay as a lockerroom prank? There must be some reason why his lineup consistently fails to give him any run support, making him 1-3 against the Devil Rays to his 12-7 record against the rest of the league. Don Orsillo put it best late in the game last......

It was a busy Friday in Boston sports - two Red Sox games, one Patriots exhibition game, baby news from someone other than Tom Brady...whew! We're just going to dive right in and give you the quick and dirty version of the Redux. Ready? Here goes: -- We've heard that Sox fans who attended the first game of the Friday Fenway doubleheader made sure to carefully tuck their ticket stubs away. We imagine that the......

Want a picture of what Red Sox Nation feels like this morning? The best way we can describe it is the scene in Airplane! when Elaine gets on the PA, tells the passengers to remain calm, then asks, "Oh, by the way, is there anyone on board who can fly a plane?" The next scene is in the cabin with passengers going berzerk and men swordfighting in the aisle. That's what being a Red Sox......

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled fretting and Chicken Littling to announce that, despite being only -5 games back, the Red Sox intend to remain competitive in the AL East race. See, whatever the Yankees do, whether it's fishgutting the Devil Rays, overthrowing the Royals, or....beating the Indians (there's no metaphor we can use there that doesn't make us feel so very wrong), they can't catch the Sox if the Sox keep winning. It's just that simple.......

We here at the Redux are starting to get awfully cranky. You see, we are running out of ways to tell folks to keep the faith and stay off the Zakim Bridge. We've invested a lot of time in the act of reassuring Red Sox fans, asking them to refrain from hitting the panic button. You'd think the Red Sox would help us out and do their part to keep people calm. That would be......

We hate to throw around the term "must-win" game. Game 4-7 of the 2004 ALCS; now those were must-win games. An August game against a non-divisional foe, when you're winning your own division, shouldn't qualify for the term. But last night sure felt like it. The Sox had dropped two straight to the Angels and the Yankees have been getting closer and closer in the rearview mirror. Furthermore, the Sox were taking the field sans......

Where to begin? When it comes to baseball, most of the news that came out of Tuesday was dreary, almost as dreary as the skies over Boston this morning. It felt as if it took ages for Barry Bonds to take the final steps in his journey to become baseball's new home run king, but on Tuesday night, the San Francisco Giants slugger did it. Shortly before midnight Eastern time, at a time when many......

Perhaps the blue shirts calling the shots at Fenway Park on Friday night were just bitter that they couldn't hang out in Harvard/Hogwart's Square with several thousands of their closest Harry Potter fans. Maybe they were concerned that J.D. Drew would further aggravate his hamstring by running all the way around the bases. We'd even like to think that they were just curious about whether Terry Francona would get himself thrown out of a game......