Ozzie Guillen brought out the grounds crew to repair the plate on the mound in the 5th inning. Shortly thereafter, my battery died

Doug Mienkiewicz takes the plate. He would fly out but get a hit later in the game. He made a brilliant play on a one-hopper in a bases loaded situation but he lost focus for a moment and all the runners advanced. I felt bad for Doug and was happy for him when the Royals eked out the win.

The poor guy took a richcheted ball to the head. Walk it off big guy!

The very, albeit long and difficult to spell, meaning of CLUTCH.

Going into Friday night, Grudz was mired in a 0-9 streak.

Streak no more!

He went 3-for-4 on Saturday including a clutch single in the eighth which would be the tying run when Sweeney brought him on a two-shot homer.

Seriously, if a MACK Truck were a baseball player, he’d be Jim Thome. Thome was really cool to the crowd, just an all-around nice guy.

He nailed a beautiful ball that just fell short of being a home run (thank god!) in the eighth inning. The guy next to me was taunting him to “Go back to Cleveland!”

After seeing that near fatal shot I told him, “It’s a good thing you didn’t tell him to go back to the Phillies…”

Continuing my (unwise) practice of taking pictures of guys with the hardest to spell names is Scott Podsednik. Others will wisely disagree with this, but I thought the Carlos Lee for Podsednik trade was the turning point in the Sox trajectory.

Besides being the rare trade where both teams benefitted from it, acquiring Pods and sending away a power hitter displayed in highliter pink ink: “we are a small ball team now”.

A bold move that all trades will be judged by.

A local 8th grade orchestra was brought on to the do the national anthem. I don’t know what the problem was (was there a broken mic??) but we counldn’t hear. No matter, in a manner befitting the class of Kansas City the crowd (and I mean the whole crowd!) sang along. It was beautiful and touching. The sortof things you miss if you are watching the game from home.

It wasn’t exactly Mo Cheeks helping a stumbling young woman but still a sweet gesture.