It's true, it's true!

Turns out it wasn't a Red Sox T-shirt buried under the foundation of New Yankee Stadium. It was a Red Sox jersey. A David Ortiz jersey, to be really specific, jackhammered out of the concrete in a five-hour excavation project this past weekend. I guess the idea of having such a garment festering underneath the $1.3 billion sports complex was too much for the Brothers Steinbrenner to stomach. Now the Yankees are comtemplating filing charges against the construction worker who planted the jersey. But was the organization better off keeping it where it was? After all, Ortiz has laid an egg for the first two weeks of the season. If he goes on for the Sox now that the replica jersey bearing his name and number has been removed from the earth of the Bronx, who will be zooming who then?

Burning Down the House (That A-Rod Built) ...

Here we go again. Tonight at Boston's Fenway Park, the eternal struggle between good and evil begins anew when the Yankees visit the Red Sox for the first time this season. The two baseball titans have played each other yearly for over 100 years - from back to a time when they weren't even known as the Yankees and the Red Sox. (Try the "Highlanders" and the "Pilgrims". Not exactly the same, is it?) Of course, the rivalry has only really become a rivalry in the past several years, when the Sox finally shook off the shackles of failure and starting giving the Evil Empire as much as they took, and those two Boston World Series rings definitely have changed the tenor of the blood feud.

And now, this: The New York Post is reporting today that the new Yankee Stadium, which is being built in the Bronx next to the current ballpark and is set to open next season, may already have "undesirable" Red Sox taint on it. Or, rather, under it. This story, which have yet to be completely confirmed, states that a construction worker on the $1.3 billion project placed a Red Sox T-shirt into the foundation of the visitor's clubhouse before the concrete was poured. According to the article, the worker wasn't meaning to place a curse on the Yankees but now fears that that may be the actual effect. And many fans of the Bronx Bombers are concerned enough to start demands that the "offending" garment be dug up asap, even though the construction is pretty far along at this point.

Stupid? Overraction? Just keep in mind that no other major sport is as driven by superstition as baseball. The curses can be epic (Bambino, Billy Goat, Bartman, etc.) or they can be miniscule, such as how, when a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter, his teammates will avoid him like the plague in the dugout; or how a player with a hot bat will not change underwear as long as he's on a hot hitting streak; or how Hall of Fame batting champ Wade Boggs ate chicken (and, at times, other things) before every game. So to place the colors of a team's most bitter rival underneath their home stadium is serious stuff indeed. And considering how angst-ridden Yankee fans already are because their squad hasn't won the Series since 2000 (shocking!), don't be surprised if there's isn't a major reclamation project at the New Stadium before it even opens.

Bill-y Buck-ner!

My allegiance and my blood are forever dedicated to the Chicago Cubs, in case you hadn't noticed. But that doesn't mean I can't take note of other big goings-on in the world of baseball that have nothing to do with the eventual 2008 World Series champions. For example, there's what happened today in Boston as the 2007 World Series champs were being honored at their home opener. After the Red Sox' epic and perhaps unfair mega-road trip that saw them cover 16,000 miles over three countries and a 3-4 start, the best awards for the team may have been a soft pillow and a glass of warm milk. But there was the matter of the distribution of the hardware - the presentation of the World Series trophy, the World Series rings, the World Series banner hoisted above Fenway Park. And it wasn't just Red Sox who were honored: representatives of the Celtics (including Bill Russell), the Bruins (including Bobby Orr) and the Patriots (including Tedy Bruschi) also were on hand with their respective championship trophies from days gone by, as if to remind the rest of the universe of Boston's exalted status as Titletown, U.S.A. And, for an added pinch of pomp, the Boston Pops played in the outfield.

The best, though, was saved for last. The Sox organization had kept a secret who was to have the honor of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, but by the time the individual in question emerged from the Green Monster to walk out to the mound, most of the crowd there had an inkling what was up. Still, that didn't squelch the heartfelt enthusiasm when Bill Buckner, wearing a Red Sox jersey (and nothing else! - just kidding), walked onto the Fenway grass to a rousing four-minute ovation before he threw a change-up to former teammate Dwight Evans.

Now, there are some caveats to this feel-good story. Even non-baseball players know why Buckner's return to Boston is such a big deal. (Two words: Game Six). But of course the Sox losing that game and eventually the Series to the Mets in '86 wasn't really his fault, just as Bartman didn't cause the Cubs to miss out on the Fall Classic in 2003 after being only five outs away from Glory.* Everyone forgets that Boston had already blown a two-run, 10th inning lead to New York (after being one out away from winning it all for the first time in almost 70 years) before Mookie Wilson's slow grounder went down the first-base line and through Buckner's wickets. Or that the Sox blew a three-run lead the following night to give the Mets the title. Buckner was the fall guy, the goat**, the player who let down an entire region of the nation. A solid, reliable career had been sullied by one play - a play he probably should have made, but a single play nonetheless. Within a year he was with another team, and though he would return to play his final season with Boston in 1990, the stigma was on him like a scarlet letter - the letter being "E" for "error".

He retired and moved to the relative seclusion of Idaho, some say after his family received death threats from fans who had too much to drink or too little time on their hands. But Baseball and the Red Sox were never out of his universe - he would develop a housing subdivision named after Fenway Park in his adoptive state - and it wasn't long before overtures of forgiveness would come from Red Sox Nation. They were tentative at first, but after Boston finally put the Curse of the Bambino to rest for good, the tempo picked up: It is said that as the team celebrated in the clubhouse at St. Louis' Busch Memorial Stadium in 2004, one of the first calls they made was to Buckner.

So some cynics might say that it's easy to forgive Buckner now that his "stain" has been washed away with the champagne of two World Series titles; cynics on the other side might chime in that there was nothing to forgive in the first place, that baseball is a game of inches, where even Hall of Famers fail more than 60 percent of the time at the plate, that Buckner's error was compounded by poor pitching and managing in that fateful inning - that, in what should be plastered onto ever clubhouse wall in every stadium, shit happens. But the emotions expressed at Fenway this afternoon, both from the crowd and in the tears on Buckner's face, were very real, and you can't beat that with a stick.



* As a Cubs fan, you don't know how it pains me to admit that.

** Goats - another sensitive subject for me!

Scientology's got nothing on this!

It wasn't enough for Academy Award winner Ben Affleck to raise the population of Red Sox Nation by having a daughter with wife and kick-ass artist Jennifer Garner. No, now he's got to get greedy. One of Affleck's next projects will be narrating a new DVD called (I kid you not) Red Sox Baby: Raising Tomorrow's Boston Red Sox Fan Today. Ostensibly the video will be geared to the very young ones to teach them lessons of teamwork, spelling and color recognition. (Get it? "Red Sox, not White, boys and girls!") But at least the title of the project is honest - this is no less than the most sinister indoctrination video since that creepy Dharma Initiative film on Lost. "Welcome, kids, to a life of misery and suffering and inherent disappointment. Here's your hat and your T-shirt."

Oh, I'm sorry - that would be whatever the Cubs are doing to bamboozle win over impressionable souls. Psst - someone get John Cusack on the phone!

(P.S.: Of course I know the Red Sox have won the World Series very, very recently - but when the hell do you think that's going to happen again? Oh, and if you asked Affleck what was bigger to him - winning the Oscar or watching Boston finally win it all - I wonder what his answer would be.)