Here's hoping Crabcakes kicks some butt tonight!
“I feel good right now. I feel like the team, as a hole, is doing well and doing the little things they need to do to win a ballgame. That’s all it does, is it builds confidence when you’ve got everybody running at the same time.”
It’s a great quote, isn’t it? It’s what Clay told the media last night after his win over the Royals. I don’t have the newspaper version of The Boston Globe but the above is taken directly from Boston.com. It might seem like a minor typo to some but there’s a tremendous difference between the words “hole” and “whole” and that, after many comments pointing out the mistake (none by me), they haven’t at least changed it on Boston.com is ridiculous.
Spelling has always been a bit of a big deal in my family. My father, who is retired, enjoys watching NESN or ESPN or CNN -any station that shows a ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen – and finding all the misspellings and typos that these professional stations let go out every day. He’s found a lot of them. I realize the world isn’t perfect and there are people who find things like proper spelling to be tedious. I also realize spelling doesn’t come as easily to some as it does others – but in this day and age of instant information at your fingertips it isn’t that difficult to make sure you’re spelling things correctly.
Sure, I’m just a lowly blogger and I don’t know how difficult professional journalists have it – I get that. But I don’t see why it is so difficult for ANYONE to use spell check or even just pop open another window in your browser and type in, say, www.dictionary.com just to make sure you’re spelling certain words correctly.
Everyone has their own voice so I try not to pick on grammar and usage since God knows I destroy many rules of grammar when it comes to my writing style on this blog – but when you spell words wrong that often stops a reader cold and they lose the flow of your words (and when I’ve written for outlets much more formal than a blog, I made sure everything is proper. I was under the impression that part of being a writer was being able to write properly. Silly me.) If Amalie Benjamin wants people to focus on her writing you’d think she’d make sure what she submits is readable. (I don’t know how newspapers work. Do they even use copy editors? I mean is there anyone who went over that column to make sure it was ready to go to print? I know I’m nitpicking but I was really enjoying this particular piece about Clay and reading “hole” was like someone sticking a toothpick in my eye.) God knows I’m not perfect and anyone could take any one of my blog entries and rip it apart for my liberal uses of dashes, ellipsis and parentheses or how I create a new sentence when I could just continue the last one and begin them with conjunctions (I know there are many more infractions on my part and I don’t have enough time to list them!). Then again, I’m not making the big bucks from a outlet as huge and influential as The Boston Globe. Also, a lot of my misuse of grammar rules is a style issue for me. Again, it wouldn’t work in a newspaper, magazine or book – and it makes me crazy when people write that way in those places – but to me a blog is fair ground to play around. As long as you try to spell everything properly! 😉
But I didn’t come here to rip on The Boston Globe and their poor editing skills nor even Amalie Benjamin. I started off the day ready to write a “Oh ye of little faith” post about both David Ortiz and Clay Buchholz. I’m basking in their turnarounds and how well they’ve been performing. And now I’m getting quite giddy at the possibility of the Red Sox clinching their playoff spot over the weekend. Hey, it could happen. I have great faith that it will happen. Tonight’s pitching match-up is Lester v Chamberlain. It seems whenever I make predictions things go horribly wrong (well except for Daisuke last time out) so I’m going to hold off on them. But I’ll just say, if I had to pick a guy to start my first playoff game and my choices were Joba Chamberlain or Jon Lester it’d be a no-brainer. Daisuke Matsuzaka on the mound Saturday against CC Sabathia sure seems like it should intimidate be but somehow it doesn’t. I think that might be the most interesting game of the lot. Sunday…well Sunday’s match-up of Paul Byrd and Andy Pettitte kind of makes me want to cry – but I’m trying to be positive so I’ll hold that all inside.
My plans for the weekend are to catch two out of the three Yankees games with some of the “sistahs”. It’ll be doubly fun to be with good friends and watch the AL East rivalry in all its glory. I received an email last night from a supposed Yankee fan telling me I “should be very afraid”. First of all, regardless of what happens this weekend, it’ll take a pretty horrid meltdown for the Sox to not make the playoffs – so the importance of it is all on us as fans. WE want the wins but they aren’t imperative to the success of this season – not really. And secondly, well, I’m just NOT “afraid” of the Yankees so telling me I should be only results in my being amused that even with such a healthy lead in the division some Yankees fans are still looking over their shoulders.
A series against the Yankees on this beautiful fall day makes for quite the playoff atmosphere, though, regardless of how important the games are or aren’t.
(Yes, given that I wrote this on the fly because I’m already late so I’m not using my best editing skills, I realize I’m opening myself up to typos and such! Such is life when you choose to criticize someone for theirs, I know!)
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