Ball 5

Author: Justin Golenbock

"OH, MY GOD, WE'RE HAVING A FIRE…sale…OH, THE BURNING! IT BURNS ME," shouts Florida Marlins General Manager Larry Beinfest into his cell phone.

"Could you maybe try that…simpler," responds principle Red Sox owner John W. Henry, and just like that an aging, cost-ridden franchise (Boston) gets the cheap, young ace (Josh Beckett) they needed, along with a gold glove third baseman (Mike Lowell) and one of baseball's premier set-up men (Guillermo Mota), for a handful of A and AA prospects. (In a related story, Beinfest sent All-Star first baseman Carlos Delgado to the Mets for young centerfielder Lucy van Pelt and her younger brother's blue blanket.)

Now admittedly, I'm writing about baseball in November, when the stories fans really care about are occurring in the sports being played at present. Take the NBA, for example, where Ron Artest recently shaved the words "tru warior" into the back of his "fro". Artest probably ignores the mainstream media most of the time, so he may not even know my name…which I'm thankful for (though I did receive an early Christmas card from the Rosenhaus family), but if he's fishing for my attention, he's found a bait juicy sweet. But I'd rather use my space to gloat over Beinfest's meek admission that, "we may have been subjected to economic factors in our dealings with [the Red Sox and Mets], but we must continue to build with an eye towards the future [when we'll suck]."

Lowell is the real chip, but, though he's expensive, he did hit 59 homeruns in the league's worst hitter's park from 2003-2004, and if nothing else, Benford's laws of probability state that he cannot possibly hit any worse than Kevin Millar (presumed editorial disclaimer: The Campus has no idea who Benford is or what his laws actually state - he Googled that one). But for Sox fans the real prize is undoubtedly the young Beckett, who should be known to all of us already from November 2003, when at the tender age of 23 he threw a nine-inning shutout in the deciding game of the Series, completing the Marlins' upset over the mighty Yankees ("YEAR TWO-THOUSAND," chants Sullivan in my ear).

Forgive me if I'm not terribly paranoid over his late season shoulder injury that limited him to a 3-0, 2.25 ERA finish in the month of September (the Globe reports his fastball averaged 97 in the final inning of each of those starts). If anything, front office "suspicions" over Beckett's shoulder allowed the Red Sox to sucker a desperate Beinfest into giving up Mota to sweeten the deal. So though I'm of the moral type who dislikes the usage of the military metaphor in sports…if you want to really want to watch a "tru warior" take the hill next November, jump on the Ball 5 bandwagon, we're full speed ahead.