In the first couple hours of 24 this season, Bauer ate a man’s trachia, shot his partner dead to protect a former terrorist, and witnessed a nuclear bomb go off in Valencia, all on the heels of a slow boat ride from China, where he’d been tortured for the past 2 years or so.

The season ended when Bauer gave Fayed the hanging chain necktie, but they decided to press on with the return of Audrey, which sucked. Then, after Josh pops one in his Gramps and Bauer escapes into the ocean the episode should be over….but no, 20 more minutes.

And for 20 minutes Jack yells at Heller who was in all of one scene this season other than the last one then has a heart-to-heart with a comatose drooling Audrey. Oh, and Chloe is pregnant with a bomb-arming wise-cracking british accented wise cracking bald-headed seed planted and I’m reasonably sure nobody gives a shit.

As for the BoSox this team should be fine but I will never get used to having a boot on the NY throat and letting them back up. I was seriously pissed off after that game not because I think the Yankees are absolutely going to come back and make a legit and relevant push for the AL East (they might, but who knows) but because if we had swept them we would be up 14+ games with another series coming up in Boston.

It’s not panic, it’s just frustration. If there were no precedent for this sort of thing no one would be annoyed by it, but the fact is that we’ve seen this Yankee team pull it together year in and year out and before we know it they’re in first place and we’re wondering what went wrong.

I know, some might say “well, THESE yankees aren’t like THOSE yankees!” and they’re right, of course. But what’s really THAT much different? Slumping all-stars? Check. Inconsistent Pen and Rotation? Check. Aren’t those their main problems every single fucking year? And don’t those problems almost always even out by the last week in August? Just by the law of averages its easy enough to see that Abreu, Cano, Damon and Giambi won’t be this mediocre all year, they might not get TOO much better but they’ll be better than this.

However the pitching is a different story. This is a team with good, old pitching, and untested young arms. The veterans are all on the wrong sides of 36 and you can’t teach youth. Rivera hasn’t really turned it around completely yet and Torre is still not totally comfortable handing the ball to anybody other than Scott Proctor.

Moose/Tavarez is clearly advantage Yanks, and at this point I’ll call Pettite/Schilling a tossup.

Good thing they don’t play the games on paper.