It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, but as I sit here writing this post on Wednesday evening, it doesn’t look like this is going to be the night when the Red Sox clinch the American League Eastern Division title. Our boys are trailing the Yankees 6-1 in the 7th, and I don’t have a good feeling about this one. (O me of little faith…)
But, as of this writing, there are still another 10 games left in the season, and the Magic Number is 2. Which means any combination of Red Sox wins and Yankee losses that adds up to 2 means the Red Sox clinch. Probabilistically speaking, this is going to happen. The Sox aren’t going to lose 10; New York isn’t going to win 10.
We will be in like Flynn.
I don’t know how far into October the Sox will still be playing. (O me of little faith.) But clinching the division? We got this.
Which leads me to one of the all time great Masshole stories.
On Wednesday, it was reported that a couple of jamokes, make that Massholes, had found the 2018 division championship banner that the Red Sox were planning on putting up once the team clinches the AL East.
[Louie] Iacuzzi said Wednesday by phone that he and his buddies spotted an object wrapped up on McGrath Highway in Somerville Monday morning. So he pulled over and crossed multiple lanes of busy traffic to retrieve it. Inside was a massive banner that read “ ‘2018 American League East Champions’; it’s the banner,” Iacuzzi said. (Source: Boston Globe)
And then the wheels in Louie Iacuzzi’s brain began to spin, and he decided that he wasn’t just going to give this treasure back and get nothing in return.
“We want to return it, we’re trying to do the right thing, but I’m not just going to hand it to them, know what I mean?” Iacuzzi said…
“My dad’s telling me to put it on eBay and sell it for a lot of money,” Iacuzzi said. “But I want to give it to the original owner.”
My guess is that a banner for the divisional championship (yawn: big nothing) that fell off the truck and never actually hung in Fenway Park doesn’t have all that 
Anyway, Louie Iacuzzi wasn’t thinkin’ eBay. So he called the Red Sox. And waited for a response.
Meanwhile, Louie and his fellow Masshole were cooking up a plan for what they were going to do if the Red Sox decided to just go ahead and print up another banner.
“If they do try to put a duplicate up, you best believe we’re going to show up and say, ‘That’s not the original,’ ” [James] Amaral said. “We’re hoping they do the right thing. You know, we did the right thing. We could have kept it, we could have put it on eBay. You know, we got connections where we could have reached out to other sources.”
“Connections”? That sounds ominous, in a ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli’ kind of way.
But all the planning and possible connections came to naught. Louie handed the banner back and got nada in return. In any case, a duplicate had already been made by the banner company. The owner of that banner company – who (can this get any Mass-holier?) is an alderman in Somerville - doesn’t believe that the original banner fell off the truck. He thinks it “walked off the truck.”
Louie Iacuzzi isn’t happy with the implications of the banner having walked, not fallen, off the truck:
“If I didn’t pick it up, a hundred people would have ran over it,” he said. “I don’t want a million dollars. I don’t need a million dollars. All I wanted was to maybe bring my family, my friends to a [expletive] baseball game, maybe meet a player. . . . The flag is back home with the Boston Red Sox.”
He also lamented his newfound notoriety.
“I want to tell you guys something: I found the flag,” Iacuzzi said. “I was never looking for money or fame or anything. I wanted to return it ever since I seen it.”
Needless to say, the comments on this story have been a wicked pissah thing of beauty, and include multiple mentions of Mark Wahlberg’s making a movie out of the saga.
As Masshole stories go, this story is just about perfection. The only thing missing, as far as I can tell, is a sidekick named Sully.
No comments:
Post a Comment