The Sox lost Sunday and I refuse to even mention the Patriots. I still have high hopes for the Sox, but I just don't feel like writing about such things until my heart quiets down. Instead, I'm gonna get a little personal (cue the cheesy Liftetime music) and tell some fun sports stories from my youth.

Also, don't ask about the image I chose. It has no meaning, it just looked cool. So, here goes...

I have a confession to make to all of you: I would rather play baseball than watch it. Don't get me wrong, I do love to occasionally watch the bloated steroid-filled monstrosities on TV confuse missile defense systems with titanic blasts that approach low-Earth orbit just as much as the next guy. I just can't help it, though. There is nothing that compares to actually playing the game.

It all started for me when I was so young that I could barely stand. Me and my dad would play catch in the backyard. That means I was diving for balls that were thrown right to me and missing them spectacularly. Occasionally we even played a game called “pepper,” which seemed to the untrained eye to be a recipe for serious head trauma. It was a whole mess of fun, though. Years later I would join little league, where I would discover that I actually had a fair amount of talent. I wasn't amazing or anything, but I didn't suck. Thus, my lifelong passion for playing the game began to blossom.

One of the most memorable moment in my early playing days was in the time I got a double off of Joey Henry. For those of you who have never heard of this kid, Joey Henry was to all of us little leaguers the Leominster Little League equivalent of Roger Clemens on horse steroids. Of course, I would discover years later that Roger Clemens was also Roger Clemens on horse steroids, but that's a whole other story.

Anyway, Mr. Henry threw what seemed like a gazillion miles per hour, had a hard curve ball, and was somewhat wild, which made him terrifying. We all knew that he would have killed us instantly had a fastball connected with any part of our bodies, including the tip of our little toe. Everyone was afraid to face him. When up at the plate, you stood as far back in the batters box as was legally allowed. Had the rules permitted it, most of us would have taken our at-bats in the dugout (or better yet, the parking lot). Once in the box, we would wave the bat at the ball in the same vane as a drunk yelling at a hurricane. The only difference was, the hurricane was more likely to move than than we had a chance to make contact.

Yet, on one fateful day (I don't even remember which one exactly, but it was most definitely fateful

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