Fall in New England: The Bolton Fair this weekend, the Wachusett IPA at the ready, and Pedro on the mound tonight against the Yanks at Fenway.

The NYT's Dave Anderson notes no other teams have finished one-two as often as the Yankees and Red Sox in their Hundred Years' War:

IF baseball were ever to put its artifacts in time capsules for future generations, it should be sure to keep the Yankees and Red Sox memorabilia in a separate time capsule. They belong together.

* * *

In a post from May 2003, Edward Cossette at Bambino's Curse responds to those who dismiss baseball as boring.

For me, baseball speaks to that hidden pleasure of the unknown, of unlimited possibility. To lose oneself in the game is to become creative.

The poet Marianne Moore gets at this so much better than I in her poem "Baseball and Writing":

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement--
a fever in the victim--
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

"You can never tell with either how it will go." That's it!

And the late scholar and former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti gives an erudite spin on the same:

[Baseball] is autotelic activity...transformative of negotium to otium, tedium to freedom (in Aristotle's terms, war to peace), because it is a medium for self-transformation...A "win" is the actual realization of what is centrally an imaginative surge.

So maybe there is the perfect response to the "baseball is boring" crowd.

Tell 'em, "It's an imaginative surge, something you wouldn't understand."

Pedro tonight! And who knows how it will go? Our excitement grows by the hour.

* * *

Has anyone else noticed a resemblance between the bearded Kevin Millar and the Three Stooges wrestler Bustoff?

Maybe in addition to "Tessie" and "Dirty Water" they could blare "Pop Goes the Weasel" through the Fenway PA.

* * *

Tufts is pressing a claim to having the played the first modern college football game, against Harvard, in 1875. The accompanying photo of the 1875 Tufts team posed in striped skivvies and muttonchops would have appealed to Edward Gorey.

The Jumbos open their 130th football season at home in Medford against Wesleyan on Saturday, while Harvard opens the Ivy season against Brown at Providence.

And New Hampshire plays Dartmouth in the Granite Bowl.