Stumbling on history...

My travels unfortunately prevented me from following up on my previous short post. There I was, spending a week in New England with The Girl, including a long weekend in Boston, soaking up Yawkey Way, Cask N' Flagon, Jillians (not to mention several superb sausages with onions and peppers for sale under the grand stand concourse...with the odd pint of Smithwicks), just happy that I was going to get two Fenway games and my first trip to McCoy Stadium. Sadly the Cape Cod league had not started in time for our trip to Chatham....next time though.

However, I digress. We get to the Landsdowne Road entrance about 90 mins before game time, just after a short downpour but with skies clearing, and lo and behold, plenty of tickets left ($50 face value for 14 rows behind home plate!) - we get our tickets and are kindly allowed back to C&F to have a $5 beer instead of a $7 beer at Fenway...

The game looked interesting for nothing else than getting a chance to see yet another team - (The Royals now join the list together with the Red Sox, Yankees, Blue Jays, Brewers, Twins, Mets, Nats, A's, Cubs, Tigers (although the last two I saw 16 years ago, and I have no idea who they played against...I call the era "B.B")), and also a chance to get a look at the highly touted and somewhat controversial Luke Hochevar. Hochevar pitched in the 2005 CWS for U of Tenn, was drafted by the Dodgers the same year, failed through his agent Scott Boras to come to an agreement with the Dodgers, fired Boras and made a $2.9m deal with the Dodgers only to resign Boras and renege on the deal. He then re-entered the 2006 draft after pitching in independent leagues and was picked no.1 overall by the Royals, one of the few teams not sick and tired of Boras.

We sit down, get some peanuts and proceed to watch a thing of beauty. However, it actually took me a while to realise Lester had a no-hitter going. After getting two easy fly outs and a 4-3 ground out in the first, Lester walked Butler in the second, and two plays later over threw his pickoff move trying to get Miguel Olivo out who had reached on a Fielder's Choice.

In the third the Red Sox opened up the offensive floodgates. Despite a double play on Varitek and Lugo, the Red Sox scored 4 runs with 2 outs to add to Drew's initial run, including a sensational triple by Ellsbury. (Remember the debate a few years ago about who would be the next CF of the Red Sox when Damon left for the retirement home....that's been solved ;).

Talking about Ellsbury, it was his amazing catch to rob Jose Guillen of a hit to end the 4th that made me look at the scoreboard and notice that the H column still said 0. It slowly started to dawn on me what was going on in front of us. Although some Red Sox fans might be under the belief that it's a relatively commonplace occurance considering Nomo's in 2001, D-Lowe's in 2002 and Buchholz's last year, only 9 no-no's by Red Sox pitchers have happened at home since the opening of Fenway in 1912 (18 in total in Red Sox history).

In the break between the 6th half innings when I went for a needed beer run, half of the concourse screamed "SHUT UP!" at the TV when a stupid Sportscenter anchor with into a segue with the words "And now over to Fenway where Jon Lester has a no-hitter going into the 6th".

Lester was completely ignored by the other Sox players, and for the last 2 innings, all of Fenway stood up for every Lester pitch. Although Lester had reached 100 pitches after 7, Francona would never dare to pull a no-no, and with the 134th pitch, a 95MPH fastball off the plate to draw the final swinging strike out, the crowd roared for a magic evening.

Sometimes you plan. Sometimes you're just lucky.