Happy Returns

The Sox are happy to be home. I, too, went away for a while. Left the country in fact. I visited a land where an alarming number of coffee shops lack Wi-Fi, the newspaper lacks baseball coverage and spring is a season only rumored to exist.

Vancouver! Beautiful city and amazingly clean. Arriving on the eve of the Canucks' elimination from contention for the Stanley Cup playoffs, I found the local sports fan in a mood nearly as foul as the weather (think late-fall in Maine).

What to make of a province that has more A&W restaurants than middle America? What to make of a city where some signs are in French, yet the population is at least 80% Asian (+/- 60, give or take)? What to make of a hotel that has a Shaughnessy Salon on the second floor? Shaughnessy Salon is probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in Canada, surpassing the time the ball got stuck in the padding of the left field wall at SkyDome and Blue Jays outfielder Jorge Bell could not dig it out (I was young, I giggled).

Lack of Internet access and newspaper coverage aside, I was able to catch the first game of the sweep on Sportsnet. Pat Tabler, could you be more dull? I saw Roberto Alomar get honored with induction in the "level of excellence." Very Canadian sounding, that. Then I saw JD Drew hit a big home run to tie it. Then I was confused why Delcarmen didn't start the seventh instead of coming in to clean up the mess that Aardsma and Lopez made. Then the Sox lost two more games that I didn't watch. As I get all of my baseball news from Me & Pedro, I can only assume that Julio Lugo is to blame for everything.