He's Back, He's Bad, He's......VENTIN' VENTRE

Everyone, we are about to get hit with some of the worst metaphors known to man.

Red Sox have become baseball tornado

This is what happens when a team wins 3 baseball games in a row, people! It transforms into a natural disaster that annihilates everything in its path!

ANAHEIM, Calif. - The earth opened up Sunday and swallowed the Angels.

Now when did tornadoes get the ability to "open the earth" and make the earth swallow things? This double-metaphor really isn't doing it for me.

Actually, it just seemed that way.

Whew.

It was the Boston Red Sox who devoured them, and really Saturday was more like the final bite before the last burp. Rarely do you see an entire baseball team push itself back from the table, take a deep breath, loosen its belt, and reach for a mint.

....I'm speechless.

What's going on here?

The Red Sox advanced Sunday to the American League Championship Series by completing a sweep of the surprisingly submissive Angels with a 9-1 victory in the best-of-five division series.

Aahhhhh ok. There we go.

Although Stanford upset USC on Saturday, proving that just about anything can happen in sports, this result seemed as if it had been etched in stone, or more specifically, in Bill Stoneman, the Angels’ GM whose mantra is that the Angels don’t need another big bat.

Purpose of big bat: Score more runs
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim: Already pretty good at that

Somehow I don't blame him.

The Red Sox are moving on because, at least in this series against Los Angeles, it seemed like the only kind of bats they have are big ones.

Also: not hard to win a series when your pitching holds the other team to 4 total runs.

The contrast was startling, as it figures to be in the ALCS. The Red Sox had been sliding somewhat down the stretch in the regular season, allowing their formidable lead in the American League East over the Yankees to dwindle to a squirmy margin. But now that that nonsense has been dispensed with, it’s almost like they’re interested again.

So that's it. They were bored. The Boston Red Sox have been looking up at the Yankees for over a decade, and now that they were the ones sitting in first with a nice lead, it was just too uninteresting for them to care. Cool.

Skipping to later......

Just about every baseball club these days pops champagne after every significant postseason development — gaining the playoffs, winning the division series, winning the championship series, winning the World Series. Investing in champagne stock at this time of year is probably the wisest move on Wall Street.

I'm actually going to stick with my initial conviction that Ventre thinks you can just "invest in champagne stock". Also good: investing in pumpkins near Halloween (like Homer Simpson), investing in pine trees around Christmas, in eggs around Easter, and in fireworks around the 4th of July. These are proven excellent financial strategies.

(we'll leave out the discussion of Ventre's lack of understanding of weak-form efficient markets and the pure idiocy of thinking that the sale of like 1500 bottles of champagne would affect its stock price, if it had a stock)

So it was no surprise to see the Red Sox erupt late Sunday in a bacchanal of bubbly.

After careful analysis of past trends, Michael Ventre has determined that no, it was completely un-shocking, and actually quite predictable that the Red Sox celebrated with champagne.

There was first baseman Kevin Youkilis madly shaking a bottle and spraying it in a 360-degree guyser. There was prankster Manny, filling a tub with ice water, then sneaking up on several unsuspecting teammates. When the champagne ran out, they used cans of beer.

These guys are a fucking baseball TORNADO. What were we writing about again?

Red Sox Nation may turn out to be the greatest country in the world, at least as far as this 2007 baseball season is concern.

This is just a mind-bogglingly stupid sentence.

Oh yeah, and "is concern"? Nice. We don't need no stinkin' editors. Fight, the power, Mike.

Go Indians!