MLB Closer: Brett Myers Is Your New Bicycle, Dice-K Baffles

• Phillies 8, Dodgers 5 Taking the advice of his marriage counseler, Brett Myers decided to get rid of his aggression on the field by making the Doyers his bitch. Myers pitched well enough to win, but did the real damage with his bat, to the tune of a 3-for-3 night with 3 RBIs. The wife can rest easy for the next few days until he runs out of stress balls. Shane Victorino added to the madness by plating 4 runs and making a stupendous catch in center field to end a threat in the 7th. Manny Ramirez tried to make a game of it with a 3-run shot that barely cleared the wall, but the team ended up succumbing to the mighty Phillies bullpen, managing only a pair of hits in the final four innings. If you turned off your TV after the 4th inning, you didn’t miss much. The Dodgers take the series back to LA on Sunday, when Randy Newman will collect another $6 million in royalty checks for that shitty song. In other news, everyone’s moms are dying! Charlie Manuel managed the game with a heavy heart after learning that his mom had died that morning, and hero Shane Victorino found out after the game that his grandmama kicked the bucket. Stay tuned to see which Phillies player is going to be the recipient of the dreaded Rule of Three.

• Red Sox 2, Rays 0 Dice-K didn’t look like he’d last long after a 1st inning that saw him walk the bases loaded in roughly 3,923 pitches, but from there the man was dominant, striking out 9 and holding the Rays hitless until a Carl Crawford single in the 7th. Buster Olney described Dice-K’s pitching as “rope-a-dope”, which seems just about right. A lesser reporter would call it “effectively wild”, but when one is Asian, one gets a bit more leniency that they’re being purposefully deceptive. Papelbon closed it out with a perfect inning and presumably did his goofy dance alone in the privacy of his hotel room. On the Rays side of the game, not much happened. James Shields pitched well enough to win, but Carl Crawford gave the BoSox a gift run when a ball bounced off his mitt. Carlos Pena ended any threat of a comeback by deciding to take Joe Maddon up on his 3-0 green light signal in the 7th, popping into a weak fly ball. As far as brawls go – this marks our greatest chance for a classic postseason fight, after all – there wasn’t much to get excited about. Grant Balfour hit J.D. Drew in the shoulder which caused Dustin Pedroia to go to the first step of the dugout and do his best Caveman impression, but besides that, peace prevailed.