When Thursday night's rain-delayed game finally came to an end, a distraught David Ortiz met the media in the Red Sox clubhouse.
He chewed out the media, throwing a temper tantrum fit for a grade school classroom instead of a place where adults conduct business, and blamed them for taking a fastball to the ribs in the fourth inning.
After all the chatter about bat flips and the fact that Ortiz had never been hit before by the Yankees, Big Papi thought the media was to blame for a pitch to his ample midsection.
He should have looked across the clubhouse to Josh Beckett, who hit Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez earlier in the contest, but that's neither here nor there.
That kind of whiny reaction hours after the incident leads to two thoughts. The first is that it is a shame that CC Sabathia didn't hit him in the mouth (not really, but grow up) and the second is that the Yankees must have pounded the Red Sox.
Alas, our whiny Papi is just someone who puts himself before the team because the Red Sox left the Bronx with their second straight sweep of the Yankees. Sabathia cruised through six innings, but fell apart in the seventh as the Sox posted seven runs en route to an 8-3 win.
Because baseball is a game that always makes room for a dramatic narrative, Ortiz started the rally with a single and ended it with a two-run double off of David Robertson. For most people, that (and the fact that New York was spared the music of the Black Eyed Peas) would be enough to make it a happy night, but Ortiz wasn't ready to smile.
Despite all the shots we've taken at him in this post, we can kind of understand it. Beating the Yankees for the eighth time in nine games can't possibly offer the Red Sox or Ortiz any joy at this point in the season.
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It's been such thorough domination -- the two Bronx sweeps haven't happened in the same season since 1912 -- that you can't really blame a guy from focusing on things other than the result. The Red Sox expect to beat the Yankees right now and that's not going to change unless the Yankees address some of the flaws on their roster before the teams renew hostilities later in the summer.
That leads us to the worst part of the whole thing. The problem for the Yankees right now isn't that they are a terrible team.
It was just three days ago that everyone felt awfully good about the Yankees coming off of a 6-3 west coast trip and they remain one of the best teams in baseball. The problem is that the Red Sox are clearly and demonstrably better.
That can change over a long season, see 2009 for proof, but we know who the best team in the American League is right now.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
