TBS found their way into the anals (mispelling intentional) of sports history last night by bringing us “The Steve Harvey Game” when a router went bad in their Atlanta, rendering them technically unable to show the pregame or first inning of the Red Sox vs. Tampa Rays game 6 ALCS series.

A few random observations:

• Football has the “Heidi” game.  Baseball now has the “Steve Harvey” game.  Being unable to show the pregame or first inning is an utter black eye and I’m sure Ted Turner is busy drawing up his pink list and checking it twice, and it ain’t gonna matter if you were naughty or nice.
• In my experience, it’s always a router.  We must pay Cisco really well for them, since they’re the universal scapegoat of IT departments everywhere.  Somewhere, at the bottom of the credit debacle and subsequent stock market implosion, there is an IT guy explaining to a CTO that it was casued by a router that went bad.  The Titanic? Iceberg?  No, it was a stinkin’ router…
• It was utterly comical watching the bozos at the Chinese Restaurant I was in argue with the owner that it was his fault they were watching The Steve Harvey Show.  I had to step in to stop it from escalating to blood shed.
• In a bizarre turn of events, a couple of the guys at the Boston College football game were getting the play by play from MLB.com and providing detail via Twitter.  Funny how a major broadcast network is knocked off the air while the spit and bailing wire service of Twitter is stable.
• Apparently MLB is too cheap to have a spare umpire on hand, which provides a single point of failure for their entire system.  One umpire goes down and they have to send another out from the warehouse in Santa Fe.
• The folks at New Era have been doing a land office business on Ray’s gear of late.  The team that feels it newsworthy to announce they actually sold out an ALCS game, will soon be explaining to all those newly minted fans, with their crisp, just out of the wrapper jerseys and hats, how the wheels came off their bandwagon so easily.
• How presumptuous is it for a guy who’s never won a World Series to have the moniker “Big Game James.”  If anyone ever was a “Big Game” guy, it’s Beckett.  Or is James “Big Game” because he is so easily hunted down and killed?

It ain’t over kids.  9 more innings for one of these two teams to get the chance to taste Phillies flesh.  While I like the Red Sox chances, the boys need to keep focused and remember this is a knife fight and only winners walk away.

I’ll offer one prediction: this is the World Series tonight in a single game.  Miss it at your peril.