After a long, tortuous layoff, Beckett-Sabathia, at last!

But I say all of this to say that today is painful just because seven straight months of baseball every day suddenly ends today.

The above words are taken from the Most Valuable Network's Rockies blog, which also features a great series-clinching entry you should read. Over the course of a long season, baseball acquires a certain rhythm that fans grow accustomed to, and when it's suddenly interrupted -- by rain, snow (God forbid) or corporate greed -- it leaves us feeling all a little emptier inside, a little worse off.

Alas, it returns! (If Cleveland clinches today and we're forced to endure a five-day layoff, I don't know what I'd do.) And with that return we get Josh Beckett -- who last pitched in a Game 5 in 2003, leading his Marlins, down three games to one, past the Cubs -- against C.C. Sabathia, the likely Cy Young winner who's had two poor postseason outings (he did throw 241 innings in the regular season). Personally, I can't see the Red Sox not taking this back to Boston, but then again, I'm not the prognosticator that Royals Nation over at The Royal Treatment is.

Questions abound: will Cleveland rock its socks off? will Bostonians weep, Woe is us! and fail to acknowledge the Sox lost to the superior team? will Manny forget to be Manny, thus being Manny? will we see GagMe?

POSTSCRIPT 1: My thanks to Steve, the commenter in the previous entry, for 1) pointing out that Joe Posnanski also wrote about Chief Wahoo yesterday (and got 132 (and counting) comments), and 2) reminding me that Joe Posnanski's blog is active again. If you haven't already -- try it, you'll like it.

Excerpt:

I was talking with Royals general manager Dayton Moore afterward, and this came up. Moore said: "You know Bob Knight used to be one of my heroes." Guy’s got a dry sense of humor. Then Dayton brought up a really good point. He said: "Funny, Bob must have thought they could contend at Texas Tech."

That's our Dayton!