(Hat tip: Boston Red Sox Nation) OK, I don’t know what the title of this post says, so don’t blame me if it translates into “Hillary for President 2008!”. But I can tell you this – it sure ain’t, “Son of a bitch, the freakin’ Yankees beat us out again!” And I’m sure as hell sure it doesn’t spell out “J-o-s-e C-o-n-t-r-e-r-a-s”, either.

Whatever. May I say that I am 100% absotively, TOTALLY psyched at the news of the Red Sox winning the rights to negotiate with Japanese phenom hurler Daisuke Matsuzaka. This is a big win for the Red Sox, in two ways: 1) it affords them the opportunity to sign someone who, by most accounts, is heads and tails above the bland array of free agent starters (i.e., Jason Schmidt, Barry Zito, etc.) out there this year, and 2) They beat the freakin’ Yankees at their own game of “Can you top this, sucker?”. I’m absolutely certain that, at this very moment, Herr Steinbrenner is downing double martinis at his local watering hole while at the same time chewing Yankee GM Brian Cashman‘s ear off over the telephone for hors-d’oeuvres.

God, it must wild on the Boston sports talk radio tonight. The Celtics $uck, the Bruins are in ruins, and the Pats have fallen to earth. It may be cool and gray in Beantown, but for Sox fans everywhere, the question is, how many days until the truck leaves Fenway Park for Fort Myers?

Sure, there’s this wee matter of being on the clock, having only 30 days to negotiate with über-agent Scott Boras to come to an agreement, but you don’t throw an estimated $51 mil at a problem and then walk away because of pennies on the dollar. Theo knows this is his big fish, and he ain’t gonna let him off the hook.

(Sure it’s a lot of money, but the way I figure it, it ain’t mine, and professional sports ceased to be true sport a long time ago. It’s now an entertainment industry and it’s all about media, marketing, and money. You can bemoan it all you want – but those days are long since past, and I’d prefer to just be a fan of the Red Sox and not worry about how many nations’ GDP the average professional sports team’s budget dwarfs every year.)

The potential of a starting rotation of Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, Matsuzaka, Jonathan Papelbon and Tim Wakefield may not guarantee anything when it comes to baseball success in 2007, but you have to – at least on paper – figure the Sox would have one of the top starting rotations in the bigs. Everyone knows, of course, that World Series aren’t won on paper – eh, Joe Torre and “E”-Rod, but with a little bit of guts and more than a few dead Presidents, the Sox have made 2007 one of the most anticipated seasons in memory – at least since 2004.

The heck with all the sanctimonious baseball writers just itching to get their knives into the Sox and their prospective new hurler.

In Theo we trust.