Swing and a Miss

It's hard to believe it's been only one month since the Red Sox won the World Series. In some ways it feels like much longer, and in others it's like only yesterday. So of course, in an effort to hold on to those good ole days, I made sure to go right out and pick up my copy of the World Series Highlights DVD on Tuesday (on sale for just $11.88 at Newbury Comics), and I watched it soon after I got home.

The film starts out with a great montage of Sox clips, showing the boys having fun — all while the Dropkick Murphys' "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" plays, of course. It's an opening that makes you smile and sets the scene for what should be an equally great film. If only the rest was as good. While the 2004 Highlights DVD was a fantastic recap of the year — from Spring Training on — told entirely from the Sox perspective, this one is exactly as marketed: a recap of the World Series, and it's told from both sides. It takes just 10 minutes to get through the entire Red Sox season, from Opening Day to the end of the ALCS, and in moving so quickly, there's very little flavor and very little of what was so memorable about the season. There's no mention at all of Clay Buchholz or his no-hitter, nothing about Schilling's one-hitter, no recap of the hype that greeted Dice-K, very little about the back-to-back-to-back-to-back homer game against the Yankees, nothing about the Mother's Day Miracle, no Ellsbury, no Wakefield ... nothing. And then there's an equally quick summary of the Rockies' road to the Series. And then we're at Game One, after only 24 minutes. (In the 2004 film, it took a half hour just to recap the Sox season, with almost nothing on St. Louis.)

Major League Baseball would have you believe that this was a closer series than it was, because it's presented as such. Never mind that the Sox swept the Rockies and won comfortably in two of the four games. It's all very businesslike and by-the-book. While there are talking head interviews and soundbites from Pap and Mikey Lowell and Jacoby Ellsbury and Curt Schilling and Theo and others, they're all pretty staid and without character, simply recapping the games and not sharing much emotion or personality. Sure, this season didn't have the same drama that 2004 did, but it was definitely more exciting than this. Even Matt Damon, who narrates the film, seems bored by the whole thing. Clearly, MLB Productions, in an effort to make the film appealing to Rockies fans, neutered a lot of the pro-Sox slant and tried to make this as fair a film as possible. Rockies players and personnel are as plentiful as Sox folks. And in making it all so balanced, they've produced an ultimately disappointing one-hour-and-10-minute highlights reel that, for a Sox fan, doesn't really recapture the glory of being World Series Champions. What a bummer.

Perhaps the best parts of the DVD are the extra features, including my favorite one, a recap of the night the Sox won the AL East. You get the last two outs at Fenway courtesy of NESN, then the last out in Baltimore (plus Millar's strikeout) from the actual broadcast in Baltimore, and a bit of Papelbon et al dancing on the field. I wish there was more of that kind of stuff, the dancing and all, on the actual film. After all, this DVD should be a celebration of and a tribute to the World Series Champs, right? But it's good to have at least some of the coverage in the bonus section. And I'll always have my memories of the actual games, and the actual season. Those are things this DVD could never document as well anyway.