FanHouse

In the Playoff Pulse series, our MLB editor takes on a hot October topic.

With a rather sizable assist from Mike Scioscia's hubris-fueled devotion to smallball, the Red Sox are headed back to the ALCS for the fourth time in six years. If recent history tells us anything, Boston might fall behind early -- as they did against New York in 2004 (3-0) and Cleveland in 2007 (3-1) -- but it will find a way to win the series.

These are, after all, the Red Sox. They've been there before. They're Major League Baseball's model franchise. They have dominant starting pitching, a lights-out closer and a mix of experienced veterans and budding youngsters.

But while Boston basks in another winning playoff series, let's take a moment to consider how many problems it is facing as it tries to win another World Series and establish baseball's first dynasty since the Yankees of the late 1990s.

There is a veritable laundry list of concerns:

If there's one commandment that all major league managers should follow I think it's probably this: put your players in position to win baseball games and then let them win it. The worst managers are the ones that try to insert their own strategic visions on teams where simple performance from the players would suffice. Mike Scioscia, a man who is generally lauded as a "great" manager in the press for "doing things right," failed to follow this credo in Game 4 of the ALDS agains the Red Sox and as a result, he lost to them again.

A squeeze bunt. With a left-handed hitter. On a 2-0 count. With one out. With K-Rod in the bullpen. With Game 5 in Angel Stadium and a five-inning start from Dice-K waiting for you if you win. With the top of the order on deck. If you could define "taking the game out of the hands of the players," it would be a video of Erick Aybar's ill-fated bunt attempt in the ninth inning of last night's game with Mike Scioscia staring blankly on to the field as his season went up in flames.

You can tell me Aybar had eight sac bunts this year. I don't care. You can tell me it was a buntable pitch. I don't care. You can tell me the ump got the call wrong when Varitek dropped the ball. I don't care. There are a million ways for the Angels to score Reggie Willits from third base with two chances. There are a million things that can go wrong on a squeeze play. Try to imagine Terry Francona making the same call. You can't do it. Now remember that Francona's teams are 9-1 against Scioscia's in the playoffs. There is an old baseball adage that applies here; bad managers lose far more games than good managers win. Mike Scioscia lost Game 4 for the Angels last night.

During tonight's Saints-Vikings game in New Orleans, Reggie Bush took a handoff and was met near the line of scrimmage by Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway. Greenway grabbed Bush's facemask and pulled, jerking Bush's head toward him, and then knocked the ball out of Bush's arm.

The Vikings jumped on the ball, but that shouldn't have mattered. The Vikings would be called for facemasking, the Saints would accept the penalty, and they'd have the ball, first-and-10. Right?

Wrong. The officials missed the facemasking. How they missed it I have no idea: This was a blatant facemask, the kind of clip you'd show to someone who didn't know anything about football if you wanted to explain what facemasking was. There is absolutely no excuse for the officials not calling it.

But they didn't call it, and the fact that the crew that missed the call is led by referee Ed Hochuli is going to be another black mark on Hochuli's record. Heading into this season, Hochuli was probably the most highly respected referee in the NFL. But between his horrendous call on Jay Cutler's Week 2 fumble and tonight's blown call by Hochuli's crew, that reputation is gone.

Of course, the real culprit in all of this is the NFL, which continues to have absolutely idiotic rules when it comes to instant replay. If you're going to have instant replay at all, why isn't facemasking reviewable?

Hey, it's one of those early-season "must-win" games! The 1-3 Vikings travel to New Orleans to face the 2-2 Saints. A lot of people had both teams as preseason favorites to make deep playoff runs, and as it stands, only the Lions stand between the Vikes and last place in the NFC North, and the Saints are in the NFC South basement looking up at ... wait, the Falcons? For real?

Whatever, we'll be live-bloggin' it up tonight, Fun starts at 8:15-ish.

The Angels won a game in the playoffs. Against the Red Sox. At Fenway Park. I know that seems improbable given recent history, but it happened. And if the Angels want a Game 5, it's going to have to happen again tonight. Interestingly, the Angels chose the schedule with an extra day of rest, so Jon Lester and John Lackey take the mound on regular rest tonight. The Angels might regret that choice given the way Lester dominated them over seven shutout innings in Game 1.

The game starts at 8:30, as the Red Sox try to become the final team to join the LCS fray (assuming the Rays current lead holds up) and the Angels try to force a decisive Game 5. Follow along after the jump as my fellow FanHouse luminaries and I chronicle the events.

While titans like Shaq and Dirk plot their farewell tours, Steve Nash tells the media he'll play at least four more years, and perhaps longer. When the time comes for Nash to negotiate an extension with the Suns, fans in Phoenix and pundits elsewhere will knot their eyelashes and stare deeply into their knuckles, retching over whether it's a good idea to bestow 1/6th of the team's total salary cap upon a 37- and 38-year-old point guard with a million miles and a bad back.

There will be no ponderous hedging from me, however. While at that point just a quiet fan and not a blogging monkey, I felt immense skepticism at the six-year, $60 million deal Phoenix handed to Nash in 2004. The thinking: if Mark Cuban, a guy whose seat to view Nash on and off the court in Dallas was closer than that of 99.9% of us, and an owner who had lavished some rather outlandish contracts on NBA players -- if he balked at a deal like that for Nash, then he had reason.

I still have no clue what reason Cuban had, beyond the same inferences that rubes like me conjured up. Sure, Nash has been reinvented and refined in Phoenix, thanks to the Suns trainers and quite possibly Nash's own earnest intentions to make good on his end of the deal given the scrutiny surrounding the contract. Did Cuban just not grok Nash's drive, or did he have some internal gut feeling Nash's back would render him useless near the front-end of the contract? We'll never know, and it doesn't really matter much in the end.

What does matter: I'm not doubting Nash again. Are you? If he says he can play until age 38 and possibly longer, you won't find me debating the suggestion. Nash has worked as hard as you could possibly want on tweaking his body and his game to perform at maximum capability. He has, more or less, become a complex machine. So long as his production remains stratospheric, I'll defer to him on questions of his basketball life span. I'd suggest you do the same.

Seth Petruzelli knocked out Kimbo Slice in 14 seconds on Saturday night, but in one respect, Kimbo is getting the last laugh: He got paid 10 times as much money as Petruzelli.

The official payroll reported to the Florida State Boxing Commission shows that EliteXC paid Kimbo $500,000 to fight Petruzelli, who made only $50,000 for his efforts. Petruzelli's base pay was $35,000, and he got an extra $15,000 as a bonus for winning. If Kimbo had won, he would have received an additional bonus of $100,000.

Obviously, what this means is that if you're a professional fighter, you're paid primarily for the number of people you can get to watch your fights, not for your performance in the cage. And since most of the people were watching that fight because of Kimbo, that means Kimbo gets most of the money.

By all accounts, Rich Eisen seems like a nice enough guy. He does a great job on NFL Network, as he did at ESPN, and never really ruffles any feathers. I guess the same can't be said about his wife and former ABC sportscaster Suzy Shuster, who writes a little for The Huffington Post.

Shuster decided on Friday that the Sarah Palin act had gone too far, only it wasn't the "I'm a good ol' fashioned mom" act that led Tina Fey to revive her Saturday Night Live career, no, the act Schuster takes offense to is the supposed "quit flaunting your five-month old baby Trig" act that only Shuster seems to take offense to. Trig, as you probably know, is Palin's youngest child, who was also diagnosed with Down Syndrome.

It actually came after the debate, when for seemingly the millionth time, Sarah Palin trotted out her piece de resistance, her favorite prop of this campaign season: her five and a half month old son Trig.

Why is this child up so late every time there is a camera op? Why isn't this baby sleeping in a crib or bassinet somewhere with a sleep sheep or some other sound apparatus lulling him into night-night? Is it just me or does it seem like she carts this poor child around like a living breathing example of how wonderful a mom she is? After all, she's more than adopted the "I'm just a mom, just like you moms out there, America" attitude.

The White Sox rode the left arm of John Danks to stay alive in their ALDS series with the Rays. Today, we see a matchup of two talented pitchers making their playoff debuts: Andy Sonnanstine for the Rays, Gavin Floyd for Chicago.

Who cracks? Who shines? Is this series going back to the Trop, or do the Rays start scouting that Angels/Red Sox game tonight? Find out along with us in a very special "FanHouse Live Chat"!

Now that EliteXC's most famous fighter, Kimbo Slice, has been exposed as a fraud, the promotion is looking for ways to make its second-most famous fighter, Gina Carano, a bigger star.

One way they're doing that, I've been told, is that they're trying to book Carano on The View.

And really, that makes perfects sense. I've always thought that one of the best ways EliteXC could take MMA mainstream is to get more female fans to take an interest in the female fighters. I imagine the overlap in viewership between MMA and The View is close to zero, so that means every single viewer of The View who starts watching EliteXC because of Carano is a viewer EliteXC wouldn't have otherwise.

I'm not sure what kinds of questions Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg would ask Carano, but I hope they ask her how much she weighs.