"Strange Days are here...."

A season filled with incredible streaks and surreal plays has this baseball lifer scratching his head

Lugo's brilliant bit of baseball deception was just the latest in a long line of unbelieveable plays this year

Okay, let's get this out of the way- I'm no Don "Gerbil" Zimmer or Tommy "Swirly" LaSorda when it comes to time served in the department of viewing baseball games, but in my 39 years I have attended hundreds of contests live and watched thousands more on the tube, and then either talked, wrote, or in Boston, often fought about said contests later.

But all I can say is in all this time I have never seen a team go through a fun & freaky stretch of baseball as Boston has to begin the 2007 season.

Now forget about the hot start and the large division lead; that kinda shit has happens occasionally, such as the Tigers' 35-5 start in '84, and it's even happened with the Sox, most infamously in 197bleepin'8.

Except when that hot start morphs into a team with the best record in baseball and largest division lead the team has ever enjoyed after 50 games, not to mention a monthlong double-digit lead over its hated arch rival, it doesn't take a diehard fan to realize your team's got something special going on.

Throw in some record-setting streaks from a multitude of players, such as Youk's multi-hit game mark, Beckett's wins w/o a loss chase, and Dice-K's three-game strikeout binge, and you've got a cauldron of championship ingredients just waiting to boil.

This is where the mystical, head-scratching shit comes in, because I don't think even Encyclopedia Pete Gammons has seen a string of plays and feats pulled of by and against the Red Sox in the first two+ months of this season.

A short list of the eerie events include:

• banging back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs against the Stanks in an incredible Sunday Night Baseball game (4/22)
• coming back from a 5-0 9th inning deficit to defeat BAL on Mom's Day (5/13)
• Eric Hinske's game-saving catch and game-winning homer against DET (5/17)
• Youk's inside-the-park homer against CLE (5/28-Memorial Day)
• losing consecutive games on late-inning homers within 24 hours (6/2-6/3)
• Oakland's Mark Ellis hitting for the cycle on Tuesday (6/5)
• Coco's twin over-the-shoulder catches in back-to-back games against OAK (6/6-6/7)
• Schill tossing a near no-hitter on Thursday (6/7)

...and the capper in last night's game..

• J.D. Drew ripping a career best two homers & 7 RBIs in the same game that Julio Lugo pulled a hidden ball trick against an unsuspecting young D-Back (6/8)

Call me crazy, but I don't believe there has ever been so many rare & exciting plays happen to one team in such a short period of time.

Things like inside-the-parkers, no hitters, cycles and hidden ball plays are scarce enough occurrences in & of themselves, but when you throw them all together in a span of a few weeks, it's time to start looking in the stands for Agents Scully & Mulder.

Maybe it's the spirit of Ted Williams' cryogenically frozen dome, or the fact that one of the greatest thriller writers of our generation is a lifelong Sox diehard, but whatever it is the reason these things are happening to our team, the only thing I know is the propensity for the unthinkable to happen at any time with this team has made for a fantastic and magical season so far.

I wonder what's in store for us tonight...

...perhaps a...Julian Tavarez victory (shriek!gasp!oohaah!)