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leviramsey Enthusiast

leviramsey

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Phillies fan arrested in sex-for-Series-tickets scheme

A Philadelphia woman charged with offering sex for World Series tickets says she's embarrassed about her arrest, but did nothing wrong and is still hopeful of attending a game.

"I didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein told the Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday, a day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an ad on Craigslist.

Finkelstein's lawyer said his client is merely "a nice lady overcome with Phillies fever."

She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist ad but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said.

The 43-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student wanted to take her husband to a game between her beloved Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. The self-described "buxom blonde" said she was simply trying to score tickets online, as she had in the past.

Over a few beers at a suburban bar, she told a police officer she needed two tickets, one for herself and one for her husband. No price had been discussed, and Finkelstein and her lawyer stopped short of recounting specifics of what was said before several officers sitting at a nearby table came to arrest her.

Brennan hopes to get the misdemeanor charge of promoting prostitution dismissed.

"If somebody read into that posting a sexual connotation, that's on them. There's no overt sexual reference," Brennan said.

Finkelstein told WPVI-TV she was looking to get a deal on tickets.

"I was hoping to get cheap tickets," she said, "maybe meet someone, and talk, and bat my eyelashes and maybe get some tickets."

Finkelstein faces a preliminary hearing in Bucks County on Dec. 3. On the bright side, she's been offered a pair of tickets to a weekend game in Philadelphia, courtesy of a radio station and car dealer.

"It definitely wasn't worth all this ... turmoil and anxiety," she told the AP with her lawyer and husband, 56-year-old John LaVoy, on the line. "Hopefully, the silver lining is I do get to see the game."

She is not worried about the notoriety that might follow her to the stadium in the wake of national news coverage of her arrest.

"I think most people will be focused on the game," Finkelstein said.

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leviramsey Enthusiast

leviramsey

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This Tony Massarotti column has set off a bit of a firestorm in New England

I am rooting for the Yankees. Under the circumstances, you should too.

Let us all acknowledge that the Red Sox have started to grow a little stale. Many of us have grown complacent, if not downright spoiled. The large majority of us now treat the baseball postseason as a birthright more than a blessing, a once-unthinkable development for a franchise that made four trips to the postseason from the start of the 1919 season through the end of the 1987 campaign.

Last year, a season immediately following a world title, local television ratings for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN dropped nearly 20 percent. This year, they dropped an additional 7 percent. The Sox are producing fewer golden eggs than they have at perhaps any other point during the era of John Henry’s ownership, which cannot help but make you wonder if they need a crisis the way a depressed nation might need a war.

Be honest with yourselves, folks.

The fire is not burning quite as hot as it once did.

Enter the Yankees, who went out last offseason and did precisely what the Red Sox need to do now. They reloaded. New York brought in CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett while outmaneuvering the Red Sox for Mark Teixeira, adding three players who shared more than just talent. Those new Yankees never really had won anything before. Even Burnett, who was injured during the Marlins’ run to the world title in 2003, recently acknowledged that he was nothing more than a bystander when Florida upset the Yankees that season.

Translation: The Yankees are hungry. If it weren’t enough that they have gone eight full seasons without a world title - in New York, those add up like dog years - they brought in even more players in search of fulfillment. The combination of talent and desire produced 103 regular-season victories and brought the Yankees into the World Series, which began last night.

For the Red Sox and their following, nothing strikes a nerve quite like another parade down the Canyon of Heroes. The irony is that another such celebration could be the best thing to happen to the Sox at this moment in team history, with the Sox having made six playoff appearances in seven years. Things in Boston have reached the point where we all but write in the Sox for 95 wins, a terribly presumptuous and downright arrogant gesture. The Sox, as much as any team in sports, should know better.

The truth, of course, is that it takes more than talent to win. It takes some luck and some hunger or greed, too. (Greed is good.) Part of the reason the Sox lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Championship Series last season was that the Rays were healthier. Part of the reason was that the Rays were hungrier. The disturbing reality for Bostonians this year is that the Sox really ended up no better than the Rays did - neither team won a postseason game - and that the only difference entering 2010 is that the Sox have more money to spend.

As for the relatively new Moneyball theory that postseason success is arbitrary, be careful what you wish for. For starters, the Yankees qualified for the postseason every year from 2001 to 2007 but failed to win a World Series. Was it arbitrary then? Were the Red Sox’ title years of 2004 and 2007 a statistical fluke? Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein himself called such thinking “a crutch’’ after the Angels wiped out the Sox in the Division Series this month, and even that assessment was conservative.

In a market like Boston or New York, rationalizing postseason failure by pinning it on a roulette wheel is an absolute cop-out, the ultimate loser’s mentality.

Nobody ever said sports were entirely fair and nobody ever said winning was easy. But more often than not, in baseball especially, you get what you deserve.

In this World Series, the Yankees encounter a fitting opponent. The Philadelphia Phillies are the reigning world champions. While the Phillies have a suspect relief corps, they have (at least on paper) the hitters to match up with the Yankees and the lefthanded starting pitching to take on the New York lineup.

The Phillies are more than capable of winning this series, and logic suggests that many New Englanders will be rooting against New York out of pure instinct and emotion.

Here’s a tip: Use your head. We all could use a dose of reality and humility. The Yankees are loaded, they aren’t going away anytime soon, and maybe it’s time we all remember what the Red Sox are up against every year. A restoration of Yankee rule may be as grotesque and incomprehensible to you as the existence of Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, but do not underestimate the impact of another world title in New York on the passion and competitive fire in this region.

You want them on that wall. You need them on that wall.

It gives you something to fight for.

This, meanwhile more closely resembles my view

Normally, the only people around here with more than a passing interest in a World Series that doesn’t involve the Red Sox are the handful of serious fans who genuinely love the game and the legions of degenerate gamblers who are genuinely the only reason the local Mafia hasn’t filed for Chapter 11.

But this year is different.

With apologies to Le Monde, Nous Sommes Tous Philadelphians.

God bless Philadelphians and their baseball team. They are lucky enough to get the chance to do what we long to do, what we lust to do: beat the Yankees.

This is culturally and historically appropriate. Philly and Boston are practically brothers. Philadelphia is Boston with cheese steaks. Both cities have Napoleon complexes and inexplicable accents.

In Colonial and Revolutionary times, the two most important cities in the nation were Boston and Philadelphia. Both have lost considerable clout in the intervening two centuries, much of it to the heaving, snarling, massive metropolis that sits between them.

New York’s ascendancy has left people in Boston and Philly with a healthy inferiority complex. Hence, the tendency among not a small number of Bostonians and Philadelphians to define themselves not so much by what they are as what they’re proudly not: New Yorkers.

The Yankees have won the World Series 26 times, the Red Sox seven, and the Phils just twice, including last year.

In Boston, we like to think the Curse is well behind us. Most of us treated the recent Game 3 meltdown against the Angels as an isolated incident, not a return to form. But the truth is, unlike New Yorkers, who fully expect to win everything, we still only say we expect to win. Believing it amounts to a conceit that Bostonians and Philadelphians won’t allow themselves and resent in others.

In his classic study, “Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,’’ the eminent University of Pennsylvania scholar E. Digby Baltzell argues that Philadelphia produced a tolerant elite that was lousy at leadership, while Boston’s Brahmins were less tolerant but took their civic responsibility more seriously.

Dan Rubin, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, arrived here yesterday looking for some advice from the leaders in how to be less tolerant of the Yankees.

“We’re new to this,’’ Rubin said. “We don’t particularly like New Yorkers, but we really have no experience in hating the Yankees.’’

So he came to the place where it’s an art form.

“Boston and Philadelphia have shared famous sons,’’ Dan Rubin said.

Such as?

“Ben Franklin and Irving Fryar,’’ Dan Rubin said.

Not to mention Pedro Martinez, who is scheduled to pitch Game 2 for the Phillies.

Alas, Professor Baltzell died, in Boston, 13 years ago. But there is another Penn professor, Art Caplan, who sees his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia as kindred spirits. Caplan is an esteemed bioethicist. He is also something of a masochist: He married a Yankees fan.

“A North Jersey girl,’’ he said. “Don’t get me started.’’

Caplan said Philly and Boston are cut from the same cloth - the parochial neighborhoods, the abundance of crooked pols, the shared resentment of New York entitlement.

Caplan grew up in Framingham. He remains a Red Sox fan first, a Phillies fan second, and a Yankees hater always.

“I’d like to think that Red Sox fans will be at home and in the bars, cheering on the Phillies,’’ Caplan said.

Rest assured, perfesser. Last night, Dan Rubin was getting schooled at Cornwalls in Kenmore Square, where John Beale cooks a mean blue cheeseburger under the Citgo sign, just a Ryan Howard fly ball away from Fenway Park. Rubin was learning much from his new best friends. When it comes to the Yankees, Boston and Philadelphia are the cities of brotherly hate.

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