America at Large: 'You've gotta be shitting me," sighed Joe Gil. "I cost the Red Sox the World Series?" Joe Guiliotti is a former baseball writer for the Boston Herald. Before he retired in 1999, we spent 20 summers travelling around the country, or at least the American League, together.

His passion for the game was such that, even after handing in his laptop, he opted to keep his hand in by intermittently serving as the Official Scorer at Boston's Fenway Park. He was there in that role over the weekend when the hated New York Yankees came to town for a five-game series, the collective result of which has already been anointed "The Boston Massacre".

Even as the Sox slipped behind the Yankees in the standings by midsummer, their ardent supporters had pointed to the coming five games, which would be played in the space of four days in late August, on the schedule, eyeing the confrontation as a means of restoring the universe to its proper order.

When the New Yorkers disembarked in Boston last Friday, the Yanks held a slender, game-and-a-half advantage in the American League East.

When they left town Monday night, the lead had grown to six-and-a-half games, and the pennant race had been rendered a shambles. The Yankees had outscored the Sox 49-26 over the weekend, taking all five games.

It was the first time the Yankees had taken 5-of-5 from the Red Sox since 1951 - and that was in New York.

The sweep was utterly embarrassing, and the devastation was felt all across New England. That much of the damage was wrought by centrefielder Johnny Damon, who defected from Boston to New York over the winter after signing a four-year $52-million contract, only exacerbated the pain.

(When the multi-talented Damon, whose only real weakness is a substandard throwing arm, signed on with the Evil Empire, he agreed to shear his shoulder-length locks and shave his trademark beard in compliance with the grooming standards of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, thus inspiring a derisive riddle among Boston fans: "What looks like Jesus, acts like Judas and throws like Mary?")

"Everything," sighed Boston manager Terry Francona after the abysmal weekend, "went about as wrong as it could."

Now, you might assume that being beaten like a rented mule by their most detested rivals might have provided the Boston team with a lesson in abject humility, but on the eve of Monday night's finale (which would prove to be a 2-1 New York win) here's what the manager was seething about: "In my opinion, it was a horrendous call, and I think the bleeping scorer ought to be embarrassed," Francona complained to Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe.

The official scorer nominally works (for $40 a game, or at least that's what it paid in my day) under the auspices of Major League Baseball. For well over a century the position was passed around as a perk among sportswriters looking to pad their paltry incomes, but in recent years politically correct newspapers concerned about conflict-of-interest issues have discouraged their employees from double-dipping, meaning the function has increasingly fallen to retired experts like Joe Gil.

It should probably be pointed out as well that the official scorer's is strictly a record-keeping position. This is important in a sport that relies so heavily on statistics, but whether the scorer deems the result of a controversial play a "hit" or an "error" has absolutely no effect on the outcome of a game. It is, or should be, a matter of consequence only to the three people whose statistics are affected: the fielder charged with the error; the pitcher, whose "earned run average" may be mitigated if his team-mates are adjudged to have been co-conspirators in the number of runs he has surrendered; and the hitter, whose batting average could be affected by as much as two or three-hundredths of a percentage point by the judgment call.

In the fifth inning of Friday night's second game, Manny Ramirez, the moody Boston leftfielder, hit a ball sharply to shortstop and reached base when the ball caromed off the glove of Yankees captain Derek Jeter. Guiliotti, ruling the play was one Jeter might have been expected to make, deemed it an error.

The Yankees went on to win that game 14-11, and afterwards Ramirez was still seething - not over his team having lost the first two games of the critical series, but over having been deprived of a base hit by the official scorer.

Baseball players are loath to discuss their team-mates' foibles, but a couple of days later the story began to emerge when Sean McAdam of the Providence Journal reported, "Ramirez was enraged by the call, and was so angry about it the next day that he had to be talked into playing the Saturday afternoon game."

Ramirez did play on Saturday, but two days later he was still sulking, and claiming a "sore hamstring" (although he did not appear to be limping), the Red Sox' most feared batter removed himself from the line-up in the fourth inning without bothering to inform the manager. (A team trainer passed the word to Francona.)

Ramirez's team-mates, accustomed to his selfish mood swings, were willing to write off the show of petulance as the latest episode of "Manny being Manny".

The manager himself, on the other hand, defended his superstar, pointing to Guiliotti's scoring decision as if it had been the pivotal moment in the five-game New York sweep.

"I can't believe there's such a flap over this," Guiliotti told Shaughnessy. "Francona ought to be embarrassed after what happened over the weekend. I would think he's got more to worry about than that."