After owning the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for so long, the Boston Red Sox finally got owned in the playoffs. But not before Boston pulled one of the tackiest moves in years, with an insulting first pitch ceremony designed to trash-talk the opposition.

The Angels got sweep revenge against the Red Sox, beating Jonathan Papelbon and the Sox at Fenway Park to win the ALDS Sunday. The two teams had faced off in the playoffs in 1986, 2004, 2007, and 2008, with the Sox prevailing every single time. Boston had won 12 of their last 13 playoff games against L.A. The Sox had also beaten the Angels a ton in the regular season, most notably in a Fenway series last month that seemed to infuriate the Angels.

But even though the Sox, of all teams, should know that such streaks don’t last forever, Boston appeared to think that they would always dominate Los Angeles. They even tried to taunt the Angels by bringing out Dave Henderson before Sunday’s game to throw out the first pitch. Yes, Dave Henderson, the player who hit that famous ninth-inning homer off Angels reliever Donnie Moore in the 1986 ALCS, when the Angels were one strike away of going to the World Series for the first time. If you may remember, Moore, in one of the more tragic stories in baseball history, never got over ultimately losing the game. He killed himself three years later.

While Henderson is justly remembered as a Sox hero, the timing of honoring him there Sunday did not go over well in Angels Nation.

Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker described the scene before Sunday’s Sox loss:

The Red Sox brought [Henderson] back to toss the first pitch Sunday, a desperate move in a desperate situation. Henderson looked at the Angel dugout, pointed, smiled and did the same spinning hop he executed when he tied Game 5 in the 1986 American League Championship Series, a mocking blow that left graffiti on the Big A for nearly a  generation.

Nice!

Don’t think the Angels didn’t notice the intention behind flying in Henderson:

“That was terrible,” Angels center fielder Torii Hunter said. “I love Dave Henderson, but looking at that, I’m like, ‘What are they trying to say?’ They probably shouldn’t have brought him out. It was bad luck, I guess.”

Bad luck, indeed. What the heck were the Sox thinking there? Didn’t anybody in Red Sox Nation remember what happened in 2004, when the Yankees did a similar thing to them?  I saw that in person, when I attended Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS. On that night, the Yankees, instead of coming up with a coherent game strategy, brought out 1978 Sox nemesis Bucky Dent to throw the first pitch. That move smacked of both arrogance and desperation, the way the Henderson moment did.

Even at the time, this Yankee fan thought it was disrespectful and insulting, as if the Red Sox were going to start weeping in the dugout at the very sight of Bucky F. Dent. It didn’t happen, of course, and the Sox won the game, and the series, and celebrated on Yankee Stadium ground in the worst game in Yankees history. Now Boston is reminded again of what it’s like to see the opposition celebrate on your home turf.

With that first pitch, Boston brass wanted to remind the Angels of 1986. As it turns out, Sunday’s game was reminiscent of that year, all right, but not in the way the Sox intended. In both games, the closer was one strike away from winning the game, before folding. And in both games, the final score was 7-6.

So am I saying that the Red Sox got karmic payback? It’s a little more complicated than that. As my Red Sox fan friend Bob Ekstrom told me in my Subway Squawkers baseball blog before the series:

“When you punch an opponent in the mouth enough times, he’s eventually going to punch you back. Boston may have punched the Angels in the mouth one time too many after that mid-September series at Fenway Park in which they took two of three….Something slapped the Angels in the face that night, the kind of slap your wife gives you when you’re sleeping off a hangover after making a fool of yourself the night before and she has to get you up because it’s a work day and – well – you’re down to your last strike with the boss as it is . . . I’m just saying.”

The thing is, I saw a lot of the 2004 Yankees in the 2009 Red Sox. After the Aaron Boone homer won Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, the Yanks seemed to think that all they needed to do was trot out talk of mystique and aura and ghosts, and that would be enough. They were the Sox’s Daddy, as per Pedro Martinez’ postgame complaint, after all. The Yanks didn’t seem to be aware of how infuriating such talk was to the opposition.

Since then, in cliche-speak, Boston has gone from a franchise that once waited for the other shoe to drop, to a team that always thought they could pull a rabbit out of a hat and come back, no matter what. And that just because the Sox had bested the Angels so many times throughout their history, that Boston would ultimately prevail. So much for those notions.

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