“So… how’s your girl?”

Even though I’m made of 100 percent cardboard and raw sensuality, I hear a lot of shit. And lately, I hear people bitchin’ about how the Red Sox possibly puttin’ a beatin’ on the Orioles next week would only make it easier for the Yankees to make the playoffs.

To that I say check yo’self! What the hell you think this is, the Pinewood Derby? This is Major League Baseball, motherf$%kers. I’ve got 99 problems and, according to my copy of the 2012 schedule, the Yankees ain’t one until the last three games of the season. Before that, we got five games against the Orioles that could–and should–have them a little nervous.

You remember that feeling you had in 2011 on the last day of the regular season? When the O’s were dancin’ around like a bunch of smacked asses, laughin’ like they’d won the World Series and proclamin’ how happy there were to be sending us home?

Now the roles are reversed. They’re lookin’ to pull a worst-to-first, and we’re going nowhere. And I sincerely hope we take all five games, leave them gobsmacked and crying and fumbling for their car keys while the Anaheim Angels step over them for that last wild card spot.

See, baseball is cyclical. One day, you’re in the penthouse. The next, you’re in the outhouse. Or, worse, playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates. The corpse you dance on today might be banging your wife and stealing your pork sausages tomorrow. And I’m totally down for seeing our boys start bangin’ wives and stealin’ sausages. In Baltimore.

Just to be clear: I was a member of the 1992 Red Sox. A team that, until this season, had the worst record of any other Sox team for the past thirty years. You know who we played spoiler for that year? OUR OWN DAMN HOPES AND DREAMS.

As a player, a lover of women, and a sartorial genius, I live by one golden rule: Nobody gets my cake. The Baltimore Orioles want our cake. I say let ’em try to take it.

If it means that the Yankees sashay into the postseason unencumbered, so be it. I’ll be the guy hanging my ass out the hotel window with “Thanks for 2011, Robert Andino” scrawled across my cheeks in Sharpie.