As Red Sox Nation once again revels in its annual agony and the despised New York Yankees move on to major league baseball’s World Series, the obvious question becomes, “So what else is new?”

Face it, Aaron Boone’s dramatic 11th-inning pinch-hit home run to win the American League’s championship series for the Yankees late Thursday night really came as no great surprise to New Englanders who long ago became resigned to being permanently left at the altar by their star-crossed heroes.

If a guy has wanted to take his mind off the sorry state of world affairs, the marathon playoffs that have brought us, at last, to tonight’s opening game of the Series at Yankee Stadium have been as good a distraction as any to fill the bill.

We’ve witnessed grown men rolling around the infield in baseball’s version of an inner-city schoolyard rumble of adolescents, precipitated by the unpardonable sin of one obscenely overpaid man-child staring and pointing at another before unleashing a 90 mph fastball at his head.

We’ve had an entire city hell-bent on lynching a young fan whose natural reaction was to try to catch a foul ball that had drifted into the bleachers, thereby crossing up a home team player who was on the same mission. The incident allegedly cost the good guys an out on their way to blowing the game and, ultimately, a berth in the World Series, and it seemingly has cost the kid a normal life.

There have been spectacular fielding gems, timely strikeouts, dramatic game-winning home runs, bonehead plays at the most crucial of times, dubious umpiring decisions and managerial strategy that, to put the best spin on it, seems to have been hatched in an opium den. And if all that hasn’t been enough to divert the electorate’s attention from the lousy economy and the slim prospects for world peace, there’s been the wisdom of television sportscasters such as the Fox network’s Tim McCarver to cinch the deal.

“That’s the fifth two-out hit with two men out tonight,” McCarver, normally a pretty decent baseball analyst, informed the masses in Wednesday’s crucial game between the Red Sox and Yankees. As compared to the fifth two-out hit with one man out, one must presume.

If you listen to the play-by-play announcers – really listen, rather than tuning out the nonstop babble in favor of your own interpretation of what can be seen happening on the field of play – you can hear some amazing stuff. Later in the aforementioned Sox-Yankee telecast, McCarver said of a Red Sox batter waving his bat menacingly at the Yankee pitcher, “He’s looking for a pitch to hit.” And I’m sitting there shouting at the television, “Jeez, Tim. Ya think?” I’m aware that the author Jacques Barzun once observed that anyone wishing to understand America must first learn baseball. But, still…

Not that the television and radio sports crowd has a corner on the inane comment or question, by any means. Sportswriters, like their nonsporting brethren (and sistren) in the print media, can come up with some beauts, as well.

In his book, “What Men Don’t Tell Women,” humorist Roy Blount Jr. included a chapter titled “How To Sportswrite Good.” In it he pointed out that sportswriters can also unwittingly be wicked good straight men. According to Blount, a sportswriter once asked Alex Johnson of the Cincinnati Reds, “Alex, you hit only two homers all last year, and this season you already have seven. What’s the difference?” And Johnson answered, “Five.”

Basketball superstar Bill Bradley’s sole response to a sports reporter who once asked him why the New York Knicks had fined him $100 was, “You have a stupid job.”

Well, sure. But someone has to do it.

Still, people shouldn’t sell sportswriters short, Blount counsels.

“We do have a certain pride, a sense of calling,” he wrote. “There is the story about a scribe who showed up in the press box after a game too drunk to write, even if he had seen anything that had happened. Firmly within the tradition of old-time sportswriting, he appealed to another scribe to let him copy the story he had just filed.

“‘Well, I don’t know,’ the sober scribe said.

“‘Come on,’ pleaded the drunk scribe.

“‘But I hate to…’

“‘Come on, please.’

“The sober scribe said oh, okay, and handed over a carbon of his story. The drunk scribe cranked paper into his typewriter and started copying. He got through three paragraphs before he stopped and looked off into the distance.

“‘To think,’ he sighed, ‘that I would be reduced … to copying [bleep] like this.”‘

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.