Last night will go down as one of the most riveting nights in the history of Major League Baseball’s regular season. Two wild card races came down to the last game, with the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves trying to avoid disaster.

For a while, things were looking pretty good for the Red Sox. The Rays were down 7-0 to the Yankees, and the Sox were clinging to a one-run lead in the 7th against the Orioles. And then the rains came. We’re always prone to look for meaning in random events, but when a team is staring down the worst September collapse in baseball history, a dreary rain delay seemed like a really bad sign.

By the time the night was over, Red Sox relief pitcher Jonathan Papelbon had given up the lead, and the Rays completed an incredible comeback to beat the Yankees in extra innings.

They’ll be talking about this one for a while. Here’s Scott Lauber from The Boston Herald:

It has been a slow, month-long march to baseball’s version of death — elimination from playoff contention — for the Red Sox.

Last night, it became pure torture.

One out from guaranteeing the Red Sox no less than a play-in game today against the Tampa Bay Rays, closer Jonathan Papelbon melted down. He allowed three consecutive hits, including a game-tying double by Nolan Reimold and a game-winning single by Robert Andino in a 4-3 loss.

Then, a few minutes after Papelbon and the Red Sox trudged off the field at Camden Yards, Evan Longoria belted a solo homer in the 12th inning at Tropicana Field. After trailing the New York Yankees 7-0 in the eighth, the Rays won 8-7.

And, with that, the Best Team Ever suffered the Worst Collapse Ever.

Lauber points out that no team has ever missed the playoffs with a lead as large as 9 games in September. The Braves managed to come close to the Boston choke job by blowing an 8 and 1/2 game lead in the National League.

Papelbon has always been a loudmouth, so watching him blow it was pretty entertaining. His post-game news conference is equally satisfying.

In an interview for the April edition of Esquire magazine, Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon said that Manny Ramirez was a “cancer” in Boston.

“… So Manny was tough for us. You have somebody like him, you know at any point in the ball game, he can dictate the outcome of the game,” Papelbon is quoted as saying in the interview with Esquire’s Chris Jones. “And for him not to be on the same page as the rest of the team was a killer, man! It just takes one guy to bring an entire team down, and that’s exactly what was happening.
“Once we saw that, we weren’t afraid to get rid of him. It’s like cancer. That’s what he was. Cancer. He had to go. It sucked, but that was the only scenario that was going to work. That was it for us. And after, you could feel it in the air in the clubhouse. We got Jason Bay — Johnny Ballgame, plays the game right, plays through broken knees, runs out every ground ball — and it was like a breath of fresh air, man! Awesome! No question.”

Papelbon said the team got rid of Ramirez when they realized he was becoming a distraction for the team.

“The beautiful thing about our team is, we don’t let anybody get above the team. He wasn’t on the same train as the rest of us,” Papelbon said in the article. “He was on a different train! And you saw what happened with that. We got rid of him, and we moved on without him. That comes from the manager, and it comes from guys like Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield and David Ortiz. Nobody is ever going to be allowed to do that. Even a guy like me, just heading into my fourth year in the big leagues — if David Ortiz gets a little, you know — I’ll tell him what’s up! I’m not afraid to do that. I’m not afraid to put him in his place, because I think everybody needs that. And if somebody does it to me, I understand that. I most certainly understand that. Varitek tells me all the time, ‘Just shut up. Do what you’re supposed to do.’”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone – Papelbon is just saying what fans and the media already believed about Manny in the first place.

But let me play devil’s advocate for a second. If you’re Papelbon, why even say anything? I thought one of the unwritten rules in baseball is that whatever happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse? I know some players allow a little insight from time to time, but Papelbon comes off sounding like a showoff in this instance. The situation is done with – Manny is in L.A., so why dig up past issues? Papelbon is preaching that the Red Sox got rid of a major distraction, yet he just became one himself by shedding light on a subject that has been dead since Boston traded Ramirez.

Not that they will disagree with him, but I’d have to believe that some BoSox players will be less than thrilled to hear about Papelbon’s comments.