How’s this for a shocker on the morning of ALCS Game 6 — not Jacoby Ellsbury supplanting Coco Crisp this evening, but the New York Times’ Murray Chass paying homage to that bane of the 2007 playoffs….Dane Cook?

There is only one postseason, there is only one October and there is only one star. His name is Dane Cook.

Major League Baseball approached him about five months ago, the 35-year-old Cook said, having noticed the way he spotlighted moments from his life year by year on his personal Web site.

When Cook™s agent, Barry Katz, negotiated his deal for the commercials, Cook told him the perks were more important than the pay.

œMajor League Baseball has hooked me up, said Cook, who grew up in Arlington, Mass. œI™ve gone to about 15 games since I™ve been in Boston. They™ve been great about getting me to games. I said I™ll basically do this for nothing if you can get me the two seats my dad and I sat in in St. Louis, and they did.

Cook referred to the tickets he bought from a scalper in Boston one night in October, and he and his father flew to St. Louis and occupied the seats behind the visiting dugout at Busch Stadium for Game 4 of the 2004 World Series. That night the Red Sox banished œ1918 from their historic lexicon.

And with that, any remaining possibility the rest of America might ever again look favorably upon the Red Sox or their fanbase — with goodwill already in short supply — has been forever extinguished.  As a cunning Red Sox hater like Chass knows all too well, it would take a thousand of the Sports Putz to equal the shut-the-fuck-up factor of one Dane Cook.