Game 2 - Red Sox
Red Sox 7, Royals 1
Record: 1-1
Quick and dirty post this morning to clear the decks for this afternoon's international extravaganza/Matsuzaka debut. Suffice it to say that our long National nightmare is over, the Sox finally ending their 6-game road losing streak to the *gulp* Royals. If that ain't the most damning indictment of the 2006 Sox' underachievments, I don't know what a'is.
Decent, albeit truncated, outing for Ebby Calvin, who required 94 pitches to get through 5 2-hit innings. Matsuzaka scoffs in his general direction and shoots a look at Tito suggesting that it'd be a bad idea to ask him to leave a game after firing only 94 bullets.
Mike Lowell probably cost Beckett an extra frame by gacking consecutive chances in the 3rd inning, then made his miserable fielding day worse by throwing one away in the late innings. The bully was strong to very strong, posting 4 innings of 1-hit ball - if Snyder, Lopez, Romero, and Pineiro can do that consistently, the Sox will waltz away with the AL East. Also, this morning brings us news that if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass every time it jumped.
Lowell redeemed himself slightly by plating the eventual winning runs with a 2-run, 2-out double in the first. J.D. Drew looked solid at the plate, and Youks belted the Sox' first homer of the season to essentially put the game out of reach in the 7th.
Bummer that the game was broadcast on the Royals network, meaning the Paul Splittorf's ultra-monotone Midwestern cadence supplanted Jerry Remy's dulcet New England accent. I'm looking forward to April 10, when the Sox play their home opener. Can't wait to hear what Wally the Green Monster's been up to.
Drew also ran down a would-be gapper off the bat of Mike Sweeney to save the Sox some serious strife in the early-to-middle innings. Trot Nixon would have made a gritty, gutty run to the wall to retrieve the ball. Score one for Ed Wade's personal nightmare.
ReplyDeletegood point - that was a nice grab and i was certain it was a gapper. also, i think that faster pussycat may be a movie and not a band name. sue me.
ReplyDeletealso, let me go on record now and say i am making j.d. drew a personal favorite in reaction to the asinine "he's not a gamer" meme from moron hometown media members.
ReplyDeleteFear not -- Faster Pussycat is/was a cheese-metal band. Freshman roomie Doug Nelson had one of their CD's; although he expanded my horizons in the ways of Metallica, the Crue, and even Iron Maiden to a tiny degree, I could not, would not enjoy Faster Pussycat. Not on a boat, not as a goat.
ReplyDeleteI still harbor anti-Drew rootings because of the Phillies debacle, but massive, misguided, media-led sweeping generalizations typically push me towards the counter-point, so I could probably be swayed.
ReplyDeletego read fire joe morgan regarding the weei/gerry callahan anti-drew campaign.
ReplyDeleteAm I a blasphemer if I say that Fire Joe Morgan is teetering on caricature? So much of what has been written there desperately needed saying, but now, as if pressed for content, they are nitpicking semantics and crushing people for offhanded, insignificant comments uttered on live broadcasts. Many, many of the points made are still obviously valid, but credibility suffers with every "how dare he" post targeting a broadcasting equivalent of bobbling a grounder in the 9th inning of a 12-2 rout.
ReplyDeletenot blasphemy, necessarily, but i'd argue that extreme ignorance demands extreme nitpicking. the game's still dominated by luddites.
ReplyDelete