Cursed To First - Sox and Pats forever.

Splitsville

On Friday, I wound up with unexpected tickets to the second  of this weekend's four-game series against the Kansas City Royals. The Sox dropped this one in sloppily dramatic fashion, beginning with a Tim Wakefield meltdown.

In the plus column, we had good seats that a friend of mine had lucked into earlier that afternoon, in a field box on the first base side. The night was mild and clear, and I got to spend several hours taking a veritable flip book of Dustin Pedroia's every move.

Some of my preferred shots from that game set: 

Okay, REALLY sure the human body isn't supposed to bend like that.

The Celtics were winning the Eastern Conference Finals vs. the Orlando Magic that night.

"Look at him doing pitcher things!" -- Sam's reaction to super-utility man Bill Hall pitching a perfect ninth. Pretty much the best thing that happened in that whole game.

Yes, the "Bride" here has a "Youuuuuuk!" sticker slapped across her ass.

***

The Sox had lost the night before this, too, and it wouldn't be until the next night that they'd flash some leather behind a dominant Clay Buchholz to win 1-0, and another day before they'd finally get the bats in gear in support of an equally authoritative Jon Lester.

A split series. Mezza-mezz. Half empty or half full?

It's otherwise been a gloriously lazy, sun-drenched Memorial Day weekend, spent catching up with friends and on my sleep in equal portions, interspersed with baseball at Fenway Park. I think I'll go with half full.

______________________

P.S. We were told we were on TV in certain NESN camera shots with runners on first base, so we watched a bit of the replay when we got home. We didn't see ourselves, but we did come across this keeper:

Insert Sweep-related Pun Here

Hamel Brooms, originally uploaded by Phil Armishaw.

How Sweep it is, Swept Away, Swept A Ray, etc.

But seriously. How awesome is it that, having taken their first win of the season against the Rays this year with the first game of this week's series, the mercurial Sox just up and decided they'd take 'em all?

Especially against one of the two teams it has seemed like the Red Sox just can't beat this year.

The biggest reason for this was the Red Sox starting pitching seeming to come into its own. Jon Lester especially seems to be turning it on after a slow start. That cutter's just devastating, his narrowed eyes above the glove tucked under his chin now the source of a positively Beckettsian intimidation factor. And Clay Buchholz is making me quite happy by bearing out my prediction that consistent playing time would allow him to blossom. It sucks for Wake, but I'm still glad it wasn't Buch they sent to the pen.

But that's not to disavow the contributions from the offense this series, especially David Ortiz, who was swatting balls around the Trop and blasting off like it was the old days. Adrian Beltre had a huge night last night with 6 RBI, and Pedroia got back on track with a three-fer performance Tuesday, including a lucky shot off the ceiling that had the Elf chuckling to himself at second base.

There are chain reactions, too, whenever one part of the team improves. Papi returning to being a threat helps his teammates up and down the lineup. The starters going deep saves the bullpen, which makes their appearances more crisp and effective (especially MDC). Not walking around with half a dozen Red Sox fans and beat writers up their butts each will also probably help the team play better defense.

This series went about as well as can be expected, but it's still always a relief to get away from road games against these dome teams. I think @RedSoxRedShoes put it best when he described the Trop this way: "I cannot believe Tropicana Field is an MLB stadium. It looks like someone puked Tinker Toys inside of a snare drum."

They Are What They Are

My father would always say the same thing to me when we were watching Derek Lowe c. 2003 -- "he is what he is," he'd say. His subsequent efforts in the postseason notwithstanding, what Lowe was (and is, at least roughly, with a career record of 146-120) was a .500 pitcher.

In some ways, being a .500 player or team is to be as Derek Lowe was -- showing flashes of brilliance, then reverting to Meltdown Mode. If he could just be the No-Hitter, Bite-My-Tweeter Derek Lowe all the time, you'd think. If he could just stop running into that one bad inning.

Enter the 2010 Red Sox. Flashes of brilliance, blowing out the Tigers on the road in the opening game of the series, with 450 foot dingers by Big Papi and a 6-run scoring differential...followed by what we've seen the last two days, disconcerting backslides into squandered starts, bullpen ineffectiveness and run-scoring opportunities left on base.

It would be simpler in some ways if the Sox were just plain bad this year. Instead, I suspect this is how it may be for the rest of the summer campaign -- rising hopes, cresting and breaking into that trough of disillusionment again. Tobin Bridge jumpers will line up after series against the Rays and Yankees, continue calling for Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester to be traded for Adrian Gonzalez, a batboy and a bucket of baseballs, call for David Ortiz's tarring and feathering on Boston Common, pine for the days when we had Manny Ramirez's bat and all its concomitant problems in the lineup.

Polyannas will snort and eyeroll at the pathalogical pessimism of the nay-sayers and congratulate themselves on their superior fandom and attitude toward the team, but they'll have a tough argument to make against games like Saturday's, in which multiple offensive opportunities are squandered and the bullpen weakens, weakens, and then finally breaks in a final humiliation to the tune of walking in the winning run in the bottom of the twelfth. Great teams, even good teams, don't do that kind of thing, or at least not with the disconcerting regularity the 2010 Red Sox have. 

But the rub is, it's really not so bad...it's just mediocre.There will be this sine-wave pattern of ups and downs, but in the end, the median is showing no signs of wavering. They are what they are -- a .500 team -- and my prediction is that there won't be any getting around it this year.

In which I attempt to overintellectualize away the pain

It is with sadness I bring you a Josh Beckett Face..., originally uploaded by ConfessionalPoet.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow Twitterer about Beckett / Lester (Blester? Leckett?) vs. Daisuke. She pointed out that Lester and Beckett seemed to be getting a pass for their bad innings (this was before the sixth last night, when Beckett had only given up a three-run homer to Nick Swisher so far), while people seemed ready to run Daisuke out of town on a rail after his first inning Thursday night.

I did argue with her a bit, though I hope civilly, just because it was counter-intuitive to me, and because yeah, I am a Blester apologist. My stance was that past performance was dictating the different reaction to Lestett vs. Dice, that Dice has had more 'bad innings' than Leckett, and that there's more optimism that Blecker will be getting his collective shit together than Dice. There's also time spent on the DL and basically reshaping his game for Matsuzaka last year, which may be understandable given his unique biography, but obviously we are not renowned around here for our patience and kindly understanding.

"Josh had one dominant year with the Sox. So did Dice-K. He's not been any better or worse than Becks or Lester," was my counterpart's stance in this conversation.

Then I found myself asking for numbers, especially WHIP, because based on my limited understanding of such things, I would theorize that Daisuke's walks plus hits per innings pitched told a different story than Beckett or Lester.

Now, look. God knows I don't normally do stats. This is a tentative, terrified little foray into this for me, so if I need correcting, please be gentle. I'm just trying not to hurt myself, here.

Anyway. When I went and did a cursory search for WHIP, what I found surprised me.

Daisuke, career: 1.41
Beckett, career: 1.23
Lester, career: 1.33

I'm not familiar with what constitutes a significant statistical variation in this number, but that seems pretty close, actually. I told @shelley1005 she had a point, though I still felt innings pitched per start and time on the DL also factored in to the differing perceptions.

Then I thought about it, and decided, what the hell, I'm going to look it up.

For 2008, 2009 and 2010 so far:

Daisuke 236.3 IP over 43 games = 5.49 innings per start

Lester 449.4 over 71 games = 6.32 innings per start

Beckett 427.2 over 66 games = 6.47 innings per start

There's a major difference, as I was alluding to, in terms of innings pitched and starts made. Last year really sunk Daisuke -- he had just 59.1 innings pitched in 12 games. The goal for an elite starter should be somewhere around 200 innings pitched for the team in a year. That alone is going to put Dice behind the 8 ball compared to the others.

But the more I look around the stats, especially over time, the more a picture emerges that Beckett and Lester are diverging, as much as they seem to have grown together in personality over the last few years.

K/9

Beckett

2007 8.70
2008 8.88
2009 8.43

Lester

2007 7.14
2008 6.50
2009 9.96

BB/9

Beckett

2007 1.79
2008 1.76
2009 2.33

Lester

2007 4.43
2008 2.82
2009 2.83

K / BB

Beckett

2007 4.85
2008 5.06
2009 3.62

Lester

2007 1.61
2008 2.30
2009 3.52

Where these measurements are concerned, I think we see a younger pitcher in Jon Lester starting to put it all together (especially that big jump in K/9 last year) and an older pitcher in Josh Beckett, who slipped in 2009 compared with the previous two years. Having broken into the bigs at the tender age of 21, Beckett has more major league pitches on his arm than most other pitchers his age, and certainly more than Lester.

Anyway, this is somewhat moot, because when it comes to that sixth inning last night, numbers aren't going to help explain it. I wonder if this is Josh's shoulder acting up -- he seemed to have some strange body language during that sixth inning, though it could've been from a number of causes (as Chad Finn put it, "This is Beckett at his absolute worst. No command, no poise, overthrowing, acting like a macho fool.").

Beckett is under more pressure to answer for the deviations of 2009 than Lester is, and while I still don't think he belongs in the same category as Daisuke, maybe it's time to admit Beckett is less like Lester, at least recently, than I had realized.

It Was a Mighty Duel

It's been an especially intense day around here. The water was finally safe to drink again, meaning millions of coffee addicts were finally able to get their Starbucks or Dunkies fix, and could finally stop getting into punchouts with each other at the grocery store over cases of Poland Spring. As if that wasn't enough, tonight, the baseball addicts in Red Sox Nation also got a wallop of beautiful baseball.

It began with a taut eight-inning pitchers' duel between Jon Lester and Ervin Santana. Both lineups resorted to the kind of small-ball scrapping that tells you they are under siege from a true monster on the mound, just hunkering down and trying to take advantage of mistakes until the bullpen comes around. Jon Lester continued the rampage he began in Toronto, clenching his jaw through 8 innings on 120 economical pitches tonight while surrendering just one run.

On top of that, at long last we saw Run Prevention in action this evening, with a breathtaking play from Dustin Pedroia to end a bases-loaded, one-out eighth. I have seen some dispute over whether Pedroia tagged the runner, but I have to believe that if there was really a case to be made for that, Mike Scioscia would've been out there flipping out about it before any of the rest of us noticed it. And in any event, Pedroia's diving, scrambling, flipping masterpiece was the most thrilling play I'd seen since Marco Scutaro's incredible ranging throw from the hole in the fourth.

There was ugliness, hideousness, even, as David Ortiz twice came to the plate with runners on, and both times grounded into a double play. The best I can do right now is allow him the dignity of not discussing it or the boo-birds much further.*

Because no sooner had Papi trudged off the field, head bowed, than young Jeremy Hermida strode to the plate, and finally delivered the killing blow the park had been jonesing for the whole night, and I'll tell you, no matter how obnoxious some of our fellow frequenters of Fenway Park can sometimes be, for all the nasty GIDPs and defensive lapses of this season, there really is nothing like the moment some crucial, timely hit goes rocketing off toward the outfield, and that place just explodes.

Kevin Youkilis was jumping up and down like a little boy in the on-deck area, waving his arms in great semicircles around his head to signal to his teammates whether they should stand up or slide coming into home. Jon Lester, in the dugout, asked of those around him, "Is that fair or foul? Is it fair? Yes?" and then he, too, was subsumed in the wave of hysteria, pumping his fist and yelling like any one of the fans who were rattling the grandstand. "YEAH!!"

I think it's safe to say every one of us really needed that. Without a doubt, the best game of the season so far.

* Except to say: I don't care how bad he is, that shit ain't right. If I could ban you from Fenway Park forever, I would. If I could take tonight's joy away from you somehow, I would. But like I said on Twitter, I also became pretty jaded to this when I saw a "fan" heckle Keith Foulke to the point of a verbal altercation, a year after the guy left his knees on the field winning a World Series for which he should have been MVP, but wasn't. (Not that I'm, um, bitter or anything.) I figured it was pretty much only a matter of time before even Papi was turned on by the Fenway crowd. And to be honest, virtually any other player would've been turned on long before this point. 

Opening Day at Chez Target

A View from the Top: MN Twins's Target Field , originally uploaded by meetminneapolis.

Further proof Jon Lester has somehow had his genes spliced with Josh Beckett's: he stormed off the field spitting curses, then pitched a full-on screaming tantrum in the dugout yesterday, after surrendering two runs and throwing 30 pitches in the first inning. He followed up his torturous four-run, five-inning start with a sullen press conference. Not quite the snarl of Beckett, but glowering nonetheless.

April, as has been pointed out pretty much everywhere, including from behind the microphones and tape recorders jammed in his glaring face yesterday, is not Lester's month -- his record today stands at 2-5 with a 5.08 ERA in 14 career April starts.

April has continued to be a cruel mistress for Ortiz as well. He started off yesterday's game with his 10th strikeout of the season. But he followed that with one of the two Sox RBI on the day with a fly ball that ate up Delmon Young (Thanks again, Delmon!).

But it wasn't scored an error! And so Papi was 1-1 w/RISP! And whatever it is you're saying about rivers in Egypt, lalalalalalala I can't hear you!!

OK, seriously--on July 14, I would agree totally that he should be taken out of the lineup. On April 14, I say, even if it's a formality, we give him a chance. He's earned at least that much.

Meanwhile, the Sox dropped another series opener and opponents' home opener on this road swing. Maybe it was all that strange sunshine in the new outdoor Target Field. But seriously...yesterday, Carl Pavano put in 6 innings, surrendering one run on four hits. Carl Pavano?

Also, Victor Martinez has thrown out exactly one runner trying to steal this year, while three baserunners coasted into second against him yesterday -- his 10th, 11th and 12th of the season (per A.Benjamin, via JoS).

I'm not expecting the Sox to go 162-0. But tomorrow I'd like to see them maintain just a little more, you know, dignity. And maybe get back to .500 again.

Red Sox Spring Training 2010: Notes from the Lazy Season

Alan Embree and SOX1FAN, originally uploaded by sox1faninnh.

First inning on an overcast, blustery afternoon in Ft. Myers, Sox. v. Astros. I cue it up on the DVR expecting to take in a sleepy, routine exercise, and before I know it, there's Jon Lester taking "a step and a half" toward the dugout, in Jerry Remy's words, on what he presumes is strike three to Chris Johnson. But the home plate ump catches him short by calling a ball. Lester fumes, takes the hill again.

This early, the story is, everyone's fine-tuning. The games are pretty much meaningless. But you wouldn't know it looking at Lester's taut posture as he stalks off the field after the next pitch.

***

The latest Sox commercials are making the rounds -- I enjoyed Don Orsillo's maniacally enthusiastic explanation of Boston-area highways to John Lackey, especially when Lackey asks, "What's a rotary?" And Orsillo chuckles, "oh-ho-ho! You'll see!" Don Orsillo: part mannequin, part human, all comedy.

The lesser of the two is the barbershop spot, which features some relative non-acting by a lineup of core Sox: Papi, Tek, Wake and Paps. It features a mouthy Yanks fan who storms into a barbershop blathering about how "My Yankees" are set up to win the World Series again this year, followed by the professional athletes in the room rising as one to kick his ass. It sounds a bit better than it's actually carried off, unfortunately, although my Best Actor goes to Papelbon, surprisingly enough. If I ever saw him slowly rising out of a chair and whipping off a cape like that in real life, I'd run shrieking in the opposite direction.

Then there are the outtakes. Turns out the mouthy Yanks fan seems like he's doing a good imitation because he is an actual mouthy Yanks fan, who had to trade having a 'B' shaved into the back of his head for the chance to insult actual members of the Red Sox in person.

I'm curious, folks in blogland, if you had a chance to trash-talk Jeter, A-Rod, Posada, and Joba Chamberlain, all at once, on TV, would you make a similar deal vis a vis the Yankees logo and your scalp? Me, I just don't know. That's a tough one.

***

Apparently nobody told the Sox or Patriots that signing Alan Embree and David Patten can't actually make it 2004 again. Elsewhere, I like the Alge Crumpler signing at tight end, provided the Patriots are going to actually throw to the tight end this year. Bonus points, also, for adding the name Alge Crumpler to the roster.

***

What are we going to do about Mike Lowell? I've just been sort of avoiding it, like discussing religion in public. What an excruciating situation for all involved.

Today, Lowell had an at-bat in the second inning, got under a pitch and skied it to right center, where Jason Bourgeois gloved it on the run. Shades of Varitek, 2008...if that's what we have to look forward to, it's going to be a long season for all involved, too -- already unable to move Lowell once, the Sox might also be facing having him like an albatross on the roster if he can't perform well enough to be shopped.

In better news, there was the ageless Mike Cameron, who followed Lowell with a booming two-run shot to straightaway center, putting the Sox on top 2-1. 

Must also pause to note Bourgeois again, for making even niftier diving catch in center for the second out of the inning, another burst of midseason intensity. It's getting closer.

***

Someone caught Tom Brady on camera taking boxing lessons in a gym near L.A. I'll pause for those of you to whom this applies to mop up your drool. I came across this post via Extra Points, the Globe's Patriots blog, which accompanied said linkage with kind of a weird rant about people questioning Brady's commitment to football.

I realize team leadership was an issue last year, but my only real thought when I saw this...echo of a discussion, if you will...was that it makes me glad to have kicked the talk-radio habit when I did. I can only imagine this is where the idea of questioning the commitment of Tom Brady to football would come from -- in fact, I can think of no other place where such an idea could be nurtured long enough to catch the attention of columnists. 

When I used to listen to talk radio, I might've followed up an angry car ride talking back to my radio about this with a tirade here on an issue that doesn't even really warrant that much energy to refute. Now that I don't listen, I see the beginning of the discussion -- Brady opting out of the official off-season program -- and the end -- Frank from Gloucester questions Tom Brady's commitment to football -- and it's like hearing the beginning and mangled ending of a game of Telephone. All I can do is shake my head.

***

Meanwhile, back in the second inning, Houston pitcher Bud Norris (who looks approximately 60 years too young to be saddled with such a moniker) was in a world of hurt; Dustin Pedroia squared up on a fastball and knocked it over the wall for his own trip around the bases. Kevin Youkilis followed with a double.

Today, the Sox offense was looking well. 

(As was Daisuke this week, reportedly. In both cases, we shall see what we shall see.)

***

If you were to graph today's box score, it would be a series of step functions as the Sox and Astros traded runs in the early innings, played another two scoreless, then upped the ante to 7-4 by the top of the seventh.

Here would follow a sharp spike, an aberration, as a migraine-stricken Papelbon was lit up for 6 runs. 10-7 Astros your final. A weird, unresolvable feeling -- instinctively, you want to be pissed off, but there's also the it's-only-exhibition panacea to reach for.

As for my boy Jonathan, I have to question the logic of forcing oneself through a March 21 inning when you have a crippling migraine, but then I remember this is Papelbon, and logic may have little to do with it.

Or maybe that was just another part of the intensity you could sense being ratcheted up another notch today: the lazy season ramping up in earnest toward April.