I mean…

Granted, the Red Sox didn’t exactly put their best lineup on the field yesterday.  Dustin Pedroia sat out with what was later reported to be a fractured finger (he won’t go on the DL, since there’s only two games left), and Jacoby Ellsbury also didn’t make an appearance.  I’m not making excuses for the Red Sox, but let’s be honest: when Ryan Lavarnway (currently batting somewhere in the .160s) is your fifth hitter, and three-hitter Cody Ross is the biggest threat in your batting order, you’ve gone off the reservation somehow.

Regardless of whether the Sox were either flopping around in the bottom of the fishing boat, or just giving their exciting up-and-comers a chance to play, last night’s game against the Yankees was the most one-sided rivalry game I’ve seen in a long time.  Clay Buchholz imploded in the second inning, giving up eight runs in a nine-run frame that decided the game early and sent a disinterested fan base packing for yet another depressing night.

Robinson Cano started the second-inning barrage off for New York, launching a solo home run to center field.  Buchholz got Mark Teixeria to strike out, but the unflappable Nick Swisher glanced a double off of center field with one out.  Curtis Granderson scored Swisher by hitting a home run of his own, and then Russell Martin promptly hit another home run, making the score 4-0.

Undaunted, Buchholz announced himself with authority by walking Eric Chavez and Derek Jeter, and loaded the bases via an Ichiro Suzuki single.  Alex Rodriguez sacrificed Chavez home for the second out, before Cano used his second at-bat of the inning to double home Jeter and Suzuki.

With the score 7-0 with two outs, Bobby Valentine had finally seen enough.  Alfredo Aceves replaced Buchholz.  Aceves faced Teixeira first, and Teixeira (of course) hit the Yankees’ fourth home run of the inning, scoring Cano and leaving the score at 9-0.  Swisher followed up with another double, but Aceves finally got Granderson to ground out to first to end the inning.

The Sox didn’t really get any kind of offensive rally going.  They scored a couple of baserunners here and there, care a well-executed Jarrod Saltalamacchia sac fly and a Daniel Nava home run; but there was really nothing happening at all at the plate.

With the win, coupled with Baltimore’s loss to Tampa, the Yankees took sole possession of first place with two games to play.  The Red Sox’ best-case scenario now is to play spoiler for either the Yankees or the Orioles, as both teams continue to battle for the division title.  That’s literally about all that Red Sox fans can look forward to – an exciting game 162 that means nothing for the Sox, but could potentially affect another team’s postseason. Blah.

Here’ a link to last night’s box score, courtesy of the Red Sox.  Tonight’s game 161 pits Jon Lester (9-14, 4.94 ERA) against David Phelps (4-4, 3.34 ERA).  Phelps replaces the beleaguered Ivan Nova in a start that will probably decide Phelps’ prominence on the Yankees’ postseason roster.

“Red Sox, why you can’t win? You make me sad.”

This is not what the Red Sox needed tonight. They definitely did not need to come into New York and drop the first game of the series. And they definitely did not need to come into New York and give up five home runs. Nope… that, my friends, isn’t going to win you many games.

I’m not sure if the air was extra thin at Yankee stadium or what tonight but it seemed like balls were flying out the park like crazy. In addition to the five the Bronx Bombers hit out, the Red Sox launched one of their own. See? They’re underachievers. You can’t give up five home runs to your opponent, only hit one in return and expect to win. It’s simple math, people.

Franklin Morales gave up four of the five home runs. I think he might be allergic to pinstripes. This season, he has given up eight total homers to the Yankees. Thankfully they were all solo shots or someone’s ERA might have really skyrocketed. I’m not going to lie, this wasn’t Morales’s best outing.

Nick Swisher led the charge for the Yankees, responsible for two of those round-trippers. And Curtis Granderson and Russell Martin went back-to-back in the second.

The Red Sox had just one burst of offensive brilliance in the third inning when they scored all four of their runs, fueled by a three-run homer by birthday boy, Dustin Pedroia. At the time it gave them a 4-3 lead but we all know that holding a one-run lead for another six innings is pretty difficult against this Yankees line up — even with their recent barrage of injuries.

And once again, I am just completely confoooosed by anything Bobby Valentine says in post game interviews. I keep wondering if maybe I just don’t speak Bobby V and that he makes perfect sense to everyone else. I can’t even listen to him without my head almost exploding.

“Well, other than the home runs, he had pretty good stuff,” said manager Bobby Valentine. “They hit all of his different pitches. It wasn’t any one pitch. Jeter’s ball, I guess, cut a little inside for a pitch that he wanted — I think he wanted to have that go away. But otherwise, he wasn’t that bad. He just wasn’t good enough.”

Click here for the home run derby box score, courtesy of the Red Sox. The two teams meet again today at 4:05pm for a nationally televised game on Fox. Jon Lester, coming off a very strong 12-strikeout performance over the Indians, will face David Phelps. Lester has not had much luck against the Yankees this season — he’s 0-1 with an ERA of 6.97 in two starts.

And, just like that, there’s maybe a little bit of hope in the nation.  Maybe a little bit of dreaming.  Maybe a little bit of… swagger?

That was one good game last night – Felix Doubront held down the Yankees for 6 1/3 innings and one run – despite walking five – and the bullpen took over from there, eventually staking the Sox to a gritty 3-2, ten-inning win.  Pedro Ciriaco, Boston’s most unlikely but increasingly expected hero, singled softly into right field in the top of the tenth, scoring Jarrod Saltalamacchia for the win.

In fact, all the runs from both sides came from unexpected players last night.  Sox youngun Ryan Sweeney doubled in the second inning to score Slatalamacchia and Adrian Gonzalez.  New York’s Russell Martin – who currently has a .189 batting average –  put the Bombers on his back with a solo home run in the seventh and an RBI single in the eighth.

Meanwhile, New York’s Hiroki Kuroda also pitched really well.  He went eight innings, allowed only two runs, and only gave up one walk.

This is the kind of game that’s fun to watch.  This is the kind of game we hope for.  This is the kind of game the Sox need more of – a lot more of – if they’re going to stay in this race, because, and let’s not forget it: as of July 30, they’re a .500 team, and they have a long way to go if they’re going to sniff October.  There are six teams ahead of them in the Wild Card hunt right now: Oakland, the Angels, Detroit, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, and Toronto.  Now that there’s two wild cards, the Sox only need to be better than five of those six teams, but that’s still kind of a tall order.  The Angels currently hold the second wild card spot, and they’re at 55-47.  If they suddenly go .500 the rest of the way, then the Sox still have to go 34-26 just to tie them.  That 34-26 would be a .567 winning percentage, which means they’d have to play better than every American League team did in the first half except for the Yankees and Texas.

Playing better than all but two teams in the league, plus assuming that a team that’s been playing well will suddenly fall to earth for no apparent reason – those are odds I wouldn’t take to Vegas.  It’s possible, but the Sox have a very long haul ahead of them.  They really, really need Josh Beckett and Jon Lester to step up to the metaphorical plate – wins from Doubront are nice, but they’re not going to launch this team into the upper ranks of the American League in time.  As Yogi Berra said, it gets late early out there.

Boston’s long haul starts tonight, when Boston hosts Detroit at Fenway Park.  Clay Buchholz (8-3, 4.93 ERA) takes on Max Scherzer (10-5, 4.49 ERA) and the Tigers in a 7:10 start.

Photo by me.

Up until yesterday, I had two very memorable trips to Fenway Park — my first trip in 1978 when I was eight years old. It was a four generation outing with my dad, my grandfather and great grandmother (who was a huge fan!), and the Derek Lowe no-hitter. This one definitely tops the list now.

Becca did such a fantastic job recapping yesterday’s events with some amazing photos (if you missed it, click here) which is great because basically all I did was cry and ended up taking some extremely blurry pictures. It’s hard to  cheer, sob and snap pics all at the same time. What an amazing day! Like the final out of the 2004 World Series, I know I’ll never be able to watch footage from yesterday’s festivities without bursting into tears. It was such an emotional day for all Sox fans. Even the season ticket holder next to me got misty when Nomar walked onto the field. He said to me, “he was worth the price of admission for every game I went to that he played in. Now I’m crying!”

When I arrived for the game yesterday, I had a good feeling about this series with the Yankees. I thought nothing could go wrong — it was a beautiful day, Fenway turned 100 years old and I wasn’t at work — the Sox had to win. But they didn’t. So they’d win the second game, right? Nope. I wish I could’ve had ended today’s game after the 6th inning so I’m breaking this recap into two sections.

PART 1: Innings 1 - 6

For the first six innings of this game, I laid on the couch thinking, “crap, this is how the game should’ve gone yesterday!” Felix Doubront pitched six strong innings, giving up just one run on five hits to a pretty potent Yankees offense. He looked good and his 93 mph fast ball looked effortless. His only mistake was leaving one out over the plate in the top of the 6th for Mark Teixeira to belt over the Green Monster. On the slo-mo replay, you could see Mark’s eyes get real big and I’m sure he was thinking Christmas came early. He struck out seven Yankees and walked just two. At this point, I thought nothing could go wrong.

Even the offense decided to show up today. Almost every batter in the Red Sox lineup had at least one hit — everyone except the 3rd base platoon of Kevin Youkilis, Nate Spears and pinch hitter, Nick Punto. David Ortiz went 4 for 4 with an RBI and raised his average to .436, and Jarrod Saltalamacchia broke out his early season slump going 4 for 5. Both Mike Aviles and Cody Ross had two RBI — Cody’s coming on a monster homerun to straight away center that hit the camera tower. The Red Sox scored two in the first, three in the second, two in the third and two in the fifth and looked to be on their way to breaking their current four-game losing streak leading 9-0 after five innings.

But we all know that any lead against the Yankees is not big enough. In the 6th, Doubront struck out Robinson Cano and Alex Rodriguez before giving up the four-bagger to Teixeira. Curtis Granderson popped out to short stop to end the inning. Doubront finished the 6th with 99 pitches. I totally expected to see him in the 7th. That was not the case…. hence the second part to this recap.

PART 2: Innings 7 - 9

Vicente Padilla relieved Doubront to start the 7th and struck out Andruw Jones to kick things off. Russell Martin singled to right field and then FOX switched over to the White Sox v. Seattle game for the final three outs of Philip Humber’s perfect game. Now I love to see a perfect game just as much as the next fan but in my opinion, they stuck with the celebration a bit too long for my taste. By the time FOX went back to the Red Sox game, the wheels were starting to fall off the bus. The score, which was 9-1 when they switched coverage, was now 9-5. WTF? Nick Swisher blasted a grand salami to pull the Yankees to within four. And my nails got considerably shorter.

Matt Albers came in to relieve Padilla who couldn’t get the job done, and promptly gave up a three-run shot to Teixeira to bring them within one. And I really started to sweat. This is one of those times being married to a Yankees fan really backfires on me. I may or may not have been nanner-nannering my husband about Freddie Garcia’s stellar 1.2 inning outing. Karma hates me.

Franklin Morales came in to relieve Albers who also stunk it up and got out of the rest of the inning unscathed. In the end, the Yankees scored *cough* seven runs *cough* in the inning so I guess there was some scathing, just not for Morales. I honestly can’t bring myself to give the gory details of the 8th inning without leaping out the second story window of my house so here it is in nutshell. Bobby Valentine brought in Alfredo Aceves for the six out save attempt after Morales gave up a lead off single to left. That didn’t happen, he got the loss. The Yankees scored seven more runs on a lot of hits and a couple of walks and now Red Sox nation is pissed off. The boos for Bobby V. were deafening.

The game lasted 3 hours and 52 minutes. It felt twice that long but I’m sure that had a lot to do with having to listen to Tim McCarver and his butchering of nearly every aspect of the broadcast. If you care to take a gander at the painful box score, here’s the link, courtesy of the Red Sox. The series wraps up Sunday night at 8:05pm with Daniel Bard facing off against CC Sabathia. Surprisingly, right now Bard has a better ERA then Sabathia (4.63 vs. 5.59). Let’s hope we can at least salvage one game of this series.