More Slow Going

Still nothing to write home about yet.  Arnie Beyeler, who’s been managing the PawSox, is our new first base coach.  Greg Colbrunn, formerly of the Evil Empire, is our new hitting coach.  Victor Rodriguez, our former minor league coordinator, is our new assistant hitting coach.

As far as players are concerned, we’ve non-tendered Ryan Sweeney, Rich Hill, and Scott Atchison.  We traded Zach Stewart, who we got from the Other Sox for Kevin Youkilis, to the Pirates for a player to be named later.  Last but not least, although we claim that we’re still working on resigning Cody Ross, we worked out a two-year deal worth ten million dollars for Johnny Gomes pending a physical.

In other news, the Pats beat the Colts, 59-24, and the Jets, 49-19.

Buzznet

 

Read Full Post »

The First Move

Not much has happened since our slog of a season ended, but what did happen should be surprising to anybody.

Our first order of business was dismissing Bobby Valentine, which we did last Thursday.  This is something that was entirely predictable, appropriate, and correct.  We all know that he shouldn’t even have been hired in the first place.  It was awful.  He just wasn’t a good fit for our clubhouse, and the whole situation with him at the helm was completely dysfunctional.  There’s no need to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that there is a certain degree of professionalism that I think players and fans alike expect from a manager and that Bobby Valentine’s conception of that degree differed from ours.  Anyway, look for John Farrell and Tim Bogar to be on the brass’s radar.  Other possibilities include Torey Lovullo, former Pawtucket manager and current Jays first base coach; Joe McEwing, Other Sox bench coach; Tim Wallach, Dodgers third base coach; Brad Ausmus; and last but not least, our very own Jason Varitek.  Onward and forward!

Our blockbuster deal with the Dodgers is finally done.  For Nick Punto, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Adrian Gonzalez, we took on Rubby De La Rosa and Jerry Sands in addition to previously acquired James Loney, Ivan De Jesus, and Allen Webster.

Pedroia was nominated for the Hank Aaron Award.

In other news, the Pats beat the Broncos, 31-21, last week.

Boston Globe Staff/Aram Boghosian

Read Full Post »

Cut Down

Honestly, it doesn’t get much more infuriating than that.  I’m just going to jump right in because it’s really tough to deal with it all.

Cook pitched decently.  He only lasted five innings, and he gave up three runs on seven hits while walking none and striking out two.  He went one-two-three in the first and second, and gave up a double in the third.  He gave up a solo shot to lead off the fourth followed by a single and then a two-run home run.  Following  two quick outs, he gave up a single, and then a fielding error put another runner on, but the inning ended there.  He allowed a single in the fifth and a double to lead off the sixth, at which point he was replaced by Hill, who was replaced by Aceves after three batters.

Meanwhile, we reduced our deficit from three runs to two; in the bottom of the fourth, Pedroia doubled with one out and scored on a single by Loney.

Aceves came out for the seventh and gave up a single followed by a two-run home run of his own, which made the score 5-1.  Two outs later, he gave up a double and was replaced by Carpenter, who ended the inning.  In the bottom of the seventh, we made another dent in the score.  Ross began the inning by striking out, but then Salty and Nava hit back-to-back doubles.  The Yanks sent out their third pitcher of the inning, and then Salty scored on a groundout by Gomez and Nava scored on a double by Aviles.  5-3.

Carpenter handled the eighth without incident baseball-wise but with incident drama-wise; when Bobby V. came out to the mound and Aceves saw Carpenter coming in, he walked to the other side of the mound to avoid Bobby V. when he left the field.  In terms of the bottom of the inning, we failed to score.  But it was not without further drama.

Ross ended the inning on a called strike; the at-bat featured seven pitches, all but one of them sliders, and the count had been full.  Ross and everyone else who had a pair of decently functioning eyes could see that that last supposed strike was actually a ball because it was low, and he let home plate umpire Alfonso Marquez know it immediately. So Marquez rejected him; it was only the second rejection in Ross’s career.  Several minutes later, Bobby V., who had separated Ross and Marquez, went back out there to have a talk with him that obviously got heated pretty quickly and was ejected for the sixth time this year, which sets the record for the most single-season ejections by any manager we’ve ever had in our long, illustrious history.  And at some point even third base coach Jerry Royster was ejected for some reason, so bench coach Tim Bogar was managing and coaching third at the same time at the end of it all.  The whole situation was just absurd and could have been neatly avoided had Marquez just done his job and saw reality.

Anyway, Miller and Padilla teamed up to shut out the Yanks in the top of the ninth, and the stage was set for another possible walkoff.  Salty’s leadoff at-bat was exactly the kind of at-bat you hope for most in those situations.  The count was full and he got an eighty-three mile-per-hour slide as his sixth pitch.  He’s a big guy, and he unleashed his formidable power on it and sent it out of the park to right field for a solo shot that only he could have powered out of the park.  We were now one run away with nobody out, and between Salty having made it look so easy and our last-minute heroics of the previous night, we were daring to believe that we could potentially pull it off again.

But we didn’t.  Nava flied out, Gomez grounded out, and Aviles reached on a fielding error.  Ellsbury could have put the whole thing away right then and there.  But he grounded out instead.

So we lost, 5-4.  But no one can say we didn’t put up a fight.  Because we did, both literally and figuratively.  We manufactured our own runs and pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps in the face of a deficit and dared to call a ball, a ball.  We just kept going at it all night long, but we came up just short in the end.  It’s just so infuriating.  I mean, I have to think that we’ve lost this way to plenty of other teams this year since clearly we’re in the business of losing every way to every other team this year, but to do it against the Yankees is particularly brutal.  We were almost there; we just needed one more run to tie it, and we could take care of them in extras.  And we couldn’t get it done.  It’s the story of our 2012 baseball lives.

On a more cheerful note, we have next year’s schedule, so assuming that we’re optimistic, it’s a reminder of something to look forward to.  The season starts for us on April 1 in the Bronx; we follow Opening Day with a day off and then conclude the three-game series.  We then head off to Toronto for three games, and then we head home for our home opener against Baltimore, which is followed by another day off.  We then finish our series with Baltimore and play the Rays before spending three games in Cleveland and going back home to face the Royals, A’s, and newly-AL Astros.  Then we have a day off and we go back to Toronto and then to Arlington, our first full series of May.  The Twins and Jays comprise another homestand, followed by a day off and another road trip against the Rays, Twins, and Other Sox.  Then back home we’ve got the Tribe and the Phillies, followed by a series at Philadelphia and then the Bronx, followed by a day off.  That takes us to June, our first full series of which is at home against the Rangers and then the Angels.  Then we head off to Toronto and Baltimore before another day off and coming home to face the Rays.  Then we head off to Detriot before another day off and another homestand featuring the Rockies, the Jays, a day off, and the Padres in July.  Then it’s off to the West Coast for the Angels, Mariners, and A’s before the All-Star break.  When play resumes, we host the Yanks and Rays before a trip to Baltimore and a day off.  The west then comes to us as we host the Mariners and D-Backs at home, which brings us to August.  We then travel to Houston and Kansas City before taking a day off and traveling to Toronto.  We host the Yanks at home after that, followed by a trip to San Francisco, a day off, a trip to Los Angeles for the Blue Sox, another day off, and then a homestand featuring the Orioles, Other Sox, and Tigers, which brings us to September.  We go to the Bronx after that, take a day off, go to Tampa Bay, and return home for the Yanks, a day off, the Orioles, the Jays, and another day off.  Then we go to Colorado for two games, take a day off, and go to Baltimore for the last series of the season.  So we’ve got at least three days off every month except one: May, our most packed month, when we only have one day off.  But it’s a good schedule.  It’s interesting that Interleague is sort of spread out this year instead of being clustered in June.  It’s often a tough schedule, and we have to play some worthy opponents, but if all goes according to plan, we’ll be able to hold our own next year.

AP Photo

Read Full Post »

Shelling

Zach Stewart was called up and given the start.  I don’t think this is a start he’ll want to remember.  I know it’s a start I don’t want to remember.  It didn’t go well.  A newcomer gets called up and all he wants to do is impress and impress and impress, and then when he doesn’t and instead he falls hard and fast, you can’t help feeling bad for the man but so much worse for the team and for you, who’s saddled with a loss as a result.

He never really had much of a chance in this one, unfortunately.  From the beginning you could tell that he was having an off night in a big way.  Most of his pitches stayed up in the zone, and the opposing hitters had no problem picking them out.

In the first inning alone, he gave up a single, an RBI double, an RBI single that advanced the runner even further thanks to a throwing error by Pedroia, and a two-run home run.  He gave up a double to lead off the second, which turned into a run on another RBI single.  He gave up his second leadoff double of the night in the third and, two outs later, gave up two consecutive RBI doubles followed by his second two-run home run of the night.

Yeah.  It was ugly.  He gave up nine runs on ten hits while walking none and striking out two over three innings.  He is our first pitcher to give up nine earned runs on ten hits since Howard Ehmke did it in 1923.  And he’s our first pitcher to allow nine runs in his first game with us.  Because thankfully he was relieved by Tazawa after that.  He took an extremely well-deserved loss, and that was the end of that.  The final score ended up being 10-3, and he gave up all but one of those runs in the first three innings.  Four runs in the first, one in the second, and four more in the third.  Wow.  That’s basically the exact opposite of the way you want a callup start to go.

Tazawa gave up the Angels’ tenth run in the fifth, when he gave up a walk and a single that was followed by a double play that brought the run in.  Then Miller pitched around a bases-loaded situation in the sixth, and Aceves pitched the seventh and eighth.

We scored our first run in the second, when Gomez and Aviles opened the inning with back-to-back singles; Gomez scored on a sac fly by Podsednik one out later.  We scored our remaining two runs in the fifth; Podsednik and Ciriaco opened the inning with back-to-back singles, Ellsbury grounded into a force out that eliminated Ciriaco, Ellsbury stole second base and Podsedik scored on a throwing error, and then Ellsbury scored on a single by Pedroia.

We hardly threatened after that.  We had two runners on in the eighth, and that was basically it for our big effort to overcome a seven-run deficit and score runs.

By the way, in case you forgot, Stewart came over from the Other Sox when we traded Kevin Youkilis.  So that’s what we get.

Chris Carlson

Read Full Post »

The Total Package

Okay.  This whole game was gold.  I’m going to start with the pitching but it’s all I can do not to just skip to the end.  Seriously.

This is the start from Buchholz that we’ve been waiting for.  This start was awesome.  This is the type of start we want to see from him, and from all of our starters, every time out.  So this is the start we need him to build upon in order to sustain this momentum.  We’re in the second half now, and we need to have a monster second half because we have a lot of ground to cover, and having our starters build some momentum toward improvement like this is exactly what we need to take us forward.

Buchholz pitched a full eight innings and gave up one run on six hits while walking one and striking out six.  It was awesome.  He pitched like a master because, as we know, deep down he is one.  He used all of the pitches in his arsenal to expert degrees, pitching to and around hitters and drawing on both his heat and his off-speeds.  And he was efficient to boot.

And what made the start even more impressive is that it was part of an extremely intense pitcher’s duel.  In true pitcher’s-duel fashion, the score was decided for most of the game by one run, and that one run was the only run that either team scored for almost the entire game.  That “almost” is the key.

At the plate, we did a whole lot of nothing for a whole lot of time.  Buchholz allowed his run in the fourth; he gave up a walk, a single, and finally a sac fly that brought it in.  And by the time that run scored, we knew that this was going to be a pitcher’s duel for the long haul.  So that run may as well have been ten.  It certainly felt like ten.  Through six innings, Ciriaco’s triple in the third was our only hit, and the third was our only inning during which we sent more than the minimum to the plate.  We had a good chance to break it open in the seventh, our most productive inning featuring three consecutive singles to load the bases with one out, but then Middlebrooks ended the threat with a double play.  And our only hit in the eighth was a single, so we were heading into the ninth gearing up for a potential disappointment.

What we got was the exact opposite.  Crawford opened the inning with a single, the newly-returned Pedroia grounded out, Gonzalez singled, Punto came on to pinch-run for him, and the Other Sox made a pitching change.  And then Ross stepped up to the plat in every sense.  He took a ninety-four mile-per-hour fastball for a ball.  He took a ninety-three mile-per-hour fastball for a strikeout.  And then he hit the fastest of all, a fastball at ninety-five miles per hour, all the way out toward the Monster for yet another three-run shot.  It was high.  It was far.  It was huge.  It was a walkoff.

He tossed his bat aside like he knew for a fact before the ball even left the batter’s box that it was going to be out.  It was one of those things where it was too perfect to really be true, and yet somehow it actually was.  It was so ridiculously, absurdly awesome in every way.

The final score was 3-1.  Unfortunately, Buchholz had no win to show for his gem; Aceves picked that up for his work in the ninth.  Gonzalez and Ross each went two for four for our only two multi-hit performances of the night.  Ciriaco’s triple and Ross’s homer were our only extra-base hits.  Both teams posted eight hits in total.

How ‘bout that? We just won the series after one swing of the bat.  That was pure, pure awesome.

Boston Globe Staff/Barry Chin

Read Full Post »