If there’s one thing I loathe with every fiber of my baseball-watching being, it’s losing to the Yankees. Why can’t we just beat them? Seriously, how awesome would that be? We should just beat them. Like, every time. It’s one thing to lose in every single way to every single team on every other single day, but it’s quite another to do all that and lose to the Yankees also.
This game was just terrible. It just didn’t go well. It could have gone well, but naturally it didn’t. At one point things looked so good, and at the next point things got pretty bad.
Morales turned in five and one-third abysmal innings and took the resultant loss. He gave up five runs on six hits with one walk and three strikeouts. Part of the reason why he was so mediocre was that he made a lot of mistakes. And a too-high number of those mistakes turned into home runs. There were four of them. He gave up solo shots with with one out in the first and again with one out in the seventh. He also gave up two consecutive solo shots with one out in the second and a solo shot with two out in the fifth. The only non-homer run he gave up scored in the sixth, when he allowed two straight singles, one of which scored on another single, which was actually given up by Mortensen, so it was an inherited runner.
The solo shot that Mortensen gave up with one out in the seventh clearly was not an inherited runner; that was all him and his own fault. And then Andrew Bailey, who we haven’t heard from basically since he was acquired and who still does indeed pitch for us, handled the last two outs of the eighth.
So while the Yankees were getting busy throughout the game, we made a dent in the final score during one inning and one inning only. Granted, it was a decent dent. It was nothing to be ashamed of. And it was a good run total. But Morales was not having a good night, and it wasn’t enough. Surely a starting pitcher should be able to lock down a win with four runs’ worth of backing. The key word there being “should,” because as we of all people know, all too often that is a far cry from reality.
It was our third inning of glory, however limited and short-lived it was. Aviles singled, Podsednik reached on an error, Aviles scored on a force out by Ciriaco, Ellsbury walked, Crawford provided an easy out, and then Pedroia just let one rip. He was in a hurry, too. It was the second pitch of the at-bat; the first one was in the dirt, and the second one was most certainly not. It was a fastball clocked at ninety-two miles per hour, and Pedroia let loose with that total-body swing that he just throws his whole self into and he powered that ball straight out to left field. At the time it gave us a much-needed one-run lead. Which was promptly erased. To his credit, he did almost vault another one out of the park in the eighth, but somehow it was hauled in for an out. We just can’t catch a break at all.
And then we went back to doing nothing and going down in order most of the time. So the final score was 6-4. And we lost to the Yankees, which is obviously devastating, horrible, painful, and humiliating every time. At least the deficit wasn’t too large, so we lost with dignity. But what bothered me was that we couldn’t spread out our scoring. We put ourselves on the board once and only once during the entire game and that was all we could manage, when all I really want to do is just clean the field with them.
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