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Sox Gamers/Postmortems

Saturday Gamer: Sox-Rays

The action gets going soon, with John Lackey facing James Shields. Comment here.

30 replies on “Saturday Gamer: Sox-Rays”

Don’t understand why they don’t play Reddick more in RF, he’s played there before (126 innings over 3 seasons). When Crawford comes back be interested to see a few games with Crawford, Elsbury and Reddick in the outfield to see how things go.

I wish Lackey got as heated about his lousy pitching as he gets about being taken out of the game.
And our latest addition to the bullpen clears up the mess with just one pitch.
Nine outs to go.

McCarver rips Lackey for showing up the manager when being taken out and suggests he should talk to the manager in his office about being taken out of the game.
Curious idea. Doesn’t he have to do it right on the mound if he wants to convince the manager to let him stay in the game? Not that I approve of Lackey doing that, ever.

If Tito had already signaled to the bullpen there was no convincing to be done. I want to see what happened, all I’ve got is game threads describing Lackey’s outburst. SoSHers seem to think that Scutaro and Lackey weren’t happy with each other (Lackey may have a good reason, there), but you can’t show up your manager. Lackey’s definitely an emotional guy, and I don’t have a beef with him getting pissed about things, but he’s still got to respect his elders.
I want to see a replay.
As for Lackey, he seems to have rebounded ok after that first inning, though seemed a bit lucky too. Schizo. He held the Rays down after the first, so not too bad. Another plus outing for him I’d say.

Williams pitching this inning is interesting. It can be chalked up to shrewd managing – while Williams may not ever be anything special the Rays haven’t seen him before, so perhaps this is the one time you let him stay out there, save Albers. Get to Bard in the eighth and save an arm for tomorrow with the new guy as the bridge. Tito may be figuring the Rays are running uphill against the new guy, which won’t be the case the next time around.

The fact that Carl Crawford is not playing for them anymore does not prevent the Rays from stealing bases against the Red Sox at will. Not that it gets them anywhere.
It’s up to Papelbon now.

This will hopefully be a nice win, with Beckett throwing tomorrow. After Miller’s craptastic performance last night Lackey did some good stuff today, along with Williams. Beating Shields is a nice cherry on top, if it holds. After that first inning I was envisioning a sweep and a crash back to Earth. Now we can win the series, if it all stands up.

So what started to look like an inevitable disaster has turned out rather well. Now let’s pray that Beckett’s knee holds up tomorrow. With Buchholz seemingly out for much longer than anticipated Beckett has to stay healthy.

Here’s a minor landmark: yesterday was the first time this season that the Red Sox had a better run differential than the Yankees. Which is sort of amazing because, going into the break, the Yankees differential was 10 runs better.

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