It’s tough in the middle of a tough loss — especially when a win seemed within reach for the first seven innings or so — to keep one’s perspective.
In the end, it’s one loss with 161 games to go. If Jon Lester has an 8.84 ERA in September, the Red Sox won’t be going anywhere near the postseason. Thankfully, that possibility seems quite remote.
To summarize: The offense looked pretty good, the defense looked solid, and even Lester looked like he was more the victim of bad luck than bad pitching. The Bard meltdown was the most unfortunate part of Opening Day, and it probably has the least predictive value on a day when nothing has any predictive value. (He’s unlikely to be terrible, obviously, and even if he is, the Sox won’t let one crappy reliever doom the season.)
I was expecting a loss with C.J. Wilson on the mound; it’s just harder to accept when the Sox manage to build two two-run leads against him. Still, there’s nothing to fix, nothing to change and, really, nothing to worry about yet. So we take it in stride and move on.
7 replies on “So Much for the Undefeated Season”
“… Lester looked like he was more the victim of bad luck than bad pitching…”
treading as lightly as i can on the eggshells in front of me i have to ask, how do you separate bad luck from poor performance?…i saw the game with only one eye open, so i’ll defer to your judgement…but i’m also not a believer in luck, good or bad…i mean stuff like a bad hop that would’ve killed a rally and ended an inning i could buy as having an element of luck, but…
“…So we take it in stride and move on. …”
makes sense…can’t throw in the towel after just one game, and i’m not celebrating too much after the yankees 1 victory…at least 161 games left…there will be a lot of wins for both teams to be sure, but also a lot of heart-breaking losses…
I thought Lester looked crappy. Not enough control (the two hit batsmen were on just terrible pitches), not enough missed bats. Napoli’s homer was a great piece of hitting, but he put two guys on ahead of Napoli to get there in the first place. So I didn’t think Lester had bad luck, l thought he was just bad.
Tend to agree with SF on Lester. On Bard, it seemed like he had problem locating his fastball and I didn’t see any of them get over 96, but I didn’t pay close attention to every pitch. I was hoping that Lester was over his April woes, we will see in a few days when he goes again. Not striking anyone out is what got me, not typical for Lester.
Agree on the offense, good to see Papi go yard on opening day and Adrian get off to a good start…wish we could say the same for Crawford.
I tend to look at the positives that came out of this game.
Ellsbury, against the lefty, looked awesome.
Papi went deep.
Obviously, AGon
Both Youk and Ped looked good
And Salty put good swings on balls all day.
Lester and Bard don’t worry me at all. This isn’t Lohud, where every missing link with a computer spouts off about how horrible Bard is and Crawford is such a waste of money a mere one game into the season.
If you asked me yesterday, I would have said they stood a 10% chance of winning the game against Wilson anyhow.
Yeah Lester wasn’t great by any stretch, but two of the home runs he allowed were on pretty good pitches. That’s all I meant.
A pitcher can look bad one day and be dominant five later. That’s the nature of pitching. How we know pitchers is over many hundreds, if not thousands, of innings of MLB performance. Every once and a while one will surprise you (Aaron Small), but the vast majority are who they are, unless they get hurt. That qualification aside, Jon Lester is a legitimate rotation ace. An ERA from him over 4 would be shocking.
I agree, James. While he didn’t look great yesterday, anyone pointing to such a performance (by he or Bard) is only doing so to push buttons of Sox fans.
I believe we had about the same exact discussion about Lester and CC, to which I contributed with tounge in cheek, this time last year.
How’d that work out for both guys last year? hahaha.