The Boston bats had Beckett's back last night, in a big way. Alliteration aside, the Red Sox starter struggled through five innings, but came up with the win, his seventeenth of the season, as the Sox took a third game from the Cleveland Indians. With only one game left in the regular season, the quiet Red Sox backs woke up, as Aaron Laffey and the rest of the Tribe's pen were lit up, on the way to an 11-6 loss.
Even an uninspiring performance by Jon Lester was enough to get the job done against an Orioles team that has all but thrown in the orange towel, as Boston beat Baltimore, 11-5, on Saturday.
It was the Red Sox bats that locked up the 12th consecutive series win against the Orioles, behind a shaky outing six inning stretch where Lester gave up ten hits. But as he continued to miss his spots (only 62 strikes over 102 pitches), the offense was busy at work against an already depleted Orioles pitching staff.
With September now underway, the Red Sox have called up five players to fill out the Major League roster. Called-up were Junichi Tazawa, Chris Woodward, Joey Gathright, Brian Anderson, and George Kottaras.
While Tazawa is the easy favorite to make an impact for the big league club, every stolen base and late inning defensive substitution will put the Sox that much closer to the playoffs.
Analysis inside...
In a homage to Twitter, the new social media application that is changing how news is delivered (in the same vein how blogs changed everything) I bring to you a summary of each Red Sox player on the 25-man roster in 140 characters or less (the maximum number of characters you can enter on Twitter).
Have Twitter? Follow me. Tim's on too. Oh, and Fire Brand has one as well. You'll notice that had you followed Fire Brand, you would have gotten all these tweets last night.
The Red Sox have traded first-baseman/outfielder Mark Kotsay to the Chicago White Sox for centerfielder Brian Anderson.
Anderson has roughly 2.5 years of MLB service, so is under Sox (the red kind this time) control through 2013, if my shady calculations are correct.
Anderson, 27, has 782 career at-bats in the bigs posting a poor .225/.288/.364 line. In Triple-A, he is at .279/.311/.488. He is a gifted defensive centerfielder, but has long struggled with the bat. Earlier, he requested the White Sox trade him so he could get more playing time. That's not happening in Boston. It's unclear the plans the Sox have for Anderson. If I was a guessing man, he's the new starting centerfielder for the PawSox.
With the continued radio silence from Fenway, it’s pretty hard to generate new blog material on the Red Sox right…