Just one night after Paul Byrd dropped five runs in the first frame against the Kansas City Royals, KC found out what it was like to watch an entire game slip away in one inning. Behind a six run fifth inning, the Boston Red Sox gave the Royals one such beat down, taking their first win of the series off of KC, 9-2, last night. The win was their 90th of the season, and brought the magic number in the Wild Card Race down to five.
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.
In his first game back since June 19, Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched a surprisingly decent an unagitating outing, as the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of California of the United States of North America, 4-1. The multi-million dollar man notched over six shutout innings, giving up only three hits. Unfortunately, he walked just as many batters, but the five strikeouts on 93 pitches were certainly a step in the right direction.
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.
What should be done with our struggling DH? A guy that could have ended each and every game, seemingly, had he been given the opportunity just a few years back.
Now, he can't hit himself out of a paper bag. And I mean a bag that is already ripped in half, tearing down the middle.
He still has a pretty good approach--taking pitches, working the count. But more of that seems to due to the fact that he realizes his bat ain't what it used to be. So he compensates by being, or so it seems, just a little more passive.
Michael Weiner, the incoming head of the Players Association, and David Ortiz will speak to the media at 12:30 pm today. Here is an advance statement released by Weiner. Two money quotes:
The number of players on the so-called "government list" meaningfully exceeds the number of players agreed by the bargaining parties to have tested positive in 2003. Accordingly, the presence of a player's name on any such list does not necessarily mean that the player used a prohibited substance or that the player tested positive under our collectively bargained program.
In 2003, legally available nutritional supplements could trigger an initial "positive" test under our program.