We'll be back after the break

Doug:
Holy Birkenstocks — how many cahbon credits did the Red Sox drain with that wasted road series?

 

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Doug:
I mean c'mon. We've got a frickin planet in crisis and shit and these guys jet ovah to Detroit just to get swept?

 

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Doug:
And talk about a lack of renewable energy, hello Red Sox offense. It's like the powah grid in a 3rd World Country, one week you've got the juice, next week it's all candles and coal fires. No reliability whatsoevah.

 

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Mike:
On the bright side, I'd rathah go into the All Stah Break having been swept then come out of it that way. I mean by the time Toronto rolls into town on Thursday, getting swept by the Tigers will be ancient history.

 

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Mike:
And at 10 games up and the biggest lead in any division …

 

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Doug:
Right. But still …

 

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Doug:
We keep waiting for Manny and Papi and Drew and Lugo to "come around" you know like anyday now these guys are going to "come around" but what if they don't come around, what then?

 

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Mike:
Don't worry — They'll come around.

 

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Comments

[Sean O]

Thank god it's the ASB. After that last gutwrenching series, I need a good 4 days without having to think about this offense, or Matsuzaka.

Please god, don't let this be another 2006. Is anyone else getting the feeling that we're having a reverse 2004? We win a million in a row early on, then play .500 for the next 4 months. Sigh.

[IkeG]

Trying not to think about it, Sean. Just trying to feel good about a 10-game cushion:

Aaaah, ten games ... ten games is a nice big lead ... ten games would be a big lead to lose ... man, that would be embarrassing to lose a ten-game lead ... aaaugh, we're going to lose a ten-game lead ... bastards! I have no reason to live!

Didn't work

[Scott]

I am officially worried after another debacle. This time at the hands of Gary Sheffield & Company. I also can't stand that old bastard Leyland. The Sox were never good enough for him. How many times back in the day did the Sox ask him about managing the team and he turned them down? Yes, I am bitter and I don't forget easily.

[denversoxfan]

Lugo will not come around, ever. He's done.

[Steve in MD]

Sunday's game came down to one horrendously bad call - the third strike in Manny's pinch hitting at bat. That ball had to be six inches below his knees - the catcher practically picked it out of the dirt.

I've never been one for conspiricy theories, but it sure seems like the umps are helping bring the Sox back to the pack of other good AL teams (Detroit, Cleveland, Anaheim and Seattle). They've really been getting a lot of bad ball/strike calls on the road...

[Youk Rules]

Nice to see Coco Crisp doing justice to the #1 spot, too.

I've said it before: would you rather be 10 games up or 10 games back? The Yankees and Blue Jays have a mountain to climb...

[Jason O.]

"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves."

-Sir Edmund Hillary

[Kaz]

We've lost a 10 game lead at least once already this season.

We've got it again.

This is what I was talking about at the end of April. Even back then, given that we'd played a stellar month, we basically presented the rest of our division with a likely insurmountable task. If we play 0.650 ball for a month while they all play below 0.500, then they have to play 0.651 ball for a month AND we have to play worst than the best sub-0.500 team for an equally long period of time to lose our lead.

The Red Sox will play well enough to retain anywhere from a 5-15 game lead on the entire division throughout the rest of the season. What we should be more worried about is the fact that we haven't done great on the road and that we're likely to pull the Wild Card opponent in the ALDS and we're a combined 6-6 against the top 3 contenders for the spot (Cleveland, Seattle, Minnesota). If we got past that hurdle, we'd still have either Detroit or LAA, and while I like us vs LAA, I think we just saw how rough a Boston/Detroit ALCS would be on the intestines.

[h.b.]

I'm with Kaz. The lead/division seems safe. The worrying now concerns the question of whether they have what it takes to do more than that?

[ygbluiyg]

"The Yankees and Blue Jays have a mountain to climb..."

The Yanks and Jays have a mountain to climb just to get into the wild card. And if either one of them gets hot, they have to still hope that the 4 teams in front of them (oak., minn.,sea.,cle.) simultaniously get cold.
There are mountains, and then there are MOUNTAINS

[PJ]

Mountain to climb? Thanks for the song! Every time somebody mentions "a mountain to climb", I think of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" from "The Sound of Music" and it usually takes about two weeks to lose that entire soundtrack after going through it all in my head. I expect this to last at least through the ASB...

(shakes head)

So Long, Farewell, Aufwiedersehn, Goodbye!

PJ

[buckner was framed]

yeah PJ, but you gotta admit Liesl was kinda hot... and, come to think of it- wasn't she wearing a teal dress, too?
hmmmmmm

[louclinton]

I don't see a return of '06. That team just quit. Even now, with the losses they are trying to scramble back into games. It's fair to say that every offensive player [save for Lowell and Youk] has been a disappointment at one time or another this season. It is particularly obvious when their bad games match up. We are due for some games when everybody is hitting on all cycliders. [I'm looking at you, Nancy]

lc

[louclinton]

I have no idea what a cyclider is...

*cylinders

lc

[Kaz]

Evidently it's part of a Suzuki motorcycle, Lou. Hope that helps.

[tooeledave]

You think hitting on all cylinders is good, you should see a team that's hitting on all cycliders. Woo.

[Sonoma Sox]

Evidently it's part of a Suzuki motorcycle - I didn't realize some of the Transformers were already getting sold on interweb market.

Manny's "called strike" was piss poor but when your the "best right handed hitter of our generation" you gotta at least make some contact in that situation - two other pitches in that sequence were called strikes both were a little higher but your Manny damnit - hit the ball.

Not that worried though - Schill will be back & strong, Lester threw a great game over the weekend AND Jeff Bailey & Luuugo will each hit 20 HRs here on out.

[JeffinDC]

I happened to surf over to YES (NO!) during the game yesterday, and the idiots were discussing which team they would rather see lose the tigers-sox game. I think ubergenius Paul O'Neill was the one who said he would rather see the tigers lose so they get closer in the WC standings to the tigers (of course, the MFY are 9 1/2 back of the tigers, a whopping 1/2 a game off the sox). Then Michael (see ya!) Kay said that he would rather see the Sox lose; his rationale being that it would be easier to catch the Sox than to leapfrog over 5 other "good" teams. Go figure.

[yazbread]

Report from Comerica. The positives. Tigers fans are great. They appear to live and die with the team, very knowledgeable about baseball, and about all of them agreed that Manny got screwed on that called strike. The negatives. For a ballpark that is only seven years old, it is a little grimy. With these huge Tiger statutes all over the place and a carousel, it has a decidedly Disney-esque feel to it and the concourse areas are pretty tight. Food is OK but the range of beer is limited. The urban blight that is Detroit pretty much encroaches on the ballpark. All in all, Comerica is a far cry from Camden Yards and the Cell in Chicago is a much more enjoyable experience. The Durham Bulls play in a nicer park in my opinion.

As to the game. Robertson's pitch count was at 97 when he served up those homers to Lugo and Bailey. So Leyland literally did not want to leave any gas in the tank and the 6-5 score is misleading. Granderson's catch on Wily Mo was spectacular and will probably be in the running for 'catch of the year'. I was hoping that Matsusaka would salvage one game in the series, but the game ended with Tiger fans yelling 'Sweep'. SportsCenter noted that the last time the Tigers committed five errors and won a game was 1930. Great see the Sox play but I am not sure I would journey to Detroit for another game - unless it was the ALCS.

[meredith]

I'm not worried about the division ... I'm worried about what happens after that.

I don't want the '07 Sox to be a repeat of the '01 Mariners. That would be embarrassing.

[Natalie]

//yeah PJ, but you gotta admit Liesl was kinda hot... and, come to think of it- wasn't she wearing a teal dress, too? hmmmmmm//

Aside from the teal dress, the similarities between me and Leisl are uncanny, bwf, what with my nubile 16 year old figure, my Nazi boyfriend, my lovely singing voice, and my ability to make clothes sewn from curtains look fetching...

This weekend sucked. What also sucks? The All-Star break. I hate having to wait 4 days for meaningful baseball. Rather than enjoying the exhibition, I mostly spend the All-Star game praying one of the Sox starters does not pull a hammy in pursuit of home-field advantage for the Series...

[Kaz]

...Liesl was kinda hot...

Wow, operative word being "was". Charmian Carr has aged "gracefully", let's just say. But actually, bully for her for not feeling the need to "regain her youth" or any other Hollywood-esque crap and get so plastic surgeried up so as to have skin tighter than a Kenyan mandinka drum.

[Youk Rules]

I'm with you Natalie...at least for the second paragraph:

I'm stewing for four days...

[PJ]

Now I'm friggen yodeling to "Lonely Goatherd"!

Shoot me now!

Heather Menzies, who played Louisa von Trapp, was my personal favorite and the one I would have liked to "odelay" the most. Not only did she actually have an acting career unlike Charmian Carr, she was also in the August 1973 issue of Playboy...

Apparently Hugh Hefner likes yodeling too!

[buckner was framed]

Kaz-
Glad to see the new job doesn't interfere with your contributions here... priorities and all that ;-)

[Steve in MD]

//she was also in the August 1973 issue of Playboy//

drat - my back issues only go back to the format change in '78...

[Bob]

Hi all. Worked all weekend, with the games as my background music.

It turned into a broken Philip Glass soundtrack.

BTW, saw this today. It completely debunks the whole global warming argument. Climate changes are evidently caused by shark fin soup.

I knew it!

http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/ocean_protection_commune_sharks?size=_original

[Kaz]

Kaz-
Glad to see the new job doesn't interfere with your contributions here... priorities and all that ;-)

Oh, shoot! My job! TTYL...gotta run!

[pudge]

For what it's worth, the Sox have been one game under .500 since May ended. A LOSING RECORD. And AL games only? We are 7-and-fricking-15 since May ended, and almost half those wins are against Tampa Bay.

(Last year, by comparison, the Sox actually had a LOSING RECORD against the AL, and were saved from an overall losing record by a 16-2 interleague record.)

If we go one game under .500 for the rest of the season, the Yankees win the division by winning .636 here out.

Not to be a downer, but, color me concerned.

[SoCal BosSox Fan]

Marlins where in town this weekend playing the Dodgers. I've got to tell you I was getting pretty sick of hearing Vin Scully go on and on about Hanley Ramirez.

To hear Vin talk you'd think it Han Ram was the second coming of Chirst.

He did at one point admit the trade has worked out OK for the Sox.

[Kaz]

But look at how we got here (even with this losing record since May). We have the second best Runs Against in the majors (the Padres are the best at a ridiculous 298 runs against). Yet, we're right in the middle of the pack when it comes to Runs Scored. This suggests that all the games we've lost have been low scoring affairs. The kind where a single big hit would have been the game changer (and yet our wins have been blowouts). And yet, we're still 14-12 in 1-run games (compared to say 6-14 for the Yankees).

All this suggests that we're in a much better position than our record shows (and our record is the best in baseball!!...even with this "losing record" since May).

Not to mention that we've been doing it with our phenom starter *only* giving us 32.2 innings of stellar closing (20 for 21 saves). Sure, Tavarez was a rocky start to the season, but May and June gave us a guy pitching 3.50 or so in the #5 spot! Even Kason has stood in pretty well as a #6 to cover for Schilling so that he's ready to go down the stretch well.

I don't worry about our bats; I worry about our middle relief (before we can get to Okajima). We have seen participation from everyone at the plate at any given time...certainly enough to win nearly 2 of every 3 games. But if our starter doesn't go more than 5 innings, it's a crapshoot as to who to turn the ball over to. Another way to look at it is who did we turn to when the game is headed for extra innings...it was a thrill a minute to see who'd come out of the bullpen for us or how long we could push Okajima.

It'd be nice to have that 6&7th guy to bridge us from a rough start (where we're still within reach or leading the game on our offense) over to our setup/closer dynamic duo.

[Sonoma Sox]

Kaz - your new job must be as Bill James' ass't...nice work getting into the front office - when do we get free tix?

Also - as stated in this holy place before, I'm scared of those middle relievers. Timlin looked good but was that a second wind dying out?

Hopefully that's why it seems Theo et al are looking at former closers (Lidge, Gagne, etc) in a trade as a bridge to OK.

[buckner was framed]

PJ-
screw Playboy, Heather Menzies was in the TV version of "Logan's Run", which, as we all know, means the Sox are going to rip off ten straight after the ASB thanks to Tessie's grandchild. So, all together now: "Doe, a deer, a female deer..."

[Sonoma Sox]

This one for you LC -

BDD: Who would be the hot-dog contest eating champion of the 2007 Red Sox?

Schill: Glenn Geffner?

Think this might be Schill's way of saying he hopes Goofner sticks enough in his mouth to shut him up?

[soxdownunder]

safe at home!
Go the american league ... whether we can stand 4 days without baseball, our boys really need the break, 6 losses in a row away from Fenway, yuck!

[Ghengis Ortiz]

Ok, this just in from CHB

"I could only think of Pumpkin, the friendly horse who kept Seabiscuit company during the golden days of horse racing. In an effort to placate temperamental Seabiscuit, trainer Tom Smith originally tried a goat in the next stall, then settled on Pumpkin. He cut a hole between the stalls so the horses could communicate.

I expected Okie to be Daisuke's Pumpkin..."

I think there's a lot of mileage in this one. h.b.?

[Bob]

Glad to hear you're back safe and sound, SDU.