Welcome back to baseball after yesterday’s emotional win, where we laughed! we cried! we cheered wildly! we hid under couches!, we all pledged eternal love and devotion to John Travis Buck for his improbable homerun to send the Fenway faithful home unhappy. Heh.
Taking a cue from this morning’s thread, I thought I’d compile some quotes about what Curt Schilling (awesome blog, by the way!) thinks of our offense in order to get the team good and fired up for tonight’s contest. I’ll make a monumental effort not to agree with him.
Eric kept the bat head in the zone on a decent split and hit it harder than I’d planned to center to end the inning. (See, he thinks Chavy can hit!)
I hang my first split of the day and Bobby hits a hard single to left. Had the whole AB setup to get him to chase one in the dirt but I didn’t get the ball to bite and paid. (Yeah, that would have been a good plan for the ‘K’)
Travis hits another split for what should have been a routine ground ball out to second. The main problem there was that about 10 seconds before I threw the pitch I moved Dustin more into the hole and the ball ends up being a single because of that. (I’m pretty sure his homerun later would not have been a routine catch.)
Going into the series Dan Johnson had swung at 1 of his last 19 first pitches. He took the first one in his first AB as well. I had a serious hunch that he’d be swinging at the first pitch and wanted to put a fastball on the corner, or just off, to get some bad contact and a quick out. Instead I end up aiming the ball and leaving it up and more on the plate than it could be and he crushes it over our pen to put them on the board. Bad mistake that could have been prevented with even an ounce of execution.
I think I caught Eric guessing on the second fastball even though I was sure he’d swing at the first pitch. When he didn’t I had a feeling that he was trying to think along with us.
You all know the ending so no need to rehash it.
Rehash! Rehash! Repeat! Repeat!
This lineup will be trying to do just that, along with something no one has been able to do so far this season: hand Beckett his first loss.
Oakland
Stewart, LF
Ellis, 2B
Chavez, 3B
Piazza, DH
Johnson, 1B
Crosby, SS
Buck Putnam, RF
Kendall, C
Langerhans, CF
Chad Gaudin will be trying to minimize damage done by this crew:
Boston
Lugo, SS
Youkilis, 1B
Ortiz, DH
Ramirez, LF
Drew, RF
Lowell, 3B
Varitek, C
Crisp, CF
Cora, 2B
Starting Pitching Lines
BOS: RHP Josh Beckett (5-0, 2.48 ERA)
OAK: RHP Chad Gaudin (1-1, 2.54 ERA)
LET’S GO OAK-LAND!
