Then the bullpen collapsed and the Sox were swept and everything had to be reevaluated. Yet I reached the same conclusion. The Rays were hot, had the favored pitching match-ups, and the Sox had been miserable on the road in 2008. Add to that a Red Sox team not playing well and starting to finally miss Ortiz and the sweep isn’t surprising.

That the Red Sox lost 3 games by a total of 4 runs should be a little consolation, though consolation doesn’t help in the standings.

Two thoughts:

1. If Varitek doesn’t hit and the young bullpen melts under his leadership, of what use is Varitek*?

2. Hansen and Delcarmen have shown moments of brilliance. They’ve also been wildly inconsistent for several years. If they don’t finish the season with signs of improvement and maturity it might be time for the Sox to cut their losses and go a different direction.

On to New York.

* Yes, I know. Blaming Varitek for the bullpen’s incompetence is a stretch. But he receives more than his share of praise when they’re successful. He can’t come off blame free when they implode.

This is Gary. You know, your biggest fan?

We buy the jerseys and the caps; the Mike Lowell World Series MVP bobble head. We buy the MLB Extra Innings package even though we know it won’t include Red Sox games if they play in Florida, or against a team from Florida, or on Saturday. We drove 8 hours to see the Red Sox play the Rays monday, and my back can still feel it.

Last night the Red Sox were playing the Rays again. The game was carried nationally by ESPN but blacked out locally since we live in Florida and are expected to watch the local broadcast. Except we’re 8 hours from Tampa Bay, which means we didn’t get the local broadcast.

To simplify, you had ESPN blackout the game so that we would be forced to either watch the game on the local channel that doesn’t exist or buy tickets for a game 8 hours away.

That’s beyond ridiculous. Please update your TV contracts. Fans (especially me, your biggest) deserve better.

Sincerely,
Gary

Tim Wakefield is only 5-5 so far in 2008. The two pitchers make an interesting comparison, however, when you move beyond the misleading wins statistic.

Mike Mussina in 89.1 innings:

ERA 3.93 | WHIP 1.24 | SO 50 | BAA .280

Tim Wakefield in 102 innings:

ERA 3.88 | WHIP 1.25 | SO 69 | BAA .229

If Wakefield could better control the knuckle ball Mussina wouldn’t even be in this discussion. Of course, that’s the catch with the knuckler, isn’t it?

Yes, I realize I’ve jinxed myself and Mussina will throw a shutout tonight.

However, I find it ironic that for all the accolades Jerry Remy receives for adding to Red Sox broadcasts the game on the field became only a bit player on his special day. If you weren’t paying close attention you might think the game had been cancelled in honor of Remy; this despite an entire hour devoted to the Remdog before the game even started.

The game deserved better, and Jerry Remy should realize that as much as anyone.

Included among the insults is a comical look at Schilling’s Hall of Fame chances:

Assuming he never pitches again (not a stretch, according to 38Pitches), Schilling finishes with a won-lost record of 216-146. Sorry, that just doesn’t cut it - not unless Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris go in first. Blyleven won 287 games. Morris won 254.

Shaughnessy, a professional sports journalist, uses wins as the sole measure of Schilling’s career and Hall of Fame chances.

Here’s how Jayson Stark looks at the case for Schilling to enter the Hall of Fame:

Schilling not only led all of them in complete games (with 83), but only one other righthander in the whole sport (Greg Maddux) was closer than 25 CGs away. Just Pedro Martinez had a better strikeout ratio than Schilling (8.59 K/9). Only Pedro and Roger Clemens had more strikeouts than Schilling (3,116) , period. Just Pedro and Maddux had a better WHIP than Schilling (1.137). And nobody had a better strikeout-walk ratio. In fact, Schilling’s K/BB ratio (4.38 whiffs for every walk) ranks No. 1 among ALL PITCHERS IN THE MODERN ERA.
So how compelling are those numbers? And I haven’t even mentioned October yet–the month in which he did his finest work of all.

Is it any surprise that Shaughnessy is considered a joke among most knowledgeable Red Sox fans?

I was watching ESPN’s broadcast of the Braves game tonight, and there was a really, really weird moment where they were discussing Rick Sutcliffe taking time off to go get cancer treatment, and Erin Andrews was in the stands and wished him well or something — I wasn’t really paying attention, it seemed totally pointless — at which point Sutcliffe went off on a bizarre rant about her, how good she looked, her skirt, and how everyone was watching her and her skirt and when they cut to the broadcast booth, his partner had this weird look of terror and shock on his face, and they chatted about how distracting she was around the batting cage.

This should be Rick Sutcliffe’s last job announcing anything. He shouldn’t be hired to do dog races. He shouldn’t be able to ever get a quarter for hawking wares at garage sales.

I normally take the safe route and just assume Rick Sutcliffe is drunk when making moronic comments.

But even more offensive than Sutcliffe’s remarks was this comment by Richard Deitsh of Sports Illustrated:

I wish Sutcliffe, who I think is a good analyst, nothing but the best of health. I wish him a long and fruitful life.

So Richard Deitsch knows even less about baseball than Rick Sutcliffe. Noted for future reference.

More than two months into the season, Joe Girardi looks a lot like Joe Torre. Girardi, too, will always go first and often to his old reliables, before foraging elsewhere on the bench or in the bullpen.

…Girardi arguably has overused his core players, the ones who still remember what it feels like to win championships. He wants to play them. They want to play, at any cost. And so you have a worrisome situation which may grow worse by August or September, if you are inclined to think negatively.

Ignored in any discussion of the Yankees’ frantic rush for a playoff spot in 2007 is their predictable collapse in the post season. Having to scratch and claw for every game and unable (or unwilling) to rest players doomed New York.

By contrast Boston’s large divisional lead allowed starters scheduled rest. The result was a lower win percentage in the second half of the season but a team rested and ready for the playoffs.

Watching the divisional lead shrink while the Red Sox sat key players was frustrating; the results were impressive. Finishing with a 2 game lead in the division and winning the World Series trumps running away with the division and wilting in the playoffs.

This year appears to be shaping up similarly. The Yankees scrapping for a post season birth while the Red Sox are already preparing for the post season.

Do you understand what you’re seeing?

What the Red Sox are doing spits in the face of current major league logic. Running in one starting pitcher after another with similar successes, while having the gall to sit back and offer these various hurlers vacations to guarantee freshness come the schedule’s final stretch run?

If both Boston and New York make it to the post season it’ll be interesting to see if the results mirror 2007.

The one plot twist was apparent half way into the move, so it failed as a drama. The story was cliched and the ending a cop out, so it failed as social commentary. But it wasn’t a drama, nor a social commentary, right? It was a comedy.

It failed in that respect as well. I’m a fan of both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but their comedy on Saturday Night Live was more cutting edge than anything in Baby Mama.

Leaving Theatre:

Me: I laughed at a few parts.

Kayleigh: Me too.

Me: What was the funniest part to you?

Kayleigh: …

That says it all.

Finally tired of being burned Francona used a quick hook on Okajima in a recent victory over Cincinnati. Single, strikeout, walk and Okajima was gone before he could do more damage.

Now if Francona could use the same strategy with Mike Timlin I could stop drinking so much. Timlin comes in with a 2 run deficit and doesn’t leave until it reaches 6.

The Red Sox appear to be giving Timlin every chance to turn his disastrous season around. A decent Timlin adds a ton of post season experience to the club. But he’s painful to watch right now and looks done. I’m hoping he proves me wrong, but I’m not counting on it.

Firefox, the little web-browser that could, hit 3.0 today. And it seems they think they’ve built a better browser than Safari.

The sad fact is, in most ways, WebKit/Safari is the superior browser. And it damn well better be. Apple caused a huge ruckus when it chose to use the kHTML engine as Safari’s starting point instead of Gecko. The long run has proven their decision was correct. They’ve managed to build a faster, more compliant-browser with fewer programmers and less glitz than the Firefox team. WebKit is increasingly being chosen as the default “browser component” for other manufacturers, from Nokia to Adobe to Google, and the recent Acid 3.0 browser-team-showdown didn’t make Firefox look particularly good.

Comparing themselves to Safari in such horrendously silly, self-congratulating, masturbatory ways is just begging for trouble.

I’m still amazed how popular Firefox is on the Mac. There’s no Firefox add-on that trumps the integration of Safari with the Mac OS. And yes, I also found the comparison chart comical.