Jacoby's excited.
You can win a World Series with Nick Green at shortstop, especially when he hits the ball this far.
Take your head out of the oven, slowly lift your toe off the trigger and look around. Did the world come to an end? Are you going to let them win now? Sure, the Sox lost their last six to the heart of their divisional rivals, but last night they came back and stuck it to another division leader while the Yanks lost one to those pesky Blue Jays (the Sea Shepherds of the AL East).
While the entire region was on suicide watch yesterday, today things are looking decidedly up. The Sox banged out 12 hits (roughly half as many as they had in the entire Yanks series), scored six times, and got a quality start out of Brad Penny (who threw up before the sixth due to bad clams/acid reflux). They scored early, on Pedroia’s first inning two run homer, and late on Nick Green’s seventh inning sac fly. They got productive outs, every member of the starting lineup, other than Victor who hit the ball hard three times, had at least one hit, and Jacoby crept closer to Tommy Harper’s club record 54 stolen bases (Ells has 51).
He Really did Puke before the Sixth, but I think it was from eating too much Awesomeness.
The key thing that nobody has seemed to notice with the debacle that was the past week at the plate is the starting pitching. Everybody was talking about how they were so worried about the starting pitching past Lester and Beckett, but then Buchholz put up a quality start (2 R over 6 IP) against Fat Ass on Saturday afternoon (which was ignored because of the fact that the Sox couldn’t score, but apparently someone took Lou’s advice and told him to relax), and Penny looked good last night against another first place team (even if being in first place in the AL Central is like being the smartest guy in the LA Clippers’ front office). The pitching, as bad as it looked last week, is only getting better. Plus, Daisuke and Wake are on the mend, and Junichi (who I want to put his first name on his jersey ala Ichiro) is going to take the ball for the first time as a starter tonight. Good things are coming.
Let’s all back away from the edge, take a deep breath and remember that the Sox still have six games in hand against the Yanks, and an 8-4 lead in the season series. The Yanks won’t win them all and each win for the Sox is a step closer to the playoffs.
Go Sox.
Done.
