Game 40

Final Score:

Boston Red Sox 6, Oakland Athletics 13

Manager's Aptitude Test, Question 157:

When your almost-42-year-old starting pitcher, a man who is notoriously out of shape, comes back from a leg injury, you should do one of the following:

A.) Allow him to return without going through a rehab assignment through your AAA minor league team.
B.) Make him go through several of those assignments, just like injured pitcher your team picked up in the off season, who spent some time on the DL during the regular season and has already had two quality starts.

If you answered A, congratulations! Your pitcher will make it through an inning and a third during his first start back and give up seven runs to a team who is last in the AL in runs scored this season and will probably be headed back to the minors to do those rehab assignments anyway. Why answer B, anyway? That would make FAR too much sense.

So anyway, not only was this a crappy game for Boston (and for the Embedded Yankee), but it was a weird one as well. I was at work for about half of it. I turned on the game at 3:40. The Sox don't score in the first. The bottom of the inning starts and my boss needs to talk to me for a few minutes. When I come back to the game, it's 4 - 0. The Sox don't score in the second. Someone starts talking to me again in the bottom of the second and when I come back, Eric Chavez is hitting his three run homerun. Varitek gets his homerun, Bellhorn gets his homerun and when I leave to go home, it's 10 - 2. When I get back home around 6:15, it's 13 - 6. The game flew by and every time I turned away, the A's scored more runs. Meanwhile, the Sox couldn't string together anything really effective, at least in comparison to thirteen runs. Boston winds up two and four on the roadtrip and thank God, there's no more travelling around the West Coast, no more Seattle and no more Oakland for the rest of the year. Now we get to face the tough teams: Atlanta, a road trip to Toronto and New York and then at home against Baltimore and the Angels, then a roadtrip to play the Cardinals and Cubs in Interleague. Of course, up until now, the Sox have played the tough teams much better than the easy ones.

Friday night, 7:05: Wade Miller and Tim Hudson face off in the first games of Interleague play at Fenway. Going home always seems to do good thing for the Sox and given the way this road trip went, they need the shot in the arm that Fenway and a Boston crowd gives. GO SOX!!!