Game 27: A Win Only a Mother Could Love

Final Score: Boston Red Sox 8, Seattle Mariners 7

In the XBox 360 version of MLB 2K7, Daisuke Matsuzaka is called Dennis Miles - presumably because of some sort of licensing issue. Like his real-life counterpart, Dennis Miles has an obscene number of pitches (I think the game includes six) that he can throw for strikes, mystifying batters and leading to complete pitcher domination. However, knowing how to select those pitches and place them in effective spots requires someone behind the controller with enough baseball knowledge to know how to a.) set up the hitter by changing speeds, b.) place the pitch so the hitter can't get the good part of the bat on the ball and c.) figure out which pitch from the arsenal the hitter isn't expecting. Get one thing wrong and you can recover; get all three things wrong and, for all his fancy pitches, Dennis Miles becomes just as hittable as a ball sitting on a tee.

The reason I bring this up is because last night, that wasn't Daisuke Matsuzaka pitching. That was Dennis Miles on the mound, with a fourteen-year-old kid with an understanding of pitching mechanics shallower than Paris Hilton operating the controls. Three walks to start the game, a five run first inning, five innings total with a bad spot at the end of the night made for Dice-K's worst outing in a string of three mixed-bag starts, where one inning tells the tale: command slips, hitters aren't fooled and that massive arsenal doesn't seem to mean anything.

There's a two-part silver lining, however:

1. All of these problems are in Dice-K's head. As every other inning he's pitched demonstrates, when he gets past the freak out, Matsuzaka can dominate hitters in the US as much as he did in Japan; he's got a 1.89 ERA (6 runs in 32 innings) when he's not having a meltdown. Even better, the solution to the problem is one-dimensional: find the key to those slips and he becomes balls-out nasty all the time.
2. If you're feeling some deja vu, you're probably thinking of the 2006 edition of Josh Beckett, struggling to adapt to a new league. Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2008 for Dice-K to undergo his own transition into the comfort zone, but there's definitely precedent that Matsuzaka will eventually come around.
   

So, to get back to the game, a quick sum up: Daisuke Matsuzaka = Dennis Miles, the bullpen was four pitchers short (Timlin on the DL, Hansack, Okajima and Papelbon all unavailable) and operating on a tape and glue budget that made Robin's fears two nights ago look like idle fancies and the Sox still came back from a five run deficit to win. There were plenty of contributions, of course: Lowell going 3 for 4; Wily Mo going 4 for 4 with three singles and a double, looking as comfortable as can be at the plate; even Pedroia knocked in a run. But the real hero was Manny with his two home runs, his fingers to the sky excellence, his sheer exuberance at cracking the hit that won the game in the eighth, as if he had found a way to focus the thousands of beams of happiness shooting out from the crowd into a single point of happiness brighter than the sun. Welcome back, Manny. It's good to have you here.