Final Score: Boston Red Sox 1, San Francisco Giants 0Talk about skin of your teeth. There were so many ways this could have gone bad, but Dice K kept his head JUST above water for seven innings. Like a hero from some bad 1920’s radio serial, he kept getting into these amazing jams and then just as things couldn’t get any worse, he squeezed his way out without any sign of damage. Bases loaded? Nothing a few well placed strikeouts can’t fix. Runners in scoring position? A little infield pop-up will solve that problem like gangbusters. Food burning to the bottom of your wok? Call Dice K cause he got the non stick coating.
The man from Japan has been a bit underrated as of late. So far this month he has a 2.25 ERA and 25 K’s. That’s a pretty healthy June. It’s too bad he has 1 win and 2 losses to show for it. Dice K seems to have contracted the “no run support virus” from Wakefield. And it’s not just those two. The Sox bats have a way of sniffing out a fantastic pitching performance and then those same bats decide to take a break and let it do its thing. They have now won 7 games where they’ve scored 3 runs or less. Good pitching, good bullpen, bad bats.
Luckily Manny’s solo shot stood up even with a little drama from Okajima (when he K’ed Bonds with two men on and it showed all the “*” signs in stands I fell over laughing). Still, as Paps got his 16th save I was cursing the fact that it wasn’t Timlin being brought in for mop up duty in a 10-0 rout. They need to start consistently destroying teams again. Making pitchers pay for every mistake and making sure that every base runner counts. The offense needs to step up and create some room for error because not every start will be a 7 inning gem like this.
But if every start was I wouldn’t complain.
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