Final Score: Boston Red Sox 3, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim 5Hey, it's like deja vu all over again! With some variation, we had a staked lead, a meltdown, and - you guessed it - a loss! I guess we should be glad that the starting pitching and the relief pitching handed off the duties of blowing the game this time, and that the offense pulled their all too familiar road trick knocking in a small enough number of runs to try - and fail - to tip the balance between winning and losing. The Sox aren't the Angels, people; their pitching isn't good enough to win an obscene number of one or two run games. It's enough to give you hives, really, or maybe just make you homicidal. I'm sure Robin's drinking himself into a stupor right now just thinking about it.
Let me drop some knowledge on ya: on the road, the Sox have 300 more at bats, but only thirty more hits than they do at home. They're five percent (i.e., 50 points) more likely to get on base at Fenway; nine percent (or 90 points) more likely to hit for power. Boiling things down to my favorite metric, OPS+, the away version of the 2008 Red Sox are 13 percent above the average team, while at home, they jump to 22 percent above average. That's not the sort of difference you want to see at this point in the season, no matter how many home games the Sox have left. I'm not looking forward to these next three games against Seattle.
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