Keeping the Faith

What a night: Lowell gets his 1,500 hit and gets tossed a few innings later for making a legimate complaint about the shape and angle of the strike zone.  Youkilis gets run over at first stretching out to make a tough play, crawls across the field towards home, and slams his glove down in frustration (right before Pedroia runs over looking like he's about to prevent a homicide) while hearts of Red Sox fans everywhere stop for a moment as the spectre of a DL trip raises his head - and it turns out he's ok.  Beckett gets through six and two-thirds without a hit and ends the night splitting five runs with the usually deadly Daniel Bard.  And Papi...

Here's the thing: I've developed a measure of fatalism about Papi that has led me to watch every one of Ortiz's at-bats as if it were his last.  Doing so last night, I'm not sure which made me happier: seeing him hit that double off of the weak-as-water Nate Robertson as part of the six-run eighth inning, or smash the 420-foot out earlier in the game.  The double looks better in the box score of course, but the long out had all of the elements of a classic Ortiz long bomb that just happened to fall in the wrong part of a very big ball park.  In other words: I'm still nowhere closer to giving up on Ortiz in 2009.