Dirty Water: Special Friday Sox Talk With the Thunderstick and Spanky the Yankee

It's Friday and the Sox-Yanks are getting ready to kick off their second meeting of the season. I wanted to do something special last weekend, but I was stuck deep in the East Midlands and had no way of pulling it off. But I have gotten not only the Thunderstick, but also our own Spanky the Yankee, better known to many of you as Holmes, to contribute a special edition of "Dirty Water." Enjoy.

Thunderstick: I must confess that work has been hellacious for me lately and I haven't been able to keep up on the day-to-day activities of the Sox as much as I normally do. I got into the car this morning, turned on Boston sports radio and joined into a conversation about this weekend's games mid-discussion. DCat sent me a text message last night saying we should do a Friday journal entry this week and I have to admit that I was confused as to why. My confusion only grew as I started listening to a conversation on the radio and learned that the Sox were facing off against the Devil Rays this weekend.

The announcers mentioned that the Sox were playing the last place team in the AL East and that on top of that the DRays had the third worst record in the AL and the fifth worst in baseball. The DRays collective team ERA is 25th. They are relying on minor league call ups that aren't getting the job done, which is pretty much the same conversation about the DRays that I hear every year when we get set to play them the first time--if there's one hallmark about a crappy organization it's that they have 3-4 spots in the rotation being filled by new guys from the minors because any real team who knows the importance of pitching with at least a decent amount of money would never allow themselves to get in a position where they didn't have at least a couple of major league arms ready to go. On top of that, the DRays starters can't get through 5 innings on a consistent basis and it's exhausting their bullpen in the first month of the season--pretty much par for the course for good ole Tampa Bay. On top of that their team defense is ranked 26th in the league. They've got some hitting, but we've seen this before with TB the last few years--they score runs, but can't get outs and a lot of times when they do, they make errors and force their mediocre to poor pitching to get extra outs on top of it.

So after hearing all these stats on sportsradio this morning, I was very confused as to why DCat wanted a special Friday post, but so be it. Here's my analysis for the weekend--After two good wins in Baltimore, the Sox should get a breather this weekend. As long as they can control Tampa's bats, they'll score their runs and win 2 of 3 at worst. Hopefully the Sox can get to TB's starting pitchers early, get them out of the game by the 5th which is about as far as the TB pitchers normally get and then tee off on the exhausted bullpen. Then we can come back on Monday and write something up about how the Sox are on a decent roll as they prepare to play Oakland and Minny in a couple meaningful games next week after a nice breather this weekend.

Normally, when the Sox play the last place AL East team and one of the worst teams in baseball on a Friday night, that's a game I can skip as it represents a good opportunity for me and my wife to go out to dinner and maybe to a movie and enjoy a weekend night. But my wife is away on a girls weekend to Maine at a spa for the weekend, so tonight I'll pick up some Chinese food, a 6-pack and kick back in front of the TV, watch the Sox and enjoy one of those solo nights that all guys like to have once in a while.

I assume the game starts at 7, just let me check the schedule on my desk here....yep, 7, but wait...we're playing the Yankees tonight??!! Man, when the guys on sportsradio said we were playing the last place AL East team and then went through all those terrible stats for them, I just assumed it had to be Tampa.

HA!!! God the Yankees suck.

Holmes: (Sent With the working title: “Dirty Pinstriped Outhouse Water”): Forget the fastballs that are topping out at 91 or 92 MPH, Mariano Rivera has the look of a 3rd grader who is sitting in the principal's office for the first time after getting caught putting shaving cream in his teacher's coffee mug. Seriously. Look at the guy's eyes, and you're looking at a completely different man. For all I know he got lasik surgery during the offseason, but I'm seeing a guy who is quite lost on the mound right now and has lost a little bit of his mojo. I do hear year in and year out that generally, closers will struggle at the beginning of each season because they don't get the same amount of work as starters do during spring training. Maybe so, but if you need more work during spring training, don't you just show up to the ballpark an hour or so early? But I'll never complain about Mo. Tell any baseball fan that his or her team will be given the most dominant closer for more than a decade and help you win 4 rings, and I'm thinking the overwhelming majority will be chomping at the bit to sign up for that. And let's not count out Mo, yet. The season is still young.

That being said, last weekend's series is not what you want to see as a Yanks fan: sub-par starting pitching and bullpen work that had me wishing Brian Cashman was making calls to Rich Garces's agent. At the same token, the Sox starting pitching was far from dominant, but over the course of an entire season, even if Schilling, Beckett and Dice-K are solid as opposed to dominant, I can't think of a stronger top 3 in the starting rotation of any AL team. Now, if they are dominant, watch out, because I'll gladly take the bet that Manny isn't going to bat below .200 for the year. These ingredients will easily make up for the Willy Mo and Coco one-two punch of the lineup that make me fondly recall the late 80s/early 90s Yankee combo of Jesse Barfield and Steve Balboni. Problem with the latter combo is that they were the "meat" of the lineup, batting 3 and 4, respectively.

What separates the Sox from the Yanks for the upcoming series as well as the season is the degree of "ifs" for each squad with respect to starting pitching. As we all know, it's the starting pitching, stupid. I have not been surprised or mad the past few years to see the Yanks crap out early in the postseason, because they simply don't have solid starting pitching. Decent, perhaps, but not the championship-caliber pitching that wins championships. I would much rather be talking about if my top 3 pitchers will be dominant or if they'll be solid, as opposed to if my top 3 pitchers are going to be sucking on mohitos at the Palm Beach Garden Club in the middle of June or if I'll be able to watch them live - at a rehab start when the AA affililate swings through my city. Both teams should be hitting the crap out of the ball with relative consistency. A-Rod will surely slow down, but I'm inclined to think Abreu and Giambi will get hot here and there. The biggest concern for this season and perhaps the future is what the effects will be on the young Wright and Hughes being called up so early to assume pitching duties. It could be devastating to both their confidence and arms if not done properly, so I'm cautiously pessimistic about the prospects for success. But who knows? One or both could be the next young phenom of the league, but the Doc Goodens and Mark Fidriches are certainly the exceptions and not the rules.

I hear they now serve sushi at Fenway Park. Like those jokes they call public bathrooms don't smell bad enough.

dcat: I want to be overconfident. I really do. And I certainly am amused by the Thunderstick's post and by the image of the Yankees-as-Devil Rays. I love the idea that Williams alum George Steinbrenner must be apoplectic about this start and that he is sharpening the hatchet. I love that Yankee fans are too dumb to realize that ARod is very, very, very good at baseball, one of the best not only in the league but in history, and yet they Boo him at the drop of a hat and use stupidly meaningless phrases like "Not a True Yankee" to describe him. Red Sox fans hate him because he is the best player on our hated rival. We get how it works. Yankee fans hate him because they keep having to repeat Darwin's "Evolution 101."

But I'll admit it -- the Yankees scare me more this weekend than they did last weekend. Last weekend we knew they were down and we thought we might be able to kick them around a bit, though few of us dared dream of a sweep. This weekend is different -- Sox fans seem almost to expect to win this series. And yet last weekend the Yankees took the lead in every game, and despite the fact that we swept, every game was close. We hit them with the ideal rotation, which we will not get this time around. And while the Yankees have serious issues on the mound, it is hard to understate that lineup. Rob's glorious cavalcade of stats is mellifluous, to be sure, but I still suspect that tey will deviate back to the mean, and for the Yankees, "mean" has proven to be pretty damned good. A team that can hit like theirs will do lots of damage, and you have to think that if given enough time (and that is where the Steinbrenner factor enters) New York will recover. In the end, I suspect that we will be looking at the Sox and the Yanks facing off for the American League East.

That said, I'd sure love to see the Sox start to bury them now. Another sweep seems like a historically tall order. But I think the Sox win this series. And if they do, I will very much look forward to seeing what the wags at the New York Post will have to say in their customary reasonableness. It's just three games. But what games they usually turn out to be.