Dirty Water: Sox Talk With the Thunderstick

Thunderstick: We went into this weekend against the Angels saying "you know what, it'd be great to win 3, but the Angels are a very good team and in all likelihood we'll split and NY is playing well so it's very possible that we could exit this weekend up 4, having gone a respectable 2-2 over LA because the Yanks take 3 of 4 from Detroit." And that's exactly what happened and yet I still feel like we got kicked in the gut. You know, if you go 2-2, get good wins in the games Schil and Beckett start and you see Buckholz and Tavarez get lit up, you say "oh well--two guys not in our rotation that needed to make spot start got bombed--what can you do". We win Buckholz's game and come back from 5-0 down to win Schill's--both nice wins. But Gagne totally geeks Beckett's game and then on Sunday the bats don't even show up. So we went 2-2 which we kind of said before the weekend we'd be happy with, but the way it happened, obviously put us back on the ledge. Not good.

But then we get to face Tampa. God it's nice to knock two off the magic number. Seems like those days have been few and far between. I agree with what you have been saying for a while now, though, that the Yanks are finding out how hard it is to come back from that deficit, especially against a team like the Sox who aren't going to go on many long losing streaks. In fact, the ground that the Yanks have made up is largely because of them playing great, not us playing really poorly--it's more like when we've got 4-3 over 7 games, they've gone 6-1. It's tough to keep that up. Going in I was thinking it would be great if we could just get this lead back up to 5 games before the series with TB was done. now that it's there, I can't help but think that it would be nice if we could sweep the series and Anaheim could find a way to take one more and we could get this to 6 before the weekend series with Chicago. I'd feel comfortable going to NY with a 6 lead, less so with a 5 game and downright frightened with a 4 game lead.

By the way -- I heard on the radio this morning that game 1 of Sox/Yanks is shaping up to be Schil vs. Clemens. Geez--that's going to be nuts.

dcat: It's a good thing that I am used to climbing out onto and then back off of the ledge during the latter stages of every Red Sox season, because otherwise this last few weeks would be doing a lot more damage to my heart than it is. But I think this day-to-day emotional investment is what separates a baseball pennant race from anything else in sports. Americans are passionate about football, to be sure, but the nature of a football season is that with one game a week per team, it is all about anticipation, the buildup to that one game on Friday night or Saturday or Sunday (or Monday. Or Thursday night. Or Wednesday night. But you get the point.) In baseball, they play every day, or nearly so. And so a race ebbs and flows, crescendoes and decrescendoes. Every single day a scene of the drama plays out, thus capturing emotions with more sustained immediacy, I would argue, than any other sport.

I wnat to take just a few minutes to discuss Tim Wakefield's performance this season. It is pretty stunning to realize that Waker has already accounted for 25 decisions this season. He has 15 wins. And yes, he has 10 losses. But what this tells me is that he is eating up innings, saving the pen, and that he is putting the Sox in a position to win when he takes the mound. He quietly might amass 20 wins and he is in many ways the anchor to this staff. Wins (and losses) are not really the greatest statistic to assess pitchers, but it is telling that when Wakefield goes out to the mound, he always sticks around long enough to get the win or get the loss. We have flashier guys. We always have. But Wakes is always there, always steady, and provides us with depth, but also with postseason options that few have, because we well know that he is capable of pitching on short rest, on the spur of the moment, in relief, as well as in the more familiar starting position. He threw another gem last night, something that has happened quite a lot regularly, and his shutout gave the Sox a serious boost.

We now get two more against Tampa while the Yanks have two more with the Angels, and we know how tough they can be. Let's hope for another two games to come off that magic number tonight. For most of the country, it is far too early to think about the Magic Number, but as we have been counting down since the first day of the season, we may as well let everyone know that according to the Thunderstick's infallible system, the Sox' Magic Number sits at 33. Or as you put it in an email this morning, "Larry Bird Says 'Go Sox!'"