Mike Cameron gets another start in Portland today. Come back soon, Mike! Photo courtesy of Kelly O'Connor/sittingstill.net and used with permission.
I started with a couple of tweets just before the game began last night, and as it began I had to go offline for a while. Come around the fourth inning and I decide to go online when I realized that Daisuke Matsuzaka hadn’t given up a hit yet. That’s when I made the decision to keep doing what I was doing and not go online. Why mess with the mojo? 🙂
It was about the 7th inning that I got this nagging feeling that he wouldn’t get his no-hitter. Something just didn’t feel right (and none of that was his pitching or the defense behind him). Maybe it was being in Philadelphia? Or that the national broadcasters were calling the game not our Jerry and Don? Whatever it was, when he lost the no-hit bid in the 8th, I was still disappointed but also still so proud. Over the past four games, three of our pitches threw 8 complete innings. For any team this is great but it’s especially important and impressive for the way the Red Sox pitching staff has been going. Daisuke, someone who gets the wrath of many Red Sox fans and is the topic of many nasty emails sent my way from opposing fans, really came through and showed everyone what he was capable of. He might not have gotten his no-hitter, just yet, but he definitely made folks in and around MLB stand up and take notice.
I had a discussion online not too long ago with someone who said that the Sox got hosed when the picked up Daisuke and he wasn’t worth his money. When I countered that, in my opinion, his first two seasons alone with the Sox were definitely worth the money (one of those seasons was the championship 2007 season and the other was 2008 when he had 18 wins), the person still disagreed with me. I’ll say it again, in terms of “baseball” money (read: money I don’t have and can pretend to spend any way I like) and for what he has contributed, I still think Daisuke was worth it. Doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes get fits when he’s on the mound, but I think the fits, at times, can defitely be worth it as well to see the end result. Injured in 2009 and off to a late start in 2010 – we still haven’t seen everything he’ capable of. Also, he pitched this one-hit game against possibly the best hitting team in baseball. That is pretty damned impressive, no?
Also, props need to go to all the defense last night, but especially David Ortiz if for no other reason than he made a couple of really good plays that finally got the Fox broadcasters to shut up about how he was going to fail at first because he never plays the position.
With Josh Beckett on the dl, today Tim Wakefield pitches the rubber game against Roy Halladay at 1:35pm. Both NESN and TBS are carrying the game because TBS, unlike Fox, doesn’t screw up everyone else’s baseball viewing pleasure just for their own greedy selves. Last night was a travesty in that there were actually people in MASSACHUSETTS who couldn’t watch the Sox play because their local Fox station decided to show the Mets/Yanks game. Absolutely ridiculous Fox. Good God when is that horrendous contract over?
Some folks have been using the new message board to in-game chat either in threads or in the built-in chat room so go on over if you’re so inclined! Tuesday night live chats (and at some point maybe more) will still be held here – can’t mess with that magic yet!
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