Congratulations to Ryan Kalish who got promoted and will be reunited with his SeaDogs teammate Josh Reddick in Pawtucket. Photo courtesy of Kelly O'Connor/sittingstill.net and used with permission.
Long weekend plus Red Sox off-day plus waking up at 4am to what sounded like Armageddon, plus almost-dead MacBook Pro = very late post today. My MacBook has been on its last legs for a while and while it isn’t totally dead yet (I’m waiting on a replacement power cord to hopefully fix the major issue) it’s quite close. So today I’m borrowing a netbook and hoping for the best. It’s been a while since I used a PC and, I have to admit, I really miss my Mac.
But enough whining.
The Oakland A’s are in town for a 3-game series before the Sox hit the road again. Tonight we get John Lackey going against Gio Gonzalez. Lackey has a 5-3 record and a 4.84 ERA and opponents are hitting .287 against him. While none of those numbers are exactly good, the still sound better than I expected. It feels like he hasn’t won a game, hell, it feels like he hasn’t recorded an out. Neither of those things is true, though. So there’s still hope. Tonight we have hope that Lackey will shake off whatever the suck is that has a hold of him and pitch like I damn well know he can.
Having the live chat tonight will, hopefully, help Lackey out. :) This will be the first live chat that we have when Lackey is the starting pitcher (so far we’ve done two Lester games, two Beckett games and one each for Buchholz and Matsuzaka) they each didn’t get all the wins, but the team did which, right now, is much more important. But it would be nice for Lackey to get into the same kind of groove that both Buchholz and Lester are in right now.
One side note: Adios, again, to Jonathan Van Every who is back on his way to Pittsburgh, having been traded for minor league catcher Josue Peley. I know it’s the life of a ball player and JVE will be just fine, but I can’t help being frustrated for him. Hopefully things work out better for him this time.
The plan is, as always, to start up at 7pm ET – so please join us if you’re so inclined while we hope the chat mojo works for the Sox’ 7th Tuesday win in a row!