Thursday, May 18, 2006

I shoulda known that sooner or later Kevin Millar and Willie Harris would conspire to get revenge on me for all the fun I’ve made of them.

Last night it happened. The streak had to end sometime, of course, but to have it happen like this was pretty galling.

Harris “didn't need a Harvard symbologist in the mold of Robert Langdon standing next to him at first base with two outs in the ninth inning last night to know that the sign relayed to him ordered him not to attempt to steal,” writes Snow. “He saw and correctly interpreted that sign. He simply didn't obey it."

Well, as Rudy Pemberton puts it: “I hope he doesn't miss the sign waving him back to Pawtucket.”

For a guy with a noodle bat, whose sole redeeming quality is his speed, baserunning mistakes like that are inexcusable. He didn’t lose the game for us, but that’s a really, really silly way to end it.

Trot Nixon was diplomatic. (“That's Willie's game. Obviously, I did want to bat, but I'd never blame a guy for playing hard to get in scoring position.") But you know he's just talking nice. A dead-red hitter, facing a fastball pitcher with a 2-0 count, he had to be pretty pissed he was robbed of the chance to put us ahead with one swing.

We wouldn’t have needed to worry about late inning heroics — thanks for trying, Papi! — had we been able to score more than one run on two hits in the first eight innings.

And we woulda been in much better shape had Kevin Millar, the man who managed to hit a grand total of nine home runs for us last year, not put one over the fence in left in the fourth.

Oh well. “As the saying goes,” says Silverman, “even the blind squirrel will find a nut now and then.”

A night off tonight, then onward to Philly for interleague. They’re a good team. But not invincible.

Ortiz will play first. He’s not crazy about the idea.

(Better he than J.T. Snow, who may not play at all — which is why he’s requesting a trade.)

Papelbon will close, and he’ll like it. Most likely so will we.

Timlin will keep being one of the best set-up men in the game.

Two starts each for Ortiz, Lowell and Youks will get in a couple games each.

There will be a lot of mixing and matching. Not ideal, but we’ll make it work. This is a team, a team that plays well together.

The estimable Thomas Boswell has a great piece about the remade Red Sox in today’s Washington Post.

Yet with all the change and the continuing search for a new identity, Boston still finds itself in first place. Somehow, these New England dudes abide. Shake them up, shuffle the roster, misplace General Manager Theo Epstein, then coax him back into the fold again and yet, at least for the moment, the Yankees still aren't in front of them. Every day, the way the Red Sox see it, New York seems to find more problems, like Hideki Matsui's broken wrist or Randy Johnson's imitation of The Lost Unit, while the team from Fenway Park learns more about itself and begins to discover its future.

"We're getting a personality. We're developing loyalty toward each other," Manager Terry Francona said of his 23-15 team. "You'll see eight or 10 guys go to dinner together. When you have players who want to do it, when they want that atmosphere, it's a big part of becoming a team. I saw six or seven of them in a bar together last night. That's good."

Cover your eyes, kids. It was probably the hotel bar, before midnight and they were all drinking diet sodas.

The Red Sox were once the team that was famous for leaving the ballpark in 25 separate taxis. Now they bond, they communicate, they talk things out. Boston is one place you go if you want to see a true team in the making.

Etc.
It’s a night game Saturday, which will give stat-heads plenty of time to spend the day at the spring regional meeting of SABR Boston, the local chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research.

It’s in the BPL’s Rabb Lecture Hall from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., it’s free, and it’s open to the public.

Guest speakers will include:

* John Thorn, noted hardball historian, author of Total Baseball and The Hidden Game of Baseball, and the guy who uncovered evidence a couple years ago tracing the game’s origins to all the way back to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1791.

* Brown University math professor Steven J. Miller, author of The Pythagorean Won-Loss Formula in Baseball: An Introduction to Statistics and Modelling

* Dr. Andy Andres, who teaches Sabermetrics 101 at Tufts

* Tom Tippett, creator of Diamond Mind Baseball

* David Grabiner, who’s currently surveying the research on clutch hitting

For more information, contact Seamus Kearney (skearney@tmfnet.org) or Cecilia Tan (sabrpublicity@yahoo.com).

5/18/2006 1:25:33 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [0] |  
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