Thursday, October 04, 2007

Thank you for gifting us with your third postseason shutout in four years.

Thank you for accomplishing the all-important task of putting us up one game to none in a short series.

Thank you for getting our bullpen another day of rest, for we shall surely need to call on them at a later date.

Thank you for making it all look so easy. You were absolutely balletic up there. It was as if you were made of elastic, launching that ball plateward like some precision-engineered trebuchet.

Dominance. Nineteen straight hitters forced to take their seat in the dugout. Eighty-three strikes and just 25 balls. A seven-pitch ninth.

No walks. No extra-base hits. That takes some doing.

Just 27 and already tied with Whitey Ford and Mordecai Brown for second on the career postseason shout out list, one behind Christy Mathewson.

Bob Ryan knows about such things.

Depending on your depth of Red Sox postseason knowledge, it was either the best postseason pitching performance since Luis Tiant in '75, Jim Lonborg in '67, Boo Ferriss in '46, or perhaps even Babe Ruth in either - take your pick - 1918 (six-hit shutout in Game 1) or 1916 (the 14-inning, 2-1 conquest of the Dodgers).

But why stop there? You can throw in Smoky Joe Wood in 1912 and Big Bill Dinneen in 1903. It's right up there, somewhere. All any of the 37,597 need to know is there have been 52 postseason games in Fenway Park and they have a ticket stub testifying they have seen one of the best pitching shows ever put on in this ballpark.

We’ll be seeing you again. You don’t have to be quite that good again, but if you’d like to be, we won’t complain.

And none of this, of course, is to discount the vital contributions of Weird Beard and the redoubtable Señor Octubre.

Small sample size, I know. But I like the way things are playing out so far.