Falling! Duck! Take cover! The Red Sox lost to the Royals! It's over! Abandon ship! Maybe next year! Get Papelbon back in the rotation! Put Schilling out to pasture! Trade Lugo now! Are you worried yet?! Why NOT!? The fucking Yankees won today!
[Deep breath...]
Welcome to the 2007 Red Sox season. After one game a few things would seem to be glaringly apparent.
1. Curt Schilling is done, finished, may actually die of old age on the mound during his next start.
2. Julio Lugo is no more than a poor man's Jose Offerman, which is to say he will be lucky to hit .200.
3. Manny Ramirez is good for one thing and one thing only, grounding into sixth inning double plays.
4. That other Asian guy, Okajima, doesn't know the season started yet, he still thinks he's pitching batting practice.
5. Maybe a little less blogging and a little more pitching? Forget the changeup let's get that fastball up over 90 first eh?
But then again it's only been one game. Lest we forget, there are 161 left to play and in my humble opinion two things are for certain. The Red Sox are not going to finish the season 0-162 and the Royals will not end the year 162-0. It's been one day people, let's relax on the apocalyptic meltdowns ok?
So since we've decided we're not going to freak out anymore, let's take a logical look at what happened yesterday. The first and most troubling thing for me was Schilling's lack of velocity. Last year NESN didn't show the radar readings on all of Curt's pitches, now I wish they had stuck to that plan for this season. His fastball was topping out in the very low 90's in the first few innings and bottomed out in the fourth at 88. That's Keith Foulke-esque, and while I know he spent the whole spring working on it, Schilling doesn't have Foulke's changeup to compliment that "blazing" sub-90 heater (I guess Folke doesn't anymore either but at least he did at one point). Without mid-90's velocity on the straight fastball Schilling's effectiveness is minimized to some degree, because his best pitch, his splitter, has no velocity variance from his regular fastball. If hitters don't have to worry about the splitter buckling their knees AND the fastball blowing past them both pitches become remarkably ordinary.
Also, while this has been wildly overplayed in the media I just can't comment on Curt's struggles without mentioning his weight. The guy looks fat. Plain and simple. I'm not one of those people who is going to sit here and say things like, "More Jogging, Less Blogging!" (dirtdogs.com). No one can work out all day. But regardless of your extracurricular activities, there is no excuse for coming into the season looking fat, slow, and old if you want to be the ace of the Red Sox staff. It's not the main point of yesterday's start, but it should be on our minds going forward
Obviously I'm not ready to throw in the towel on a great competitor like Schilling after one game. Yesterday absolutely could have just been a hiccup and not an indicator of things to come. He's a warrior (I hate that sports cleche but it applies here) and even with deteriorating physical skills his ferocity and baseball intelligence should be able to buy him 12-15 wins this season. That being said, his spot at the front end of the rotation looks very shaky, and the door is certainly open for Josh Beckett or Diasuke Matusaka to step through and assume that role.
One thing about yesterday's game that is being overlooked is the performance by Gil Meche. While it certainly can be said that the Red Sox didn't hit, to place all of the blame on their lineup is to grossly underestimate the performance Mech put on. He made the Royals look like geniuses for inking him to a 55 million dollar contract last winter. After the first inning he simply dominated the Sox lineup, throwing under 10 pitches in three of his frames and once he was given the lead he never allowed them back in the game. Sometimes you just run into a buzzsaw on the mound, and wiith no other evidence to suggest otherwise, I am willing to say that is what happened yesterday. The Sox lineup is still potent and will not be shut down like that all the time, in fact they'll probably will bounce back with a far better performance on Wednesday.
An exclamation point on the struggles of the Sox offense was new shortstop Julio Lugo's three consecutive strikeouts in his first three at bats in a Red Sox uniform. If I were him I would avoid listening to WEEI at all today (which I guess won't be hard since they're on the road), they won't be kind. But the good news is all he has to do to get back in our good graces is have a good game tomorrow. To be fair, coming into the game Lugo was 0-7 lifetime against Meche, and it's just a fact that some pitchers just have some hitters' number, and vice versa. I don't think we're looking at a potential all star here, but we should still consider Lugo a key to this lineup so long as Gil Meche doesn't get traded to an AL East team.
This time of year everything is thrown into sharp relief, especially on paper. Looking at a team and trying to evaluate it after one (or even a few) game(s) is like trying to evaluate a hitter's batting average over the same amount of time. One day could be hitting 1.000, the next he could be down to .200. Everything is overly fluid at this point, and just like every season it will take a few weeks to sort out the good from the mediocre and even longer to determine the mediocre from the bad. So while the Yankees looked like they could win every game 9-5 yesterday and the Red Sox appeared to be the next incarnation of the '05 Tigers that could all be flipped on its head by this time tomorrow.
So relax, it's baseball season, a six month excuse to not leave your couch between 7 and 10 PM five nights a week.
While it wasn't a great day to be a Red Sox fan or player yesterday it certainly was a great time to be a former member of the hometown team. Seemingly everyone of consequence that has left the Sox over the past two seasons had a great day, highlighted by much maligned shortstop Edgar Renterria's two homeruns, including a game winner for the Atlanta Braves. Man, why can't we get players like that? Other ex-Sox studs studs on Monday, Trot Nixon went 3-4 for 3 runs scored, Hanley Ramirez went 4-6 with two doubles, an RBI, and four runs scored, and Johnny Damon predictably got on base twice and scored a run for the Yankees. At least Derek Lowe got shelled. That always gives me a warm feeling in my stomach.
