This and That

Early in the season, it was the Red Sox making a statement. We can beat you in April. Then the Yankees made a statement. We can beat you in May, June, July, August, September and, probably, October. While the Sox were swept again, the Yankees clinched the AL East title for the first time in three seasons, spending a half a billion dollars to ensure that they did. Now, having put the message out there that “We can beat you in high-scoring games, we can beat you in low-scoring games, we can beat you any time we want to, it’s on to the playoffs.”

Remember what Bill Parcells always said: “The first step is just to make the tournament.” But the Sox haven’t done that yet.

A couple of newcomers made a couple of great plays over the last week, as Alex Gonzales grabbed a ball to his left, twisted and turned and crawled to the second-base bag for a forceout. Then Victor Martinez, with two outs and the bases loaded, dove down the first base line, grabbed the ball, then dove back to the plate for the out. Two very similar plays that neither Nick Green nor Jason Varitek could have made.

Back in the preseason, we were wondering which Josh Beckett we were going to get this year, the 2006 model or the 2007 model. With the season almost over, it looks like the answer is 2006. Beckett has 16 wins, which is his average number of wins in a season over his nine-year career. All ballplayers have a career year, when the numbers stand out as a statistical anomaly (Yaz in 1967, Rice in 1978) and 2007 is Beckett’s career year. He’s a very good pitcher, but he may never duplicate that season again. I wonder what that will mean to the Sox when his contract comes up again after the 2010 season.

Every ballplayer has a time when they suddenly “get it” and it is a career-changing moment. For Jon Lester it was his no-hitter last year. For Clay Buccholz, it was the August 29 game against Toronto when he went 8 1/3 innings, gave up one run and struck out nine. He was 3-3 at that point, but since then has gone 4-0 with one no-decision, a 1.38 ERA with 24 hits in 32 innings. That’s even better than Jon Lester’s 4-1, 3.07 for the month.

The Pawsox ended their season at 61-82 with no notable performances by anybody. Their top pitcher, Enrique Gonzales, won eight games. Their top hitter, Mets-bound Chris Carter, had 16 home runs and 61 RBIs. So, they fired their hitting coach, Russ Mormon. He couldn’t make better hitters out of retreads like Paul McAnulty, Travis Denker and Chip Ambres. In those cases it’s not the hitting coach’s fault. Sometimes you just have guys who are in the minors for a reason: They can’t hit. The problem was that the alleged prospects at Pawtucket weren’t hitting either. Mark Wagner (.214), Aaron Bates (.213), Bubba Bell (.208) and Travis Denker (.238), all of whom had worked their way through the Sox minor league system, had hitting problems once they reached AAA-ball. Time will tell. Maybe none of them were good enough to make the majors anyway, but for all four of them it was a lost season.

And good luck to Chris Carter, who will be joining the Mets system in the off-season as the player-to-be-named-later in the Billy Wagner trade. Carter, who came here as the player-to-be-named later in the Wily Mo Pena trade to Washington, put up solid, if not spectacular, numbers in two seasons.

Speaking of minor leaguers, at the start of the season, the hottest prospects in the system were Lars Anderson, Michael Bowden and Junichi Tazawa. Anderson came nowhere near the hype, hitting .233 with only nine homers, 51 RBIs and 114 strikeouts. Bowden, who has not reached his “get it” point yet, had a decent year, 4-6 for a bad club with a 3.13 ERA, 88 strikeouts and 106 hits in 126 innings. Tazawa had an outstanding first pro season, posting a 9-7 record combined at Portland and Pawtucket with a 2.63 ERA and 94 strikeouts in 109 innings before coming to the majors. But the best pitcher I saw in the minors this year was Felix Dubront, a poised lefthander who was 9-6, 3.35 ERA for the Seadogs striking out 101 batters in 121 innings. The 23-year old was 13-9, 3.70 in 2008, so that’s two good seasons in a row. He should move up to Pawtucket and maybe Boston next season, potentially ahead of Bowden.