Not a Good Start

I woke up this morning thinking that it was Saturday but not being too sure. It’s that playoff zombie feeling from too many late-night games. But it doesn’t look like I’ll have this feeling much longer because it doesn’t look like the Red Sox will last much longer this year.

While the Yankees are staging ninth-inning comebacks and walk-off wins, the Sox are just trying to stay in the game, and not doing a very good job of that. A .131 batting average and two runs scored is not a recipe for playoff success.

This is a recap of the 2009 regular season condensed into two games. Boston hitters would feast on the bottom-dwelling teams and go south against good teams. Get swept by the Yankees? No problem, the Royals or Orioles are coming to town. The inability of this team to hit against the better teams was masked by its prowess against teams with losing records.

Now, in the playoffs, there are no weak teams. You can’t fatten up your average against the Indians. They’re playing golf right now and this isn’t better.

Meanwhile, the Angels just go on playing their brand of baseball, which puts pressure on a team no matter who it is. Hit and run, first to third, walk then steal second, two-out triples. The Angels have done it all. They may be geographically challenged about where they play, but they don’t have a problem with how they play.

They remind me of the 1970s and early 1980s small-ball teams that wore powder-blue uniforms and played on artificial turf in big, donut-shaped stadiums. Yup, the 1982 Cardinals of Ozzie Smith, Lonnie Smith, Willie McGee and Tommy Herr. Couldn’t hit home runs, but had five players with 19 or more steals, 87 total sacrifice hits, and were experts at bouncing the ball off that hard field for singles, doubles and triples. The team batting average was just .264, but they made every one of those hits count. When that team played the Dodgers, I’ll bet 23-year-old Mike Scioscia was watching and taking notes.

But, back to the Red Sox, who had eight strikeouts but only seven base runners last night. They’ve been in this situation before, of course. Remember Kevin Millar’s rant on the night of game four against the Yankees about how we have Schilling pitching tonight, then Pedro tomorrow and then game seven and anything can happen? Well, this year we have Buchholz then Matsuzaka and then game five and anything can happen. Not quite the same, is it?