Given the up-and-down season the Boston Red Sox are having, you never know which team is going to show up. Is it going to be the team that swept the Los Angeles Angels and Toronto Blue Jays? Or is it going to be the team that got swept by the Baltimore Orioles?
It appears the team that showed up last weekend in Baltimore is the one that showed up at Fenway Park in the series against the New York Yankees so far. Things were so bad for the Red Sox in yesterday’s 14-3 loss that Jonathan Van Every made his second relief appearance in a Red Sox uniform in two seasons.
I’m pretty sure when the Red Sox reacquired JVE from the Pirates, they really weren’t getting him to provide depth in the bullpen. But his appearance just sums up how this season has gone for the Red Sox.
Now a season isn’t made in five weeks but given the way the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays are playing so far, the Red Sox are digging themselves a deep hole which they could find hard to get out of. They currently find themselves 7½ games behind the Rays for first place and seven games behind the Yankees for second. It’s so bad right now that the team they swept last week in Toronto is 2½ games ahead of them for third place.
We were all promised a season of run prevention and great defense but we haven’t seen that yet. In their first 31 games, the Red Sox have given up 174 runs and have scored 156. It’s not the offense, it’s the pitching and defense. Sure the starting pitching had been good for about a week before the Yankees showed up but now we’ve had two straight bad starts.
The Red Sox thought they were getting a Gold Glove third baseman in Adrian Beltre but he’s been far from that. He made his seventh error of 2010 and also did the ol’ Roger Dorn ole. Maybe Tito needs to go ‘Lou Brown’ on him.
This video is not NSFW unless BS is tolerated.
And by the way, can we just release Scott Schoeneweis now? While we don’t know what Alan Embree would have brought to the table since we didn’t get a chance to see him pitch, it sure seems like boy wonder Theo Epstein made a mistake.
Something needs to change and change quickly, otherwise the Red Sox will be making vacation plans and tee times for October.
We’ll be back later with the lineups, batter/pitcher matchups and links from the day.
For more slices of Boston Red Sox goodness, head over to the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, ESPN Boston, NESN, Providence Journal and WEEI websites.
And to take a look at what the enemy papers are saying, head over to the ESPN New York, NY Post, NY Daily News, NY Times and Journal News websites. You can also check out what our Bloguin brother NYY Stadium Insider has to say.
