Better Red Than Dead with Jon Couture

Rebuilding A Winner

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:48:04 GMT

Not exactly a grand blog return, but to feed off Tuesday's column outlining how critical the trade market will be to the Red Sox in 2010, I did some digging on how quickly Theo Epstein has dismantled his World Series winners.

As I said in the column:

Within two winters from that championship, more than half of the curse-breaking team's main components were gone. Within three, there was another championship to celebrate.

"We're always open to change, because I think you need change to improve," GM Theo Epstein said during Boston's season breakup last week. "It's part of the natural cycle."

There's been more roster consistency from 2007-09 than there was from 2004-06 simply because this is purely Epstein's team — he built it looking more forward than Dan Duquette arguably ever did. Yet change remains inevitable and proactivity still the key.

Here's how that shakes out. When I said "main components," I meant in addition to the nine primary starters on each title team, I considered pitchers with at least 10 starts or 50 relief appearances.” That made for 17 players in 2004 and 20 in 2007. The breakdown, and how the player left Boston, if applicable:

2004 TEAM
C: Jason Varitek
1B: Kevin Millar (free agent, 2005-06 offseason)
2B: Mark Bellhorn (released, mid-2005)
3B: Bill Mueller (free agent, 2005-06 offseason)
SS: Pokey Reese (free agent, 2004-05 offseason)
LF: Manny Ramirez (trade, mid-2008)
CF: Johnny Damon (free agent, 2005-06 offseason)
RF: Gabe Kapler (retired, 2006-07 offseason)
DH: David Ortiz
SP: Pedro Martinez (free agent, 2004-05 offseason)
Derek Lowe (free agent, 2004-05 offseason)
Curt Schilling (retired, 2007-08 offseason)
Tim Wakefield
Bronson Arroyo (traded, 2005-06 offseason)
RP: Mike Timlin (free agent, 2008-09 offseason)
Keith Foulke (free agent, 2006-07 offseason)
Alan Embree (released, mid-2005)

2007 TEAM
C: Jason Varitek
1B: Kevin Youkilis
2B: Dustin Pedroia
3B: Mike Lowell
SS: Julio Lugo (trade, mid-2009)
LF: Manny Ramirez (trade, mid-2008)
CF: Coco Crisp (trade, 2008-09 offseason)
RF: J.D. Drew
SP: Daisuke Matsuzaka
Tim Wakefield
Josh Beckett
Curt Schilling (retired 2007-08 offseason)
Julian Tavarez (released, mid-2008)
Jon Lester
RP: Hideki Okajima
Javier Lopez
Jonathan Papelbon
Mike Timlin (free agent, 2008-09 offseason)

GONE BEFORE START OF NEXT SEASON
2004 team (before start of '05): 3 of 17
2007 team (before start of '08): 1 of 20

GONE BEFORE START OF SECOND SEASON
2004 team (before start of '06): 9 of 17
2007 team (before start of '09): 5 of 20

GONE BEFORE START OF THIRD SEASON
2004 team (before start of '07): 11 of 17
2007 team (before start of '10): 6 of 20 (and counting)

ALDS Game 3: What's There to Say?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:12:14 GMT

I was at Fenway on Sunday for every blissful second, which you can relive -- me being there, moreso than all the gruesome details -- via the wonder of Twitter.

The thoughts I've been putting up here throughout the series were put together for the dead-tree S-T and Cape Cod Times ...

Red Sox Finish Not That Far-Fetched

It's pretty good, if I do say so. Read early and often.

However, the nature of the aforementioned piece meant not including a slew of quotes from the media-stuffed clubhouse. Much of it is exactly what you expect it would be, but I always try to glean out the nuggets that are a little something more.

"I definitely feel like a lot of this is on me. My team fight to put me in that situation and you do it all season long and time and time again in the postseason previously, but I just wasn’t able to come out ahead this time. … These types of moments stick with you a little bit more than the types of moments when you do preserve those wins because they tend to sink a little bit deeper." -- Jonathan Papelbon

After the last part of that quote was the second time during the period I stood at the back of the Papelbon throng that I though he might break down a little bit. He didn't, but his voice seemed to crack the slightest bit.

I've already talked a lot about how intrigued I am by the idea of trading Papelbon this winter, either just handing the closing reins to Daniel Bard in 2010 or keeping Billy Wagner around to let Bard have another year to ramp up to the role. Seems like there's a lot more murmurs about the idea floating around than there were six weeks ago ... not due to the end of the season or what happened Sunday, but because it's becoming a lot more obvious to people that the Sox aren't likely to have any interest in giving Papelbon the big-money, multi-year deal he's going to be clamoring for in free agency after the 2011 season.

"I learned a lot. Got to be around a lot of great players, including a lot of guys out in that bullpen who may or may not be back next year. … I tend to have probably higher expectation of myself than other people do, especially being a pitcher. We’re all perfectionists. I expect a lot out of myself, but it was a good year. I learned a lot, and I have a lot to take away from it." -- Daniel Bard, on what he'll remember from his rookie season

"That’s kind of the tough part for me I guess. I don’t really know what’s going on, and I don’t know … It’s very weird for me. Every year, whether it’s postseason or regular season, you always kind of know where you’re going to be. This is kind of uncharted for me. A little uneasy, not knowing if this’ll be the last time I’m in here or not. Guess I’m not the first guy to go through it." -- Jason Bay, on his being a free agent this winter

"There isn’t a ton of other places. I would say that this would be, can’t say it’s the only place in the world but it’s definitely one of. Which makes it tough to think that this might have been it. ... Pretty much loved every minute of it." -- Bay, on the likelihood he'll return to Boston

"They played better ball than us and had better timely hitting. I don’t think they hit the ball that much better than us. I think they had some pretty good timely hitting and manufactured some runs and they pitched well. … I think offensively, our bats came alive a little bit today. It was just a little bit too late." -- Kevin Youkilis

OK, I used this in my story as well, but I don't think it can be understated. In the three games, L.A. hit .258/.346/.409 ... certainly not stop the presses stuff. But Boston hit .158/.223/.232. That's pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. Leading hitter by average? Jacoby Ellsbury at 3-for-12. Three guys had a pair of RBIs: J.D. Drew (2-for-9), Victor Martinez (2-for-11) and Dustin Pedroia (2-for-12). Youkilis went 1-for-12.

Beating a dead horse, but dear Lord ... just say you tip your hat and move on.

"I did alright in some situations and then in others, felt like if I had just thrown the pitch and not thought about it too much, it could have gone a little bit different. Did what I planned on doing as far as going at least five innings and keeping the team in the game and it’s tough to swallow right now. But that’s the way it is." -- Clay Buchholz on his outing; he made it three batters into the fifth, ultimately charged for only two runs thanks to the yeoman's work of Daniel Bard

"When you have your pitcher on the mound, as a catcher, when he’s in trouble, if you’re gonna die, he’s going to die with his best pitch. And it’s just a matter of location. That was pretty much it." -- Victor Martinez, on Jonathan Papelbon being so fastball-heavy in his outing on Sunday

WBZ got video of Martinez smashing a cooler in the dugout after the loss. I'm not sure what this has to do with the quote ... guess that it wasn't so cut and dried in his head from the beginning. Shut up, it's just a segue.

"You can’t make decisions based on any three games but I don’t think anything that occurred in this series came completely out of the blue, either. There were times we struggled hitting on the road in this series. There were times during the year we struggled hitting on the road. Certain things that went down in this series were foreshadowed in the regular season as well. That said, I think we were capable of winning the World Series and if we’d come out and played better, we’d still be playing right now." -- GM Theo Epstein

"The way I look at it, we’ve had sort of two three-year runs in the postseason. We’ve swept World Series twice, we’ve been eliminated in the LCS Game 7 twice, and we’ve been swept in the first round twice. We couldn’t have predicted it at any time. We were prepared to go on a nice long run. ... We didn’t play well in this series, and that’s a disappointment. We have to live with that going forward." -- Epstein

There'll undoubtedly be more from Theo on Monday, when the teams will hold its breakdown day at Fenway. Epstein and Terry Francona are expected to meet the press one final time before the winter really begins.

"It took a bad hop. Our infield sucks. It’s the worst in the game. I’m not lying about that. That is true. … I just tried to put my body in front of it to get an out. ... Stuff upsets me. Like my job is to take 1,000 ground balls a day and other guys’ job is to get the field perfect so we can play baseball. It happens. It’s the way it goes." -- Dustin Pedroia, steaming about the lost chance for an inning-ending double on Kendry Morales' grounder in the eighth, the at-bat before Juan Rivera's two-run single

And now, one last run through the lineup card.

Jacoby Ellsbury: Was the team's "offensive star" for the series and was the only guy to score multiple runs, but really was the bad Ellsbury on Sunday. Five at-bats, none seeing more than four pitches. Heck of a season of growth for him, though.

Dustin Pedroia: Looked off-kilter all the way through outside of his third-inning double, on a present from Scott Kazmir, whom he destroys no matter the occasion. Was his usual solid self in the field, but that non-double play in the eighth ... bad hop or not, that one's going to linger in some minds.

Victor Martinez: The RBI single after Pedroia's double was really his only big offensive opportunity of the afternoon, and he cashed in on it. And ultimately, the problems caused by L.A.'s running game on Sunday weren't due to him.

Kevin Youkilis: Some of the worst glove work we've ever seen from him at first base. Both of his gaffes were tough plays -- letting a pickoff attempt get away in the first and clanging Bobby Abreu's grounder to lead off the eighth into the camera well -- but they're plays he should have made. And offensively, he was absent all day outside of that second-inning ball he clanged off the porch about six feet wide of a home run to left.

Probably the biggest disappointment of the series, and there was a race for that title.

Jason Bay: Went out with a whimper on Sunday -- two quick at-bats on changeups after a four-pitch walk, then caught looking at heat in the eighth before the rally. Let the intrigue around his contract begin.

David Ortiz: Only reason he wasn't the biggest disappointment might be expectations, though his only hit of the series ended up being rather significant -- the single that sparked the final run of the Red Sox season. Hard not to look at his 1-for-12, though, and see the same guy from the early months of '09. He didn't look as hopeless, but the results sure were the same.

Mike Lowell: He had the audacity to not remain superhuman on defense Sunday, but "made up for it" by getting on base three times and taking what he was given to single home that final run through an open spot at first.

What he did this series offers a lot of hope for the final year of his post-title contract of 2007-08 ... when his hip is right, he's still got the defensive gifts that put him among the best third basemen in the game's history.

Joey Gathright: L.A.'s pinch runner got picked off first base. Gathright stole second on a pitchout and scored. I'd say he won that head-to-head.

J.D. Drew: With his two-run homer to center in the fourth, he takes the postseason RBI lead for the Red Sox from 2007-09 with 19 -- he'd been tied with Kevin Youkilis. As I said on Twitter during the game, being a longtime J.D. Drew apologist, I know this stat by heart. And really, he gave the ball a heck of a ride toward the Monster to start the third.

Best season of his Red Sox career, without a doubt.

Alex Gonzalez: When your "didn't walk for 100 plate appearances" shortstop ends up likely leading your team in three-ball counts seen -- not completely sure he did, but he saw quite a few -- that's a pretty good sign your offense was off kilter.

Had you told me when he was signed he'd be pinch-hit for by a crippled Jed Lowrie in the last inning of the season, I would not have been surprised. And yet, almost everything Gonzalez did for the Sox surprised me a bit. Very solid return.

Clay Buchholz: There was a point in the sixth inning, right before he came out, where L.A. had runners on the corners and nobody out. (This was right after Buchholz balked Torii Hunter to third on an attempted pickoff move to second.) Buchholz was stepping off, faking to first, faking to third ... it was your worst-case scenario for a guy who'd always been too fascinated with opposing runners when he struggled.

He said it himself ... in points at the game, he'd have been a lot better off if he'd turned his brain off. Because he was alright. All L.A.'s offense against him came on the fastball, but his other pitches weren't dominant. (Very few swings and misses for what we've come to expect; three of his four strikeouts were looking.)

Got the Sox through five with only the Kendry Morales bomb against him, but fell apart in the sixth. The man he has to thank ...

Daniel Bard: Not quite the performance of Orlando Hernandez four years ago, when he kept the Sox off the scoreboard completely after they loaded the bases with none out in the final game of the '05 season. However, let you never doubt again the power of a secondary pitch ... he got out of the jam with his fastball, but that slider tore through the seventh.

Believe he threw it six times, though one might have been more of a changeup: it got both his strikeouts, plus a pair of swings and misses and four total strikes. He took it as a challenge, and he delivered.

Billy Wagner: We'd talked about his control deserting him a little bit before an end-of-season surge, and I'd say walking Vladimir Guerrero is a sign your control is off. However, his outing comes down to those two balls that bounced against Boston: the one off Youkilis' glove into the camera well, and the one that apparently took a bad hop in front of Pedroia, preventing a jam-ending double play.

You've got to make your own breaks sometimes, but he pitched a little better than the numbers show. Not much, but a little better.

Jonathan Papelbon: One of my peers after the game kept telling me something like Sunday happening was in the cards, because this is how Papelbon pitched. He was touchable. He was gettable. I don't disagree, but I think that flies in the face of how good the closer was the second half of the year. The walk to Figgins was his first free pass since Aug. 24.

And yet, the thing I come back to is pitch selection. He threw 28 actual pitches on Sunday, throwing out the four that made up the intentional walk. Fastballs? Probably 26 ... at best, he mixed in two splitters, both of which were early in counts and both of which were balls.

Juan Rivera knew he was getting a fastball when he came up with two on in the eighth, and he ripped it to right for a critical single. Guerrero, who as you may be aware will swing at anything, said he was just looking for a pitch to hit ... he got one right away, and he dumped it in center field.

There's going to be a lot of wrongheaded things said about Papelbon in the coming days because, hey, people are angry. His act gets a lot more tiresome when the results aren't there to back it up. I've already heard a significant uptick in the talk about the move we'd kind of been giddily bringing up earlier in the season: trade Papelbon, and either keep Wagner in 2010 or just give the keys to Bard right away.

I have no idea what Theo Epstein's going to do, but I do know some of his words struck me rather poignantly after Sunday's game. "Certain things that went down in this series were foreshadowed in the regular season as well."

His big-time closer -- all but assuredly out the door come free agency after 2011 -- has all but lost his secondary stuff, and his first pitch isn't lights-out able to beat good hitters anymore.

Believe me, Epstein knows it, and he's never shown an unwillingness to make a move.

Game 2 Quotables

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:28:03 GMT

As after Thursday's Game 1, our take on Friday's affairs is already up on the post before this one -- right here, if you've not already seen it or are just dying to see it again. As for what those who were actually in Anaheim had to say ...

Gamers: Globe -- Herald -- ProJo -- RedSox.com -- L.A. Times

From The Press Conferences: "They certainly have executed very, very well. Weaver tonight -- he wasn't pitching down the stretch very much. Jacoby's triple. You know, he throws across his body with the deception we talked about before the game. He executed his pitches, and we looked like we started trying to pull a little bit too much.
We didn't square up on the balls." -- Terry Francona on the Sox offense; Boston has just one run and eight hits in the two games against L.A.

"In the first at-bats I was trying to pull the ball too much in that situation with the big hit, I just tried to hit the ball back up the middle, and I hit it curveball." -- Maicer Izturis, on his game-winning single up the middle off a Josh Beckett curveball that was out of the zone

"I think it was a big help. Obviously going into your home park and knowing that you're going to have your fans behind you. You obviously want to go out there and try to locate, first and foremost. I was able to do that for the most part tonight." -- Jered Weaver, referring back to his 13 2/3 innings of eight-hit, two-run baseball against the Red Sox in the early season; he'd allowed eight total runs in two starts each against Boston the last two seasons, plus been knocked out after five innings against the Sox in the '07 ALDS

"The only way you're going to beat good pitching whether it's a spring training game or regular season game, pennant-race playoff game is to pitch with them. We've been able to do that the first couple of nights. That's what I think one of our strengths have been the last 40 or 50 games for our club since our rotation really got settled. We've pitched with a lot of the great pitchers that are in our league, and we've been able to come away with some wins." -- Mike Scioscia, on L.A. beating Jon Lester and Josh Beckett on back-to-back nights

Only once all season did Lester and Beckett take the loss on back-to-back nights: April 12 and 13, when both went eight innings -- Beckett allowed five runs and 10 hits to the Angels, Lester eight runs and 12 hits to the A's. That's a bit misleading since the duo only pitched on consecutive days 10 times, but Boston was a combined 32-14 in games they started. Beckett had the reputation of being the team's big stopper for good reason: The Sox were 12-3 this season in games he started following a loss the previous day.

"I think this year we've had incredible batter's box offense, which I think has really fueled most of our push during the regular season. We were really swinging the bats well with runners in scoring position and everything was happening. Probably up until this year it was a much larger part of what we needed to do. This year it's part of it, but the whole picture is much more than just base running for us this year because we've really swung the bats well, especially with runners in scoring position and manufactured with the base running that we're talking about. ... It's one component. We don't have a trademark on it. A lot of teams do it. Boston does it. Tampa Bay, you know, Texas, the Yankees, those guys are extraordinary in running the bases and are very aggressive. We're one of those teams that needs to push that end of it, and we have the talent to do it, and these guys do a good job with it and it showed up tonight." -- Scioscia, on the team's approach blending aggressiveness on the bases with power

Around The Links: "I felt good through six innings. I made a couple of mistakes in situations (in the seventh) where I can’t make mistakes. I just wasn’t making pitches when I needed to. ... If it wasn’t for those two pitches the game could have a different view and the guys aren’t trying to fight back from a three-run deficit, it should have been one run. We need to regroup and we know what we need to do now." -- Josh Beckett, on his seventh-inning curveball that hit Mike Napoli and the ensuing fastball Erick Aybar slugged for a two-run triple (more here)

McAdam pulls no punches in that article: "It wasn’t that long ago that Josh Beckett was regarded as the game’s best Big Game Pitcher, the heir apparent to the crown jointly shared by John Smoltz and Curt Schilling for many of the last 15 years. ... But 2007 seems like a long time ago now, far longer than two short years ago." Jesus. That's some pretty high ripping for a guy who'd held the Angels to a run and three hits through six innings.

Boston finds a way to kick around Weaver, Beckett's the stopper. Let's cancel the tar-and-feather order for a few more days yet.

"I don't know about surprising. I don't think we've played well enough to win either game." -- Mike Lowell, who's 0-for-7 in the first two games; Jacoby Ellsbury is the only Boston player with multiple hits, and he had both of his on Friday night

"You look at the guys we have in that lineup, and we expect to score runs. You expect a hit here, a walk, a flare. But the reality is, we haven’t gotten it. Usually, you get one or two guys that kind of carries when guys don’t go well. I think that’s another testament to how they’ve been pitching. As a team, these last two games the pitching has been better than our hitting." -- Jason Bay (more here)

"If he can hit the ball in that spot, you tip your cap to him. I thought he was looking to hit the ball out of the ballpark in that situation. That was a big play for them." -- Dustin Pedroia on Vlad Guerrero's single through the spot Pedroia vacated on a fourth-inning hit-and-run; the quote breaks the world record for times one team "tipped its cap" to another over a 48-hour period

“It’s not the end of the world, like somebody said. We’re going to come out and play as hard as we can. Everybody in this room, we all fight. We’ve fought through a lot of things this year. We’re definitely not giving up. We’ve got a lot of baseball ahead of us. There’s a lot of character here. That’s what we’re built on. A lot of guys, a lot of us are underdogs. Now we definitely are as a team. We’ve got to play better." -- Pedroia, channeling Manny Ramirez's don't-worry attitude when Boston trailed 3-1 in the 2007 ALCS to Cleveland

"I’m already thinking about my next start. Hopefully I can get back up on the hill as soon as possible. Whenever that is, Tito will let me know, and we’ll prepare and get going. ... I’d like another shot at them. ... I’m just preparing like I’m pitching again. I’m preparing like I’m pitching in five days, but if it’s sooner I’ll make adjustments." -- Jon Lester, whom Francona said would start Game 4 on Monday in Boston against Joe Saunders; Lester went 5-3 with a 3.99 ERA in 15 starts made on four days rest this season, as opposed to 8-3 with a 2.72 ERA on five days rest (more here)

"You know, it was actually more from his side of it. He was kind of telling me not to tiptoe around it. Maybe I was. He goes, ‘Hey, just tell me. I’m a big boy.’ I think that really helped me. He’s been terrific. He tries to do anything in his power to help us win. He’s got a ‘C’ on his chest. He earned that and he hasn’t unearned it. Just, he’s not playing as much for various reasons." -- Francona on Jason Varitek approaching him at the end of the season to ask what his playoff role was going to be; Varitek did not play in either of the series' first two games (more here)

ALDS Game 2: "We've had a tough time ... that's an understatement."

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:35:51 GMT

As I read this over, there's probably some debacle sentences in here ... bear with me, as I'm attempting to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. For reasons I wish I'd fully grasped earlier, I'm doing a call-in on Comcast SportsNet's "Baseball Show" in the early hours. Tune in to hear my lyrical speaking voice at 9:55 a.m.

Hitting, in so much as someone as unathletic as me can understand it, is about opportunity. There are going to be points when skilled batters turn on a pitcher's best stuff or just take what they're given, but the big blows usually come when the pitcher makes a mistake. Good pitching, like good defense, is usually going to carry the day.

To Boston's credit on Friday night, they took advantage of their opportunity. Jered Weaver hung Jacoby Ellsbury a changeup to start the fourth inning, and Ellsbury slugged it over Torii Hunter's head in center for a triple. (Had it been Hunter at the plate, he'd probably have bounced another off the fake rocks beyond the wall, but that's not the point.) Six pitches later, Weaver hung another to Victor Martinez. Single to center field, 1-0 Red Sox lead despite a dominant all-around performance.

The Angels, similar situation. Josh Beckett got a little bit loose at the end of the third inning, giving up a two-out single to Erick Aybar, running a 3-1 count to Chone Figgins, then catching a break when Figgins could only fly out to left on the ensuing fastball. To start the fourth, Bobby Abreu slapped a lofted curveball into left. That was the catalyst to their tying the game: Vlad Guerrero bounds a ball through Dustin Pedroia's vacated spot on a hit and run, and a sac fly later, it's 1-1.

L.A. struck again later, though, in a way these Sox simply aren't. And haven't been for much of the year.

Great as Josh Beckett was at times in Game 2, he didn't get a strike on his curveball even one out of every three times he threw it. Despite that, after going fastball-heavy on Guerrero the first two times he faced him -- got him to fly out on heat in the second, and essentially got him to ground out on one in the fourth -- he threw him three straight curveballs to start the seventh. All missed so badly, Guerrero didn't swing. The fastballs that followed were too little, too late, same as the two outs Beckett got after the walk.

But it wasn't so much because Beckett made a mistake. Maicer Izturis slapped a low curve maybe six inches out of the zone for the game-winning single to center. L.A.'s No. 7 hitter, the same spot he was in when the Angels started a lineup of all .300 hitters on Aug. 18 -- something that hadn't been done by any team that late in a year since 1934 -- made something happen. Two batters later, Erick Aybar smoked that fastball to center for a triple that essentially sealed up the game, but that doesn't happen without Izturis simply beating Beckett.

The Red Sox? They're not beating anybody, and they're not creating anything. Weaver undressed them the same way he did in the early season ... twice. And yes, early in the game, he was pounding the zone, getting ahead, throwing first-pitch strikes to nine of the first 13 guys he faced. The Sox, though, helped out. Dustin Pedroia swung at an ankle-high pitch and an eye-high pitch back-to-back in the fourth. Mike Lowell saw eight pitches in going 0-for-4. Alex Gonzalez actually ran back-to-back three-ball counts, then remember he was the guy who went his first 100 Boston plate appearances this season without a walk.

They made nine of their 27 outs on Friday night on pitches out of the zone, though that's a bit of a fungible measure based on pitchFX data. What that also means, though, is they made 18 on stuff in the strike zone. Boston didn't have a single hit on Weaver's fastball or his cutter -- though both their hits against the L.A. pen were on fastballs. He just overpowered them, as good pitchers keep on doing to them.

So here the Sox are again, same place as they were in 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2005 -- down 2-0 in a Division Series. The '95 Indians and '05 White Sox both ended up winning the pennant, so there's really no shame in the Sox going quietly against the two of them. The middle two, however ... how do they differ from this, for whatever it's worth? The Indians blew the Sox off the field a decade ago, winning Game 2 by a lopsided 11-1. Boston had a Martinez going in Game 3 ... it was older brother Ramon, but he was good enough to stifle Cleveland until the bats could take out the Indian bullpen. (Not to mention what his brother and their teammates did later in the series.)

In 2003, Derek Lowe went seven strong in Game 3. I remember Game 4 fondly -- that's my first-ever Red Sox assignment there, kids -- and arguably the best offense this franchise has had for 50 years found a way to sneak into that iconic ALCS.

In 2009, the offense isn't that good even when it's fully firing, and they get lefty Scott Kazmir in a Fenway Park day game -- not a happy combination. And aiming to keep the season alive? Clay Buchholz, a guy beginning to fully capitalize on a devastating array of pitches, but whose mental game is probably his weakest link and who came up very small when he could have thrown the Wild Card clincher during the final homestand of the regular season. Real box of chocolates, he is.

In the end, it's hard not to look at it all and just realize the better team's winning the series. If anything, we have Boston's defense -- predominantly through Lowell and Gonzalez -- to thank for keeping the games closer than they should be. L.A. wins with speed. They win with power, and they win with pitching.

There's time for a turnaround, and there's precedent for the Sox flipping the switch. If only the Orioles were coming to town for the weekend.

Running through the lineup card as we did for Thursday's game ...

Jacoby Ellsbury: Boston's lone multi-hit night, but with a couple of inning-starting strikeouts interspersed with them. When Buck Martinez informed me during the game that the Angels' scouting report said that Ellsbury has an "average major league arm" in center field, I wondered whether I've been overstating the skill level of major-league players for years.

Dustin Pedroia: Certainly looks to me like he's pressing, which feels like a lot of this team's problem when the bats start to go bad. Of course, Pedroia's also one of the best bad-ball hitters in the league ... guess it's along the Ellsbury lines, where I criticize him for not seeing enough pitches when he's not getting the hits to cover it up.

Victor Martinez: Delivered right on cue with that single to center in the fourth, plus made the right call on the pitchout to catch Bobby Abreu stealing in the eighth. Did allow two stolen bases earlier, but they ended up not mattering all that much when Aybar slugged that triple.

Kevin Youkilis: Nondescript night punctuated with that double off Kevin Jepsen in the ninth.

David Ortiz: He's 0 for the series, but it doesn't seem like it's in a helpless way. Just seems like good pitchers are beating him the same way they did in the early season.

Jason Bay: So close on that cutter to start the fifth, and loved the at-bat in the seventh. Eight pitches probably got Weaver out of the game earlier that Scioscia had hoped for. Least earlier than I'd hope for when Brian Fuentes is the guy at the end of my bullpen.

Mike Lowell: He's never been a terribly patient guy at the plate, but this is ridiculous. He actually looks worse than Ortiz, like he's just trying to get his at-bats over with ... obviously not the case, but they're all so quick and he's hitting nothing hard. Fortunately, he's playing defense back at that "this guy might be the best third baseman ever" level. To go from how hobbled he was last fall to that diving play on Torii Hunter in the fourth is hard to imagine.

J.D. Drew: Weaver took him apart in chunks in the eighth ... really drove home how good he was. Especially after Drew had worked all those breaking pitches against him for that fifth-inning walk.

Billy Wagner: Had to chuckle a little when Buck Martinez was talking about control being the last thing to come back to a guy after Tommy John surgery. Wagner did have that stint where he walked a ton of guys a couple weeks back, but appears to have worked through it. Would love to see him stick around and help roll Daniel Bard into the closer's role.

Jonathan Papelbon: I have to be honest. Papelbon's now 26-inning career playoff scoreless streak is one of those stats I'm in awe of. Should he allow a run, I fully admit I'll be a bit crushed. Having gotten to witness the thing from start to finish, whatever you think about the guy, that's almost impossible to imagine. Plus, he's got his control back and he's once again peaking at the perfect time of year.