photo from projo.com
They’re still playing baseball?
I’m sorry, I’ve been distracted all day by thoughts of last night’s Patriots game, specifically the last five minutes when Bill, Brady, & Co. ripped the collective hearts out of the entire city of Buffalo, NY and sent shockwaves through the NFL.
Somewhere in New Jersey, Mark Sanchez is putting salve on his diaper rash after wetting his pants watching last night’s game and Rex Ryan is mowing on fried chicken and biscuits while analyzing Pats game tape in anticipation of Sunday’s matchup in the Meadowlands. He’s not sure which will give him more acid indigestion later on.
But back to the Red Sox, who are the real topic of this post. Tonight, the Sox place their hopes on the slender right arm of Daisuke Matsuzaka-san, who returns from the disabled list (better known as the WBC) for his first start since June. With a 4.5 game lead on Texas in the Wild Card going into tonight with only a few short weeks to go in the regular season, some well placed wins will go a long way in locking up a playoff spot.
The Sox have tried everyone from John Smoltz to Clay Buchholz to Junichi Tazawa to Paul Byrd to My Old Uncle Charley and his patented “Funny Ball” Pitch in Dice-K’s place since he last pitched for Boston 87 days ago. Way back then, the loss of Matsuzaka, while considered serious, was taken in with the knowledge that Boston had Smoltz waiting in the wings to take his place. Matsuzaka had fallen off the wagon completely since last year, going 1-5 with an 8.23 ERA in eight starts this season. His WHIP was 2.20. BAA? .378. There’s bad, there’s worse, then there was Dice-K.
But flash forward to now, when the Sox are throwing out a bucket of balls every five days as Tim Wakefield continues to nurse a bad back and Paul Byrd finds his way back into form after a very Brett Favre-esque retirement, and Matsuzaka has the chance to become a key cog in a postseason run. If..he’s healthy. If…he’s effective. If…he has his head out of his ass this time around.
The front end of a potential Sox playoff rotation looks set with Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, and Buchholz almost all locked in. Clay has pitched his way into that fold lately, but there’s still a fourth starter/swingman’s job that needs to be claimed by SOMEBODY. Wake hasn’t been healthy since the All-Star break and Byrd is pitching on fumes and is starting to resemble a cross between Jaime Moyer and Eddie Harris from Major League on the mound with his combination of old time delivery and soft-tossing Vaseline balls…er…pitches.
The time is now for our once most-cherished Japanese import. I think I speak for us all when I say Dice-K, get your shit together.
