Pitcher tossing, turning
Byrd wins game but will lose sleep
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It was one home run for Adam Jones. It was a night's sleep for Paul Byrd.
It was a first-inning mistake pitch, but Byrd has trouble letting it go. For the moment, yes. For the sake of the game, sure. To salvage a start and get his first win as a Red Sox pitcher at Fenway, absolutely.
But at some point, he has to go home. That's when Byrd will replay everything about last night's 7-4 win in his mind, from the pitches he left up in the zone to the ones he left over the plate.
"Even when I pitch well - like, really well - I still have trouble going to sleep," he said.
He went seven innings against the Orioles, giving up seven hits and four runs - three of them solo homers.
"It's just hard to come down," he said. "I've tried it all, man, but the bottom line is this: If you have to be at peak performance from 7 to 10, it's hard to go to sleep at 12 or 1 o'clock. So I'm up sometimes till the sun comes up just thinking about different things."
Part of it's pressure. Part of it's expectation.
"I've always had something to prove," he said. "I've always been one of those guys where people, even when I've done well, they say, 'Well, I don't know if he can do it again.'
"My stuff's not that great. I'm not super tall. It's just one of those things where I just have to go battle and proving that I belong up here."
So he pores over every pitch. The one to Jones was too high.
"I don't know if it bounced off the Citgo sign or not," said Byrd.
Then Juan Castro took him for a ride out to the front-row seats atop the Monster in the third.
"I thought I was throwing the ball really well," he said. "I'd throw nine or 10 pitches, then I'd leave one right over the plate."
Byrd had 1-2-3 innings in the fourth and fifth, then survived a scare in the sixth, allowing a manufactured run on a single by Castro, a sacrifice by Brian Roberts, and a single by Nick Markakis.
He hung around long enough to give up another homer, this time off the lip of the Monster by Kevin Millar.
"When he made a mistake or two, they hit them a long way," said manager Terry Francona. "Adam Jones hit that ball all the way home and Millar did what he's been known to do from time to time.
"But then he made pitches and he was pretty good. You look up in the fifth and I think he had 51 pitches, and on a night when we needed to stay away from [Manny] Delcarmen and [Justin] Masterson, getting to where he got us was very helpful."
The Sox pulled the mid-August trade with Cleveland so Byrd could be a pitcher that ate innings seven at a time, as he did last night.
"He kept us in the game," catcher Jason Varitek said. "Once we got the lead, he held the lead for us."
But that doesn't do much to ease the anxiety.
"Being a starting pitcher's tough," Byrd said. "You only get to pitch once every five days. Everything's piled on to that one day.
"You mean a lot that night. So it's tough to go to bed."
Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com
