Red 2, White 0
So remember a week and a half ago when Dice-K’s gave up five walks and got the win for the sixth time this season, first time any Red Sox pitcher's done something like that since 1953.
It was a Matrix-like, bullet-dodging phenomenon that had catcher Jason Varitek baffled when our own Amalie Benjamin tried to get him to explain it after the game.
“I can't explain it,” he said. “Sometimes he loses feel and just misses on pitches. Part of him is still harnessing who he is at all times.”
It’s the kind of luck that pitchers around the league would kill for.
Pitchers like say, Javier Vazquez, the sometimes great and sometimes not pitcher for Chicago. Last time he was on the mound … well let the Chicago Tribune’s Rick Morrissey tell it.
Saturday felt so wasteful. Don't the Sox know there are starving baseball teams that would love the kind of success Vazquez was serving on a hot, muggy August afternoon? Finish your food, kids.
“Surely the Sox know the importance of opportunism, locked in a pennant race as they are. True, it was Vazquez who loaded the bases in the eighth inning before exiting against the talented, emboldened Rays, but he received little help from his teammates. He left with a 3-1 lead, and by the time the inning was over the Rays were up 5-3.
More important, the same score was glowing on the scoreboard at the end of the game.
"It's one of the toughest games I've lost, just being ahead like that and then all of a sudden, boom," Vazquez said. "It was just a tough game to swallow."
His luck hasn’t changed much in the past few days.
Chicago hasn’t been able to get a bat on Matsuzaka all night (two hits, a walk and five strikeouts), Vasquez just gave up an RBI double to David Ortiz and a single to Kevin Youkilis that set up a convention at the mound with one out and runners at the corners.
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Meet the Globe's Red Sox team (left to right): Nick Cafardo, Amalie
Benjamin, Adam Kilgore and Tony Massarotti
