Resiliency

Doug Mirabelli, asked whether the 2006 Sox are as resilient as the 2004 team:

I don't know if the '04 team realized they had resiliency until they did it. After Game 3 against the Yankees, if you had talked to anybody and they really believed that they were going to sweep the Yankees from there on out, I would have to say that they were probably lying at that point.

If you looked at it that far ahead at the time, if you looked at it like, 'OK, we need to win four games' instead of saying 'We need to win the next game,' you would have been overwhelmed with the thought process. What the '04 team allowed themselves to do was just concentrate on just winning one game at a time because they knew the next loss would end the season.

Mirabelli says Jason Varitek might be back for the four-game series at Yankee Stadium beginning September 15. ... Tim Wakefield has been told to stay off the bullpen mound for awhile, until his discomfort goes away.

Jonathan Papelbon is considering playing in a series of exhibition games in Japan after the season -- partially because of the money involved (who is in charge of sounding the media's greedy player alert?) -- but the team would rather he not go. Papelbon also says that after this season, he will sit down with management and discuss whether he will start or close in 2007.