Dustin Pedroia, on the four-game lead:
I don't care what people's nerves are. We have a four-game lead with [38] games to go. It's better than being four games behind. Confident? Why wouldn't we be? We have the best record in baseball. Let off the panic button a little bit, you know what I mean?(In the fine tradition of sports columnists, I have used a beyond-stale pop culture reference as the title of this post in an attempt to be funny and hip.) And for those people who think the Red Sox are choking, Eric Wilbur invites you to look at what the Dodgers and Brewers have done lately.
Bobby Kielty, on his Fenway debut: "I was very excited, extremely excited about it. It's the team I always wanted to play for since I was a little boy. My dad was from the area. It's the team I always rooted for."
Kevin Youkilis is hitting .114 (4-for-35) in his last 10 games. His OBP hasn't been this low (.389) since April 26. He has also struck out 25 times in his last 21 games. Plus, as Chad Finn writes, Yook "was a lot more likable before he decided he should be able to call his own balls and strikes".
3 comments:
Yes it is better to be up by 4 games... but I liked the 8-10 game lead much better, the lead we had back in early July.
We all liked that lead better, but it was unsustainable. This is still a solid, if more realistic, lead.
Good job, Dusty!
It seems to me that we will know a lot more about this Red Sox team on 9/1. This will be after 7 games with TB and Chicago, and then three games in the Bronx.
The 7 games with TB and Chicago will show us whether the Sox can win the games that they are supposed to win (regardless of what the Yankees do during that same time). I would think that they should be reasonably expected to win 5 of those 7 games.
Then we have the series in the Bronx. The Sox need to show that they are the better pitching team with the best record in baseball and take 2 out of three from the Yankees.
If this happens, then we go into the last 28 games of the season with at least a 5 or 6 game lead. That should be enough to shut the door, barring a catastrophic losing streak (which I don't think would happen given the Sox schedule in September and their track record throughout the season).
So, I think that the team is in reasonably good shape. They just need to take care of business.
As Tek has been saying all along, they just need to focus on winning the games that they need to win, and forget about everything (and everybody) else.
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