Lester Sets K Record, Leaves With Sore Groin

Jon Lester broke Bruce Hurst's single season record for most strikeouts by a Red Sox left-handed pitcher. Hurst struck out 190 in 1987 and Lester, with nine strikeouts last night, now has 196.

Lester threw only 97 pitches, coming out after six innings with a sore right groin.

Just a little precautionary thing. We don't want to push it at this time of year. It's just something that popped up tonight. I couldn't tell you when or how or what pitch. It's that time of year when everyone has bumps and bruises, and you have to pitch through them a little bit.

Terry Francona, on deciding to bring in Jonathan Papelbon:

The way the inning was unfolding, it looked like the game was going to be won or lost in the eighth. We brought him in with the idea that, if he gets out of the eighth and it's really taxing, we'll just go to somebody else in the ninth.

Beautiful.

He got out of it with no runs, which is really tough to do, and came out and had a real crisp ninth, so it worked out about as well as it could.

With the tying runs on base, Papelbon got the second out on an amazing sliding catch by Jacoby Ellsbury ("I knew I could make it off the bat ... I caught it right in the heel") in center field. Ellsbury moved two steps in from his usual spot for Jason Bartlett's at-bat. Those two steps likely saved the game.

Francona said when Ellsbury came in at the end of the inning, he told him: "If you miss that and it rolls, go right up that tunnel and right out with it."

Francona called Daisuke Matsuzaka's first inning at Portland on Sunday "a fiasco ... He said he was trying some things. [Maybe he should] try something different." He was joking. ... Ellsbury is tied with David DeJesus of the Royals for the AL leads with nine triples. ... The Red Sox are not the new Yankees. They are "some unholy amalgamation of the postwar Brooklyn Dodgers and the Grateful Dead".