Lester: "I'm Not Tired. I'm Not Hurt."

                       IP    H   R  ER  BB   K    ERA
0816-0906 (5 starts)  31.0  19   5   4  11  32   1.16
0911-0924 (3 starts)  13.2  21  16  16   8  10  10.45

Jon Lester:

I'm not tired. I'm not hurt. There's nothing wrong with me. I wouldn't go out there if there was something wrong with me. It's nothing physically. [So what is wrong?] I stink. If I had the answer, it wouldn't happen. You go 32-0 every year if you had the answer of why you stink sometimes. It just happens. It's part of baseball. Teams go through stretches like this ... Pitchers go through stretches like I'm doing. It's the name of the game. Other times, you throw the ball right down the middle and it gets popped up. That's baseball. You make a pitch on the black, and it gets hit 400 feet. ... It's not a good time to have this stretch.

Adrian Gonzalez: "When we get into the playoffs, whoever we play better watch out because we're going to go in being the underdog, especially the way we've been playing this month, so we've got nothing to lose. Plain and simple, we're not playing good baseball. At the same time, we can come out tomorrow and win the two games and pretty much be a lock to be in the playoffs. All these things can turn in a matter of 12 hours. The last time we went through this, we came out of that and we were the best team for two or three months. When we come out of this, we're going to be the best team and that's why I like our chances going into the playoffs."

Complicating that optimism is the fact that the Rays won this evening, beating the Blue Jays 6-2. (The Angels beat the A's 4-2.) Tampa Bay is 1.5 GB the Red Sox for the wild card and, if everything goes wrong tomorrow (with Wakefield and Lackey, it's a serious concern), the two teams could be tied with only three games left in the season.