Twins - 001 000 000 - 1 4 0 Red Sox - 200 000 20x - 4 9 0Chris Sale: 6.1-4-1-2-9, 108. ... Mitch Moreland hit a solo home run in the first inning and drove in a run with a sac fly in the seventh. ... Tzu-Wei Lin (#73), recently of Portland (AA), made his first major league start, and singled in his first at-bat.
John Farrell went to the bullpen with one out in the seventh and two men on base. Heath Hembree got Chris Gimenez (who had homered in the third) to ground into a 5-4-3 double play. (Sale referred to Hembree as "Heater", so I guess that's his nickname.)
Betts, RF
Pedroia, 2B
Bogaerts, SS
Moreland, 1B
Benintendi, LF
Young, DH
Bradley, CF
Leon, C
Lin, 3B
2 comments:
SoSHer nvalvo, on Lin:
Lin, for those just hearing of him for the first time, is a Taiwanese shortstop.
The Red Sox signed him for $2m, the largest bonus ever given to a Taiwanese position player, when he was eighteen. The Yankees had attempted to sign him two years earlier, but there was a Tazawa-style incident about big league teams poaching high school students, and the deal fell through. The Sox swooped after he graduated.
Until this season, he's been a glove-first shortstop, although some scouts question if he has the arm for an everyday SS in MLB. He had risen quickly through the system because of his defensive maturity, but stalled out at AA because he couldn't break a .600 OPS against Eastern League pitching.
But this year, he tweaked his swing to get a higher launch angle and suddenly started destroying the Eastern League. He's still only 23.
****
On the Moreland HR: I (unlike Eck) immediately thought it was at least a Wall ball. Outfielders going back...they turn and look up... and the NESN camera finally decides to give us the low view instead of aiming up toward the moon. And guess what? The ball lands in the Monster seats, about a half-inch from the top-left corner of the screen. They're lucky it was even visible. They not only missed up-down but also left-right.
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