Must We Take It Like This?
Watching the first inning of the Fenway opener was a bit nerve-racking. But after seeing guys like Pedro Martinez struggle in the first innings only to turn out gems by the end of the game made it a little more tolerable to sit through Josh Beckett’s first inning struggles. As already noted everywhere in the sports-blog world, Beckett delivered another fine performance to help the Red Sox pick up their 6th win of the season.
In short, if every Beckett game has rough 1st innings like he’s had thus far, only to then deliver 6 score-less innings afterward: I’ll take it.
Beckett was far from a master on the mound, but he got the job done. As did Papelbon and to a lesser extent Foulke. Foulke wasn’t as sharp as his previous outing, but the homerun he gave up wasn’t the biggest blast in the world and in my opinion should have been caught by Wily Mo Pena.
Pena, on the other hand, is by no means winning accolades for his pick-up — yet. Bronson Arroyo seems to be leading Pena in nearly every offensive category despite only playing in 2 games, and as a pitcher at that (Arroyo had his 2nd home run of the season yesterday).
Will Pena turn it on and start banging the hell out of the green monster? Watching him swing at breaking balls leads me to believe that could be a long wait.
April 12th, 2006 at 11:28 am
It looks like we’ll get a chance to see alot more Wily Mo in the next few days. Trot Nixon will be out about a week because of his stellar play on the ball yesterday (that made me look real credible).
April 12th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Guess that means we’ll be seeing a lot more curve balls thrown too!