The baseball gods have mercy.
After 2 and a half weeks of torturous .384 winning percentage baseball, the Red Sox added an additional victory to their win column last night...and they did it in rather convincing fashion.
After flying out to San Francisco early yesterday morning, Jon Lester backstopped a dominant 8 and a 3rd innings for Boston, striking out 3 walking 2 and giving up just 6 hits on no runs scored against.
"I mean, my motivation is kind of the same every game," said Lester. "I want to try to finish every game that I can. Obviously these guys had a long day. [I was] fortunate enough to come in yesterday. I think for us to come in with that travel schedule, which guys aren't normally accustomed to, and do what we did tonight, it's big for us."
As Lester highlighted in that statement, he was one of the few Red Sox who did not wait until yesterday morning to fly out. While the rest of his team went home after their crushing 9-6 loss to the Yankees, Lester went right to the airport and was in San Francisco by 4am California time. But by that point, the rest of his team wasn't even in the air as they would not hit the sky's until 10:20 eastern time. They did not touchdown until 1:20 California time.
"Anytime you have these long travel days, you always look to the starting pitcher to keep the game under control," said manager John Farrell. "Not knowing how you're going to come out physically from an offensive standpoint, how many different times you can push to get an offense started, he gave us just that."
The Red Sox were tired but Lester was un-phased as he took out the first 9 batters San Fran put up in order. 4 innings later, Lester was still in the game and had allowed just 2 hits. But by that point, good pitching was not the only story.
After the top of the 7th inning the Sox were up 5-0 all ripping apart a former Cy Young winner in Tim Lincicum.
"We played great," said Dustin Pedroia, "Jon, he was unbelievable. It seems like we were barely on defense. He was getting us back in swinging the bat. Guys had great at-bats. It was a big win."
Last night's Boston win was crucial in the pennant race. Tampa Bay won 4-3 over the Orioles meaning that with just 1 game separating the Sox and their south Florida rivals, should Boston have lost last night, their division lead would be gone.
Now on a normal night, Lester probably would have been allowed to stay in the game to finish it off, a wish that he made clear by yelling it after finishing off the 8th. But after Ryan Dempser's plunking of A-Rod on Sunday he will likely be suspended meaning that with Lester already throwing over 100 pitches, Farrell was not ready to tire out a guy who is finally looking like and ace again.
"Jon was exactly what we needed -- we needed a strong pitching performance on a night when we could use a guy to go deep in the game and he gave us just that," Farrell said. "An outstanding effort on his part. A lot of strikes, I thought his fastball was sharp, it was powerful and he mixed in some breaking balls and particularly his cutter was powerful tonight."
Jon was exactly what we needed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment