Eye of the Storm

Although the Red Sox lost Wednesday 6-5 to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and have only a 5 game lead over the Yankees going into a "must-win" end of the week 4 game series against the AL West leading Angels, things are definitely more calm then they were before the Sox took 2 of 3 from the D- Rays. While I suspect that there is calmness mainly because we are smack in the middle of the eye of the storm, this calmness is also due to the Yankees losing on Wednesday.

Because there is a 12 hour time difference between Boston and China—where Your Red Sox Diarist is scribing this blog—and the Red Sox game and the Yankees game against the Baltimore Orioles were both played during the mid-afternoon, Your Red Sox Diarist did not know the results until Thursday morning China time. While following Red Sox baseball from the Peoples Republic of China of course necessitates making certain adjustments, Your Red Sox Diarist felt that staying up until 4:30 in the morning on weekday to follow a game against Tampa Bay wasn't really a great idea.

To better understand this, let me explain how we follow games here in the Peoples Republic. To watch or listen to games live, there are several media sources available. MLB.TV (or audio), accessed from the mlb.com website, is the best option. This however requires the payment of a subscription fee. This service allows one to watch (or listen to) all games live on a computer. The NESN TV broadcast is the feed for all home games and the away broadcaster is the feed for most away games. For the audio service, the feed is the WRKO radio broadcast. Other good media sources to follow Major League Baseball in China include mlb.com's Gameday service and ESPN's mobile phone service, where one can follow a text plus graphics version of the game on a cellphone.

My buddy O'Brien, who is a somewhat senior person in the financial services industry and flies around Southeast Asia as often as most flight attendants, follows the Red Sox in a similar manner as I do. Whether in a hotel in Jakarta, on a beach in the Philippines or on a golf course in Ho Chi Min City, O'Brien is able to follow—and does follow the Red Sox as if he were living in a brownstone in the Back Bay back in the Hub. Typically, no matter where in the region O'Brien happens to be, together we dissect each game by telephone or email and generally opine on the state of Red Sox Nation. This dedication to all things Red Sox, whether in the thick of a division race or in the dog days of the Hot Stove Season, has led us at various times to planning a trip to the World Baseball Classic in Tokyo, making pilgrimages to Fenway Park and most recently, many fruitless discussions about doing a Red Sox Podcast.

The strange thing is, after O'Brien and I saw the results of Wednesday's losing efforts against the Devil Rays, we didn't have much to say. There was only a calm.

Random Tidbits

There are some interesting statistics coming out of the 5 games immediately preceding the Red Sox loss to the D-Rays on Wednesday. The Red Sox starting pitchers in those 5 games (three against Baltimore, 2 against Tampa Bay) had a combined 0.99 ERA giving up only 4 earned runs over 36.2 innings. The 5 Red Sox starters (Dice-K, Beckett, Schilling, Wakefield and Lester) had a combined WHIP of 0.77. The Red Sox bullpen on the other hand had a combined ERA of 12.16 and a combined WHIP of 2.03 over a 7.4 inning period, giving up 10 earned runs, 11 hits and 4 walks. The bullpen also gave up 2 homeruns during those 5 games while the starters gave up no home runs.