Just Like Jenn Said--Peter

Well, for those of you who read Jenn's post earlier today on last night's game, today we had Beckett on the mound and, sure enough, a new win streak begins. JB pitched a solid seven innings, giving up only six hits and a single run with no free passes. His WHIP for the game was below 1.0. Can't complain about that--at all! Even better, he strung together 8 K's and once again finds himself among the AL's leaders in that category. Even better, from a career standpoint, one of tonight's K's was his 1,000th in his career.He looks like he's recovered from his early season ailments and ready to duplicate last year's success.

The guys from the Hub collectively got 13 hits, everybody except Lugo getting at least one. Ellsbury, Papi, Lowell and Crisp each had multi-hit games, and it was another day of evidence that both Papi and Lowell have come out of their early season slumps. After the game, Papi's B.A. was up to .239 and Lowell's was at .260, both season 2008 season highs. Yooouk (regular visitors here will note I don't necessarily have any consistency in how many o's I put in Yoouk's name--I have no idea what's correct, so I just wing it) had another roundtripper, tying him with Manny and Papi for the team lead in that category. He also picked up his 26th and 27th RBI's, putting him in the league's top five for that category.

Pitching--a lot better all around than last night. After JB left following his seven innings, Hansen threw just twelve pitches in a perfect inning of relief and was followed by the Other Manny, Delcarmen, who also threw a shutout inning, although he did give up a single squared (that's one single and if I have to explain it, it's not worth the discussion).

Well, that's it for now in the Motor City. New England's answer to Daniel has left the Tiger's den (I know, in the Book it was lion's, but hey, I didn't write it and you get the point). Off to the Twin Cities for a weekend series with the Twinkies. One thing about the town(s): if you like to play with words, there are at least two good ones to work with. The Twins manager is named Gardenhire (what's the matter, he couldn't buy one?) and the local nickname for the newspaper, the Star Tribune--it's called the Strib. See you from the Central time zone.