Well, it was the first game in the post-Manny era. The sports pundits are back and forth about who got the best deal; if the Sox are better or worse off, and so on and so on, ad infinitem. But the fact remains, Manny is no longer a Sox member. His replacement in left is Jason Bay, hitting .282 for the season before last night's inaugural with the Bosox, with 22 homers for the season. It turns out Bay grew up with posters of Yaz, Rice and Pudge on his wall in Vancouver, BC. Why? Because his dad was a rabid Sox fan and he brought this kid up right! If this has a familiar ring, well....I plead guilty.
Anyway, against the A's at the Fens, trying to get back on the winning trail and gain a game on the Stripes, who'd lost earlier in the day to the Angels and not lose ground to the Rays, who've beaten Detroit, Wake is pitching an excellent game against the A's, matching zeroes with the Elephants' only All-Star, Deutscherer. Fairly early on, the Sox go ahead with none other than Bay scoring the lead run, having gotten aboard on a free pass.
The game proceeds on and Wake continues to put up the zeroes. Finally, one gone in the 7th, he's pulled for Okajima. Oki makes only one mistake, but it's an instant blown save. He offers a fat one to the A's excuse for a star, Cust (hits homers and very little else--ever), and Wake's chance for a W is gone like a fart in the wind--1-1. There the score remains through inning after inning; through he, who shall now be referred to as The Only Manny-Delcarmen (still TOM, though), through Lopez and through two innings of The Saver. Nothing changes. After 11, it's still 1-1.
Top of the 12th--enter Jenn's favorite pitcher, Timlin. He's masterful--really! In and out of the inning in nothing flat, no runs or much of anything else. Bottom of the 12th with two outs and facing another former Sox hurler, Embree, up comes Bay. To this point, he's 0-2, with two walks and one HBP. So, his OBP is looking pretty good, .600. All he needs is a hit to round things out, and a walkoff shot would be Hollywood's ideal. Just as the thought speeds though the grey matter holding my ears apart, he swings, the ball takes off like something out of Cape Canaveral and I scream, "YES!", thinking it's over the Monster ending the game with a W. Unfortunately, its flight path is slightly altered by the time it approaches the Wall and it caroms high off it in deep left center. If it'd been twenty feet to the left, it probably would have cleared the wall and that would have been it.
Anyway, Bay kicks it into gear and when the dust clears is standing on third with a triple waiting rescue by the next batter; the crowd is going berserk; and you can feel the momentum swelling through the old park. Jed Lowrie taps a slow chopper just over the upreaching glove of Embree toward second, where A's SS Crosby makes a vain attempt to grab it and throw out Lowrie. But Lowrie, fairly speedy in his own right, is already standing on first when the ball arrives, and Bay has already crossed the plate. Game over--Sox win, 2-1.
How does the trade look after one day? Well, Bay himself says he knows he isn't Manny, and that's fine with him. But he IS a pretty good hitter who has power, and Manny's antics, which had apparently gone from being just amusing to being disruptive when he started to not run out balls and arbitrarily skip games, are no longer a factor in the dugout to be concerned about. They're now Joe Torre's problem. By the way, in case anyone's interested, Manny went 2-4 in his first game in Dodger Blue, but grounded into a double play with no outs and two on in the 9th when his team needed a rally to win the game. Can we still win the division and go deep into the post-season? Yes, assuming the team starts to hit again, and Oki's lapse yesterday was just a one pitch mistake and the rest of the pen hangs together.
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