Saturday, August 15, 2009

Too Much Bad Stuff in a Win

I'm not ever going to complain when we win a game, but we need to see more consistency in a few areas. Namely defense and Jose Contreras' pitching.

I'll start with the defense. The Sox defense leads the league in errors, and they showed again tonight why that is the case. Alexei misplayed one, Nix botched one, and Q and Rios couldn't decide who wanted to catch the ball. Not to mention there was a play in left that had Carlos fielded it cleanly the guy at the plate very likely would have been out. Basically all I have to say about this is that it needs to stop happening. Well moreover, it needs to stop happening as often. Obviously there is never going to be a team that doesn't make errors, but there are plenty that are not this bad. The ripple affect from misplays on defense is enormous, and frankly we just can't afford it. It puts more runners on base, which gives more chances to score, and forces more pitches to be thrown. In the middle of a division chase, you simply cannot give up runs when you should be out of innings. I'm afraid it's not going to stop, but who says I can't ask.

The other big thing I'm getting sick of is Jose Contreras and Ozzie's love affair with him. Jose was clearly reeling in the 4th inning tonight. He somehow escaped that inning allowing only 5. Well at that point, he should be toast. But not with Ozzie. He always tries to get his pitchers through that 5th inning to get them in line for the win, sometimes in lue of giving his team the best chance to win. Really I'm just sick of Contreras, and I cannot wait until he's out of this rotation.

All this being said. It was great to see them play like crap for 6 innings and still win a ballgame, especially in a place we have really struggled. They stuck with it offensively, and Alexei came through yet again. Both tomorrow and Sunday look good for the Sox as far as matchups go, but we will have to see.

Lucky for all we will escape my rant about the FOX Blackout tomorrow because I will be at the Blink 182 concert. All you really need to know is that FOX uses this blackout to try and allow more people to watch the games, but what it really does is give many markets teams they don't want to see, and fully lock out teams playing in games they don't pick up. 161 of 162 games are shown by the Sox this year on TV, tomorrow is the 1, and I can't stand it.

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