SOX FLUSHED BY ROYALS

The line is forming on the Zakim Bridge in Boston. Let's not blow this loss out of proportion, people. Let's blow it proportionally.

Schilling sucked, Meche was lights out. Nuf Said. The game was over by the 2nd inning. Schilling extended his first inning struggles, Meche calmed down his struggles.

I was forced to watch this game on ESPN. I wasn't too pissed off, it's nice when I can see the Sox on TV in Ithaca. Then Jon Miller and Joe Morgan came on the screen and my heart sank. Miller's got a great voice, and he's a great radio announcer, but on TV I think the way he comments on games is not interesting or confounding. Example: when Ortiz was up with 2 on, 1 out in the 8th, Miller said "I think a homerun here kills the rally." Homeruns ARE rallies in one fell swoop. Yeah, a series of 7 or 8 singles in a row makes the rally longer and therefore seem more productive, but I'll take a 3 run homer instead.

And Joe Morgan is just an idiot. He's worse than Madden. I was watching the Mets-Cardinals game on Sunday night and he declared that "Infield defense is the most important part of any team." Forget pitching, forget hitting, it's guys who do what Joe Morgan did, those are the things that matter. Morgan has no clue when it comes to anything but middle infield defense and line drive hitting. He knows what he knows, and that's it. When he says what pitch a pitcher should throw, he's almost always wrong in his prediction, and his reasoning makes no sense.

The only thing worse than listening to Miller and Morgan for 9 innings was watching Curt Schilling for 4 innings. Wow, he looked bad. He was dull, very dull. Not boring. Dull. His curveballs were horrendously awful. They almost never hit the right spots, nor did they break in any good way. He had difficulty throwing early strikes, and he depended on his 91 MPH fastball entirely too much. Hopefully this was just a one time thing. Otherwise, he may have to become a full time blogger very soon.

Meche was very very good. We didn't exactly hit well, but Meche did a great job at making the Sox hitters look like minor leaguers. The Sox got 8 hits, 6 of which were singles. One was a meaningless double by Lowell late in the game. One single was Pedroia's, who got thrown out trying to extend it to a double. Understandable considering the left-fielder was a transplanted first-baseman.

Nobody in our lineup really looked that good. Varitek, Lugo, and Crisp stuck out, but the fact of the matter was that the entire lineup had a bad day. Meche pitched well, give him credit for it.

We did get an opportunity to see a lot of our bullpen today. Lopez was great, Donnely looked good against one batter, Okajima gave up a massive homer but was otherwise good, Pineiro looked washed up on the mound, Romero's 0.2 innings were in garbage time.

As some of you may know, after each game I award The Man of the Game and sometimes the Bitch-Goat. The Man of the Game goes to the most outstanding player of the game, on either team, regardless of which team won. The Bitch-Goat is an allocation of blame for the Red Sox losing. In a loss, I divide the number 1 into tenths and distribute them to different players based on how I much I feel they were responsible for us losing. This season, I'm adding a category called Honorable Mentions. These are for performances that stood out, but weren't the most outstanding. I'll award up to 3 of these a game.

The Man of the Game for the 7-1 loss was Gil Meche. He went 7.1 innings, scattered 6 hits, allowed 1 earned run, only walked 1, and struck out 6. He had a rough 1st inning but settled down by the 2nd.

The Bitch-Goat shall be divided thusly:
Curt Schilling: 0.9 - 4 IP, 8 H, 2 BB, 5 ER, looked awful.
Manny Ramirez: 0.1 - 0 for 4, K, 2 LOB, GIDP

So this means that in my eyes Curt gets 90% of the blame for the loss, Manny gets 10%. In reality, Manny doesn't deserve a full 10% for this one, but someone on the offense has to take it, in my opinion.

Honorable Mention goes to Mark Grudzielanek. He went 3 for 5 with a double, 3 RBI, and 2 runs scored.

Honorable Mention goes to Tony Pena Jr. who went 2 for 3 with a pair of triples, knocked in a run, scored a run, walked, and had some nice defensive plays.

Honorable Mention goes to Joel Peralta who pitched the last 1.2 innings, striking out 4 Red Sox in a row.

The one thing that sucks about losing on Opening Day is that off day before the next game. You spend October, November, December, January, February, and March waiting for real baseball and some redemption from last season, then your team loses and you have to wait until Wednesday before they play again.

Beckett vs. Odalis Perez on Wednesday night.