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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 7, 2021 16:45:08 GMT -5
Bill Koch @billkoch25 · 54m Christian Vazquez -- 'Fun 24 hours. We got both wins. It feels good to win.' #RedSox
Vazquez -- 'The pitching staff, they're doing a great job.'
'We've started hitting better and getting on base.' #RedSox
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 7, 2021 16:46:54 GMT -5
Bill Koch @billkoch25 · 1h Nathan Eovaldi -- 'I didn't have one pitch that wasn't working.' #RedSox
Eovaldi -- 'We're a completely different team than we were last year pitching-wise.' #RedSox
Eovaldi -- 'Other teams are sleeping on us right now, which is fine.' #RedSox
Eovaldi -- 'I'm trying to attack the zone. I had a couple four-pitch walks -- I wasn't happy with that. But otherwise I didn't have a lot of deep counts.' #RedSox
Eovaldi -- 'Having a sweep, especially against the Rays -- it's a big one for us.' #RedSox
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 7, 2021 16:50:00 GMT -5
Well after all that, other than today it was not perfect however they picked themselves up as a team and showed some grit and onions this series and that IMO, is fantastic. Keep it going.
and hey Tampa....
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Apr 7, 2021 19:40:28 GMT -5
Two days later, they're the feel-good Red SoxDownload the RADIO.COM app Current Time 0:21 / Duration 1:11 By Rob Bradford All is right with the Red Sox' world. Who knew we would ever be believing that by Wednesday? The press reminds me of the FOM. Great leg muscles from jumping on and off the bandwagon.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Apr 7, 2021 19:46:50 GMT -5
Nasty Nate cruising 84 pitches thru 6
youtube broadcast not bad Carlos Pena I like Smoltz as always is talking about himself. but overall, not bad. I had the sound muted, but it felt like some of the visuals were missing, like who was at bat, on deck, etc. They had the discussion board on the right. I didn't have much interest, but if they showed this on Youtube regularly, I can see the discussion board becoming a cool thing.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Apr 7, 2021 19:53:13 GMT -5
Taylor giving up hits again with 2 out the Rays plate another 9-2 now
Taylor has to get this corrected...all over the place. I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like he's been pushing some of the RPs. Two innings by Taylor, two innings by Barnes, 2.1 by Andriese, 3.1 by Whitlock, 2 by Valdez.
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Post by scrappyunderdog on Apr 7, 2021 20:00:30 GMT -5
Well after all that, other than today it was not perfect however they picked themselves up as a team and showed some grit and onions this series and that IMO, is fantastic. Keep it going.
and hey Tampa....
6 games and 5 good starts by the rotation. That's what will win in the long-run. We need Richards to get back on the rails. The rotation is not good enough to go long stretches of good starts, but it might be good enough to get a QS 4-5 starts. With our offense, that should be good enough. And kudos to JD. This is a completely different team when he hits.
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 8, 2021 3:12:17 GMT -5
From 0-3 to 3-3: How Sox flipped the switch April 7th, 2021 Ian Browne
Ian Browne @ianmbrowne
BOSTON -- It's amazing how much things can change in a span of three days.
The Red Sox -- who were swept by the Orioles of all teams the first three games of the season -- turned the tables on the defending American League champion Rays by doing the sweeping themselves this time.
The Boston broom job was completed with dominance in a 9-2 victory in Wednesday’s getaway game, as manager Alex Cora’s squad outplayed Tampa Bay in every facet of the game.
While all of the individual developments were nice, perhaps the most important thing that happened was the Red Sox demonstrated that they aren’t going to be pushed around on their home field by the Rays any longer. Tampa Bay had taken it to Boston at Fenway, going 12-1 in the previous two seasons.
“I mean, it’s important,” said Cora. “We won one game [at home against them] in ’19, [none] last year. They’ve been really good here. We’re 3-3 against the division, 3-3 at Fenway, we need to do better, but this is a good start. On Sunday, going home, it was a tough one. But now, hopping on this plane, it’s going to be a different feeling, but nothing changes. We do believe we have a good team, but we have to keep working to get better.”
There are indications that the Red Sox, are, in fact, better, and here are some takeaways from an impressive end to the first homestand.
J.D. is, well, J.D. again When you have a bad season, even if it’s in a consolidated 60-game season, people can overreact to it. Just ask J.D. Martinez, who was asked time after time in Spring Training about hitting .213 last season without much power.
Those questions are no longer being asked, because Martinez is looking like a beast in the No. 3 spot in Boston's batting order. By belting a double in Wednesday’s win, Martinez extended his extra-base streak to start the season to six games. The last Red Sox player to start a season like that was David Ortiz in 2005. Faye Throneberry (1955) is the only other player in team history to achieve the feat, so Martinez can set a club record if he has an extra-base hit in Thursday’s game in Baltimore.
Through six games, Martinez is slashing .440/.481/.920 with six doubles, two homers and 11 RBIs. Yes, he is back, and back big.
Pitching better than expected Coming into the season, many people questioned a Red Sox rotation that will be without Chris Sale until at least midseason and didn’t have Eduardo Rodriguez the first turn through the rotation.
But a funny thing has happened. The starting rotation is turning in strong performances. Aside from a clunker by Garrett Richards on Sunday, the starters have been spot on. In fact, they’ve allowed three runs or fewer while going five-plus innings in five of the first six games. This is the first time since 1992 Boston’s pitching staff didn’t allow a homer in any of the first six games of the season.
Nathan Eovaldi, who pitched seven impressive innings (three hits, one run, seven strikeouts) on Wednesday, has a 1.46 ERA through his first two starts. And Rodriguez comes back to make his debut -- and first start for the Sox since 2019 -- on Thursday.
“I feel like once the rotation starts rolling, everyone else follows suit,” said Eovaldi. “I'm very pleased. We're a completely different team than we were last year, pitching-wise. Our bullpen, they've been coming in, doing a great job. And then starters, we've been able to go out there and limit the walks. We're attacking the zone and that's what we've got to do.”
Vázquez becoming Mr. Clutch When you think of the Boston offense, the names that come to mind first are Martinez, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and Alex Verdugo. But Christian Vázquez is providing another reminder this season not to sleep on him.
The cannon-armed catcher was behind the plate for 12 innings in Tuesday’s thrilling win, and came up with the game-tying homer in the bottom of the ninth. With the day game after a night game, Cora wisely found a way to keep Vázquez involved and had him in the lineup as the designated hitter. The move paid early dividends when Vázquez again mauled one over the Green Monster in the bottom of the fourth to snap a 1-1 tie. Vázquez later added an RBI single as part of his team’s game-breaking, six-run barrage in the fifth.
“I'm feeling good. I'm feeling sexy at the plate,” said Vázquez. “This feels good to be helping the team win. It feels good to sweep the Rays, it feels good to win. It’s a good feeling all around.”
If it seems like Vázquez has a habit of timing his home runs well, it’s because he does. Of his 42 career homers, 22 have either tied the game or put the Red Sox ahead.
“I think any homer feels good, when you crush that ball,” said Vázquez. “And when you put your team ahead and we go ahead, it feels better.”
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 8, 2021 3:34:53 GMT -5
After starting season 0-3, Red Sox complete three-game sweep of Rays By Alex Speier Globe Staff,Updated April 7, 2021, 4:03 p.m.
Through Sunday, the Red Sox offered a case study in season-opening disappointment with three straight losses against the Orioles amplifying every reason for skepticism about the 2021 team. Three whiplash-inducing games later, the club can be seen in a different light.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Red Sox clobbered the Rays by a 9-2 count, closing out a three-game Fenway sweep of the defending American League champions. In three games, the Red Sox delivered a pair of blowouts sandwiched around a never-say-die extra-innings victory in which the team erased three separate deficits in the ninth inning or after. Overall, the series proved no contest, with the Sox outscoring Tampa Bay 26-9, marking the fourth-most runs the pitching-rich Rays have allowed in any three-game series in the last decade.
The mixture of dramatic and decisive victories proved restorative to the spirits of a team that has maintained since spring training that it looks forward to defying and surpassing expectations. Whereas the team expressed disappointment and near embarrassment following its three straight losses to the Orioles to open the year, it concluded the three contests against Tampa Bay with different sentiments.
“This feels good,” said Christian Vázquez, who described himself as feeling “sexy” at the plate after going 2-for-4 with a two-run homer while serving as the designated hitter. “It feels good to sweep the Rays. It feels good to win. It’s a good feeling around. We’re playing better, we’re playing aggressive, [and] we’re pitching better. It feels good to win.”
The series finale offered a glimpse of a team capable of steamrolling a contender, with Opening Day starter Nate Eovaldi delivering a dominant outing that was backed by an offensive eruption of a Sox lineup that punished the struggling Rays (four straight losses) for every miscue.
Though the Rays scrapped for a run off Eovaldi to claim a 1-0 lead in the third, the Red Sox responded with three runs in the fourth. Xander Bogaerts delivered a one-out RBI single, his second hit of a 3-for-3 day, and Vázquez blasted a two-run homer over the Wall in left for his second homer in as many days.
Vázquez, it’s worth noting, was in the lineup not as a catcher — he had a day off behind the plate after navigating the Red Sox through their 12-inning marathon on Tuesday — but instead as the DH, a sign of his increasingly indispensable place on the Sox. He’s off to a .421/.476/.789 start, a performance that served as a reminder of how valuable he’s become.
“I do believe that he’s one of the top catchers in the league,” said manager Alex Cora.
One inning later, the Red Sox put the game away by pushing a half-dozen runs across the plate with two outs off Rays lefthanded starter Ryan Yarbrough (0-1). With two on, J.D. Martinez continued his scorching start by lofting an only-at-Fenway two-run double high off the Wall. The double not only extended the Red Sox lead to 5-1 but also gave Martinez extra-base hits in each of the first six games of the season. He joined David Ortiz (2005) and Faye Throneberry (1954) as the only Red Sox with such a season-opening streak.
Singles by Bogaerts (8-for-12 line in the three-game series) and Vázquez scored Martinez, and a wild throw by Rays shortstop Willy Adames on a Hunter Renfroe grounder scored two more for the Sox. Christian Arroyo then blooped a double down the right-field line to extend the lead to 9-1.
That advantage proved gratuitous given the excellence of Eovaldi (1-1). The big righthander proved in total command throughout the afternoon, staying away from the middle of the plate with a precision 95-99 mph four-seam fastball. He complemented that with a healthy balance of curveballs and slider, mixing in just enough cutters and splitters to baffle the Rays.
The mix allowed Eovaldi to cruise through seven innings in just 91 pitches. He allowed one run on three hits while striking out seven and walking three, lowering his ERA to 1.46 through two starts. Eovaldi expressed particular pride in offering a reprieve to a bullpen that had logged seven innings the previous night.
“We were short on guys,” he said. “For me to be able to come out today, get a little deeper into the game for us, and then for us to come out on top today, have the sweep, especially against the Rays is a big one for us, big series win.”
Eovaldi’s excellence through two starts is part of a broader general pattern of strong pitching thus far. Sox starters have worked at least five innings in all but one of the team’s first six games. Outside of the dreadful Red Sox debut by Garrett Richards, the staff as a whole has shown generally sharp execution, evidenced by the fact that it hasn’t allowed a homer through six games for the first time since 1992.
The team’s nightly competence on the mound and 3.63 ERA through a half-dozen games represent departures from last year’s train wreck. The team features depth that it didn’t possess a year ago — both in the rotation and beyond it. On Thursday, Eduardo Rodriguez will make his first big league start since Sept. 29, 2019, with promising rookie Tanner Houck headed to the Alternate Site in Worcester as an option of first resort.
“We’re a completely different team than we were last year, pitching-wise,” said Eovaldi. “Other teams are sleeping on us right now, which is fine, but we’ll be able to go out there and compete.”
That, at least, is the sentiment as the team leaves Fenway for its first road trip of 2021 — on the heels of a homestand that suggested that spans of three games might be inadequate for rendering definitive judgments about strengths and weaknesses. Unlike the past two years, the team did not get sucked into a season-opening black hole, but it remains in the early stages of defining its direction.
“We’re 3-3 against the division, 3-3 at Fenway,” said Cora. “We need to do better, but this is a good start. . .We do believe we have a good team, but we have to keep working to get better.”
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 8, 2021 3:49:16 GMT -5
Nathan Eovaldi has 1.46 ERA through first two starts for Boston Red Sox: ‘He was amazing’ on Wednesday, Alex Cora says Updated Apr 07, 2021; Posted Apr 07, 2021
By Chris Cotillo | ccotillo@MassLive.com
BOSTON -- So far this season, Red Sox starter Nathan Eovaldi is picking up right where he left off in 2020.
Eovaldi, who threw 11 scoreless innings over his final two starts of last season to finish with a 3.72 ERA for the year, has once again flashed improved command in two strong outings to start 2021. In seven innings Wednesday, he allowed just a single run on three hits while striking out seven in a 9-2 win. For the year, he owns a 1.46 ERA (two earned runs in 12 ⅓ innings) while recording 11 strikeouts.
“We needed that,” manager Alex Cora said after Wednesday’s win. “The fact he only threw (91) pitches, it was very important but he went seven. Where we were pitching-wise today, we needed a big performance from him and he did.”
Eovaldi effectively used a five-pitch mix to stymie the Rays’ offense, throwing 60 of his 91 pitches for strikes. Though he walked three batters, Eovaldi battled in and around the zone for most of his outing, inducing 17 swings-and-misses.
“I’m going out there trying to attack the zone,” Eovaldi said. “I had a couple where I had the four-pitch walks and I wasn’t happy with that, but other than that, I didn’t have too many deep counts I was getting into.”
Armed with a good game plan developed at least in part by what he learned in a rough spring training start against the Rays on March 19, Eovaldi picked up his tempo throughout his outing and continually kept hitters off balance. He averaged just over 13 pitches per inning, facing the minimum in four of those frames.
“He was amazing,” Cora said. “In two starts already, he has done an amazing job mixing up pitches and throwing strikes. The fact that he only made like (89) in the first one and (91) today, now he gets one more day in between starts. That’s really good for him.”
Eovaldi struggled with results during spring training but came out of camp feeling healthy and rejuvenated after being limited to just 48 ⅓ innings during the shortened 2020 season. Though he’s 1-1 in his starts because the Red Sox lost a close game to the Orioles on Opening Day, he has been particularly sharp in the early-going.
The righty was happy to help the Red Sox get back to .500 after a brutal opening weekend.
“The way we started the season, 0-3 against the Orioles, we’re not happy with that,” he said. “To come in -- last night was a huge game for us. We were able to come back from behind, tie it up in the late innings and ultimately win the game. Both sides of the bullpen, we were down, so we were short on guys. For me to be able to come out there today, go a little deeper in the game for us and for us to come out on top and have the sweep, especially against the Rays, it’s a big one for us.”
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 8, 2021 3:52:57 GMT -5
Red Sox Notes @soxnotes · 12h Red Sox pitchers have allowed 0 HR to their 245 batters faced (57.0 IP). Prior to this season, it had been 29 years since they allowed 0 HR in the team’s first 6 games of a season (1992).
Red Sox during 3-game sweep of Rays:
+17 run differential (26-9)
.339 AVG, .903 OPS
2.10 ERA, .194 opponent AVG
0 errors
0 HR allowed
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Post by Kimmi on Apr 8, 2021 7:58:07 GMT -5
6 games and 5 good starts by the rotation. That's what will win in the long-run. We need Richards to get back on the rails. The rotation is not good enough to go long stretches of good starts, but it might be good enough to get a QS 4-5 starts. With our offense, that should be good enough. And kudos to JD. This is a completely different team when he hits. That was a fun series. Game 2 was epic.
Short sample, but our pitching has done very well so far.
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Post by CP_Jon_GoSox on Apr 8, 2021 9:10:05 GMT -5
Is this what happiness feels like?
The second series of the year washes away the first, and all of 2020. By bryanjoiner@bryanjoiner Apr 8, 2021, 9:01am EDT
The NFL season technically begins on the first or second Thursday in September, depending on when exactly Labor Day hits. Since the Thursday game was implemented, it has almost always featured the defending champs against a rival, and in virtually every case the defending champs stomp a mudhole in their opponents, as if the game itself was an extension of the victory parade. The Chiefs did it last year, the Bucs will do it this year, and the Pats did it what seems like a hundred times.
It is just a thing that happens. The season, for all intents and purposes, begins on Sunday. That’s when new storylines develop, the Colts lose to the Jaguars and such, there’s more grist for the content mills, and everyone’s happy (outside of Indianapolis). I mention all this because the first Red Sox series of 2021 was so straight out of the nightmare that was 2020 to have effectively been the same de facto extension of it. The Sox played so differently against the Rays than they did versus the Orioles that it hardly looked like the same sport.
For all these reasons, I’m willing to totally scrap the first series of the year as a final sacrifice to the Mookie Betts trade spirits, angry that they didn’t get a full 2020’s worth of vengeance. The debt now settled, we can now safely stay in the happier present day, which sees J.D. Martinez looking to start the year with an extra base hit in seven straight games (We are keeping the few good parts of the Orioles series, of course) and the Sox looking to go above .500 for the second time since Mookie patrolled the Fenway outfield, and the first time since the first day of last season.
It is hard to express how relieving it is to finally turn the page on all that garbage. For Martinez, specifically, it’s as if his swing is the canary in the coal mine, the single sign of life that enables the Sox to keep plugging away toward their potential. For Boston’s offense as a whole, the return of Alex Cora, along with the naturally convalescent passage of time, seems to have sparked the team back to life.
This is all I ever wanted, and as many have written, there’s something deeply compelling about this team, especially if the pitchers can keep up their end of the bargain. Martinez worries aside, we knew the hitters would hit. We didn’t know that the rotation of misfit starters would work; six games in, and I’m not sure I expected to see this many strong performances in a short time all season, with Garrett Richards’s Sunday blowup the major exception, though it was mitigated by Garrett Whitlock’s wonderful relief appearance.
Eduardo Rodriguez makes his first start today, a day after his birthday, and if he can shake off the lingering effects of a dead arm, there’s suddenly and perhaps temporarily some real reasons to be optimistic about this year’s rotation. Tanner Houck is temporarily back at the Alternate Site but looks as good as anyone not named Nathan Eovaldi; for his part, Eovaldi looks like the most complete pitcher he’s ever been, finally working offspeed pitches in the mix with his effortless 99 mph fastballs to make batters look clueless. You love to see it.
Admittedly, this is written in a euphoria. I cannot remember being this happy about a single series sweep that wasn’t in October or against the Yankees. It is unlikely to last a full month, leastwise a full season, like it did in 2013. But not all moments need to be sustained to be profound. We finally made it back, not to the promised land but to the place where baseball is fun, and what’s happening on the field is on center stage, rather than what some executive said when trying to sell tickets. We have a team that sells itself now, and I’m buying in. Take my money!
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