jung

Eo is probably as surprised as anybody that he is doing this without being able to paint with that Cutter outer 3rd of the plate.

Hot Dog Nate...another light load inning.

Atta boy Joe West. Best home plate ump of the series by far

Geez I hate to tell this announce team but the best play of this game was Bregs on the smash at 3rd. The rest of these plays are plays that should be made by MLB fielders.

Sorta' tells ya' something don't it.

Nunez footwork is terrible. He can go to his arm side and he can come in a little bit. Could be the ever injured knee. But it looks more like this is him for the rest of his career. That inning might have saved Eo and could allow him to get through the 5th.

He has to get outs on less pitches than this especially with the guys at the bottom of their order. He can afford to get stretched out by the guys at the top of their order. If he lets both top and bottom stretch him out he won't make it through 5 innings in this park.

I have no idea what Eo is doing here

Eo, you cannot let these guys at the bottom hurt you. Get this bum out.

And there it is folks...the only sort of play that Nunez came make at third with any real consistency....going arm side.

The Sox probably did not move on Moose too embarrassed to have to go through 85 3rd baseman to get 1 that actually played the position competently. "Nah, we're good with what we got".

Moose went to the Brewers for no money at all. THAT was the move for the Sox to make.

And Mr Useless chips in with his usual nothing AB.

Red Sox 2, Nunez 1. I swear to God players that do not respond to pressure should just be on the bench in this series because pressure is the star of this series. Devers might be better over there if for no other reason than he seems too young and oblivious to know better. Nunez is just self destructing over there.

I actually don't know why Nunez just didn't tag the runner coming right at him at 3rd. He blew the DP as soon as he slipped, slid and then bobbled the baseball.

I am so tired of announcers saying "nunez is much better at 3rd than 2nd". He is not better than an emergency 2nd baseman and a journeyman 3rd baseman. So just stop with the nonsense please.

Geez Nunez is a panic at 3rd lately.

Eo seems a bit amped up

If Dallas K has to pitch from behind all night, he is going be in trouble all night.

No answers from AJ to protecting Bregman. Still has Gurriel behind him. Altuve at DH and 2nd in their order. Hammy too gimpy for 2nd. Hopefully Eo stays with the plan at least as it relates to Bregman and Breg gets frustrated.

I don't know why anybody thought 2-3 was a good idea....lazy I think. "Well if we have 2-3-2 for 7 games, isn't 2-3 good enough for 5?" Well NO actually!!!!! Not even close. I prefer to think it was laziness because I just do not want to deal with the knowledge that the powers that be in baseball rationally arrived at 2-3 making a hill of beans of sense.

X knew he had screwed that play up. Probably should have charged it at all costs. Where was the ball going to go if he missed it...the OF? Would Correa have been anywhere other than 1st base if that had happened? No, 1st base was all Correa was getting as long as X didn't throw it into the loge seats. But then he crow hopped and still got nothing on the throw. Just a bad play from the start, probably because he didn't charge the ball.

I actually had to struggle with why I had it stuck in my head that at one point baseball used a 2-2-1-1-1 formula. In my case I finally remembered it right. it is because I lived through the mid-sixties period of utter attendance failure and everything being thrown on the table by MLB and its media attendants as possible solutions, including going to 2-2-1-1-1 for post season play. It was presented in some way shape or form every year in those years because baseball was really struggling and everything was on the table all the time as a means to solutions. You really want to talk about bad attendance? In two games in Fenway in 1965, the Sox drew 500 paying customers....500!!! I don't care how bad your team is, you start drawing only 500 people to a game and your game has problems. Attendance across baseball was horrible, worse than the year after the strike which is the year everybody talks about as "scary" because MLB thought they might have killed the golden goose. Only the very best teams drew anything at all. I would watch a game in those years and was just too young to understand what was happening. I just knew baseball to be a beautiful game and I just could not understand why there were so many empty seats. Was it me? Was I nuts for loving this game? It was so bad that you started to question why you were so committed to this game if nobody else appeared to be. I think there is every reason to believe that as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird are said to have saved the NBA, it is entirely possible that the 1967 season and the role the Sox played in it saved MLB and even allowed it to get to the strike year that came much later. Slowly MLB started coming back after that enchanted year with the Sox screaming to a finish as the pennant winner. People connected with that team and you did not have to be from New England to connect with it. People connected with the Cardinals as well and after that series, baseball started climbing back. Even the Twins team we beat out for the pennant had developed a following outside of their immediate region. It was a golden year. I don't know if its the same for others of my age. But I was actually embarrassed for thinking MLB had a 2-2-1-1-1 formate at one point. But if you are of my age group and as devoted to baseball as I was from the late 50's through that period, you might also be remembering all of the things that were thrown on the table year after year as possible changes to be made to resolve what was a very serious attendance problem. One of them was going to 2-2-1-1-1 with the age old question of the fairness of 2-3-2 being questioned. The argument that it "should be that way" was often presented as "it ALWAYS should have been that was" and then interpreted as "It had been that way". For the record, I never questioned the fairness of 2-3-2. By the same token that was the main argument being raised. Honestly had to search my memory banks hard for this one. But I actually do appreciate the forum for forcing me to do it.

The other thing that really hurts Kimbrel is that if he does not think that FB he is just addicted to is getting it done he starts to overthrow it. When he overthrows, his arm angle drops, his head starts to finish high because in fact he is not finishing at all. His head finishes high because he is more upright on the mound and the ball sweeps across the plate, yanked outside to the RH hitter. The thing that absolutely murders me is that when he simply throws correctly but just harder, he gets the result he is looking for, a bit more velocity on a ball that moves but not so far off the plate that nobody will swing at it. It is beyond maddening when that stupid FB starts sweeping across the plate, yanked toward the first base dugout because he just cannot get it through that cement skull of his that sits between his ears!

Kimbrel performs in a very narrow range. Bring him in for "work" without a save on the line and he seems to sleepwalk through the stint. So how much good did you really do for him? Bring him when he has not worked for 3 days or more and he seems to struggle with that. The more I see of him the more I think he is a managerial nightmare and I am tired of there being excuses to the left of the narrow range he performs in and excuses to the right of it. As it is he cannot get more than 4 outs in a save situation. So that is another limiting factor. I suspect Cora will use him all the way up to a crunch time, do or die, win or lose the series appearance and then make a judgement at that point. I do not think Kimbrel is at this point in this series the automatic choice in that particular spot.