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Lester is no Darvish. But he is grooving too many pitches. Thank God this is not somebody like Detroit or else we would likely be seeing some moon shots the way the ball is carrying tonight. I have to admit that I am surprised Jon is making so many bad pitches each inning. Lots of stuff left right out over the plate without much on it. When a LH pitcher makes this many bad pitches in Fenway it usually has disastrous results.

What an awful place to leave a change up. Jeez Jon.

Jon knows he is not making good pitches.

Well I guess Jon was destined to throw one of these "struggles in the 1st inning" starts in on us. He does have the ability to settle in most cases and end up pitching a decent game. While we tend to think about Jon in terms of games where he struggles and games where he does not, I don't wonder if he would be having a pretty darned good season start to finish if you took his 1st inning problems away.

Players seem bound and determined to piss us off lately. It is almost like the fans are incidental to the players efforts to secure some portion of the enormous baseball money out there. But they really don't care if we think they are a lying self centered dick-heads. I never thought they cared about being roll models and I would never consider professional athletes as role models. I would like to think of they are decent human beings instead of dick-heads that will stoop to just about anything to get what they want, props or money or whatever. Unfortunately, so many of them prove to be dick-heads. Ross somehow decides he is in the same league with Vic and also decides that three years is a long term deal. Paps decides to tell us all that "I did not come here [Philly] for this" meaning some kind of rebuilding. We know that is not what you went there for Paps. You went for the money and made no bones about it at the time. Why don't they all just shut up, enjoy their good fortune and continue to play this kids game for as long as they can do it.

Somebody posted that the Rays boards were kinda' quite tonight. Maybe a bunch of them went off to their sea floor beds for the night confident that the Sox had surely lost. They will have to wake up to find that the Sox came back to win it.

I was wondering if Wright would stick the last time he did this and it did not happen. I guess I am less inclined to think it will happen this time. Sox FO might just think he has a hex on the Mariners. Even if it was a different team tonight, I don't think Wright will stick. Don't think the Sox trust that he can be reliable just yet. At least they should give him one more shot before sending him right down but don't think it will happen.

Can you believe this s***. Baseball is such a terrific game. How many seasons of late has there been something like this year's Red Sox, seemingly destiny bound. O's with their 29 1 run game wins. 11 walk off wins for the Sox this year. Glad it appears to be us doing it this year.

Beat me to it Pal...Wright really came through tonight. In fact didn't he have a similar outing last time he was up that basically kept us in a game until we could finally win it. I think Dempster must have taken his black cloud out of Fenway with him when he left the mound.

Actually he gave up 2 earned runs in 5.1 innings on 84 pitches. 6 hits, 2 BB's 4 K's. His last four starts before tonight he went 6.1, 3.1, 5.1 and 5.1 innings. That is pretty terrible. He actually got into the 7th inning, pitching 6.1 on July 6th. But that was not really that good a start and it has been all downhill from there. Before that, he had a decent smattering of games where he went a full 7 innings or 6 plus and that was the norm. He went 5.1 again on June 30th but has not really sniffed the 7th inning or even 6 complete since that July 6th start. It has been such a precipitous slide that I would not rule out injury.

The NESN guys just said Workman to the pen again. So it must be the story the FO is currently peddling. I suppose they could change their minds. I guess I don't understand why the FO so quickly opted for Workman going to the pen instead of Dempster.

Dempster has been hard to watch for about five weeks now. Don't think we had much to complain about before that. But I don't think he has had an uptick in the last five weeks to where he is now...which is truly awful. Even going back five weeks he was better than he is now. But once he started downhill every outing has been worse than the last and he is still in free fall.

Who knows if Dempster has bottomed out still. He has been in a free fall with each start worse than the last one.

I really do hope Workman is the guy that stays in the rotation. It seemed like all the TV talking head experts anointed Workman as the guy going to the pen as soon as the deal was announced. Figured they must have an inside track on the Sox intentions but at this point I would much prefer Workman remain in the rotation. Dempster has been on a pretty steady slide now for weeks.

What the f***....did that ball that got by Vic land right on the margin between grass and warning track? Not sure how that got by him.

Wish NESN gave us a better angle on the throw from LF. Sorta' looked like Ells and the ball would would have gotten there pretty close together if the throw went through, assuming it was a good throw. I could not even tell if the throw was on line from that angle.

2-0 is still a ballgame. Need to do something before the Mariners make it 3-0 though or that could be damned difficult against King Felix.

Boy so many people (not on the forum I don't think but generally) seem to be selling Peavy short. I really don't get it. OK, so Peavy could get hurt. Did anybody see Moore going down for a couple weeks? Can Moore's injury be worse than a couple weeks? Could be. Even with Detroit sort of killing two birds with one stone in getting coverage for Peralta and getting a SS that probably fits into their future plans if it were not for the PED suspensions, this deal probably does not happen. Then Lee does not happen because Philly was demanding XB plus. So I just don't get it. Doing nothing did not make any sense. Maybe another pen arm would have made some sense. But we get Workman to the pen out of this deal. Seems to me that the FO takes full advantage of the situation and getting the most out of a player that does not fit into their future plans while really doing as much in one deal that they could have done to accommodate the situation they are in. I guess I should qualify that by saying I think they needing pitching more than they needed a bat.

No question that Peralta's issues sorta' forced Detroit to get a SS. But as I recall, they did not have an Heir Apparent sitting somewhere close enough to come up and play. That to me was the dif. We have XB waiting in the wings. What is interesting for us is how we deal with this issue of XB's frame and does he eventually outgrow SS. Maybe it does not matter. If XB retains his nimbleness, flexibility and range, maybe it is a mute point. Sure bigger guys find it easier to absorb some of the stuff they take at the hot corner but if XB is big but still nimble and quick he should be able to stay at SS. So far, I haven't seen how XB is getting so big that it is an issue.

Seems to me that Detroit wanted Iggy, unlike the Sox who appeared to tolerate Iggy in spite of the money the paid him. So, I don't see Iggy as a utility player next year. I think Detroit will give him his shot. Now what none of us probably know at this point is if Detroit is the kind of team (which does exist by the way) that will tolerate more like a 220-230 BA to go with that glove or if they will insist on seeing the sunny side of .250. Pitchers have found his current weak spots and he must improve again in order to stay above that .250 hill. At some point pitchers are going to stop letting him even put the ball on the ground since he does not put it in the air for any power. There goes the leg hits.

I do agree that Workman should see some late innings time as I posted last night. I have heard some talk of Workman in long relief and that just sounds like a lotta' pine time for him to me. I want to see him spell Taz who can probably make it to the end of the year still effective if they don't burn him out completely.

I can't say that I have seen much of Paps since he has been away. However Paps did tend to straight up challenge hitters more than Workman does I think. Workman either works the guy in and away, up or down, then if it is working drops the curve on the guy or more often the change, eventually dusting him off with another FB in a good spot having set him up for it. Paps would move the FB around the plate if anything but when push came to shove, he was more willing to come right after the hitter. If the hitter was a little weak hitting dweeb he was really apt to just go after the guy. In fact it seemed to me that when Paps would struggle it was because he was too many pitches into a stint and would still try to go after hitters when he just did not have enough left in the tank to do it. You could often see ahead of time when things were going to end bloody for Paps.

If Drake can continue and even get a bit better, then maybe he is really the guy that gives us more of what Miller was giving us before he went down. Britton seems a bit more like Miller to me than Bres does. Thornton seems more like the LH specialist that Miller was at the start of the season. Thornton keeps getting opportunities to show he can get LH and RH hitters out. So far though if he does get a RH batter out it seems more like luck than anything else.

One advantage to bringing up XB is that he might add back some of the speed that Farrell no longer has without Iggy. Farrell started the season with speed at the top of his lineup, speed at the bottom and speed on the bench. Now he has speed concentrated at the top, never the most efficient way to have speed, none at the bottom and none on the bench. Yet he continues to pursue this "relentless" approach to the running game. Many of his players don't even have average speed and are in fact as slow as molasses with a very limited base running skill set.

They might go into the game with Felix feeling relaxed having won tonight and may well take it to him. The Mariners still have to play the game.