jung

Thank you ump you s*** head.

Damn Salty...sometimes one swing can turn an AB around. Here Cobb is having a little trouble with his control. Salty swings at what would have been ball 3 for a 3-1 count and follows that with the d-mac dribbler.

Catching a little of the Bruins game. They are getting the better chances 0-0 but not doing anything with them. Hate that...much like leaving guys on base all the way up until the other team hits a dinger. Pyatt slams Boychucks head into the turnbuckle....going off for a penalty. Boychuck seeing stars

Jeez Felix is right in the middle of the plate...just enough off of that one to ruin the hitters timing.

Damn, Naps swings through so many of those. Surprised Ortiz gets anything to swing at.

Come on David...get this run in. Thank you David.

Cobb wears the strangest expression on his face all the time. Always seems to be glaring at something.

Not much on the pitches Felix is tossing up there currently and the location is not that great either.

Luke Scott getting plenty of playing time. Gator hunting season must not have started yet.

Jennings is pretty graceful in CF. When a guy has time to check where he is relative to the wall and still pick up and play the ball so effortlessly, he is a pretty comfortable fielder.

Damn....Drew got that off the end of the bat.

They had a soldier just back to the states in a Rays uniform and full catcher's gear take the first pitch from a little girl who did not know her dad was home and that she was throwing to him untii she went to get the souvenir ball from who she thought was the catcher. He took off the mask and she realized that dad was home and she had just tossed the first pitch to him.

Hate this place and this team so much it is hard to grudgingly admit when they do something right. But that first pitch surprise was a pretty neat idea.

Here it is the NBC Sports Network that carries the national feed hockey games. Gonna' be tough to focus on this game and the Bruins/Rangers. Tortorella is always fun and it his hard to beat the Stanley Cup for end to end excitement. But the only team I like beating more than the Rays is the hated Skanks.

At least we have a chance to take the series thanks to last night's game. Myself, I never know what to expect from Felix any more. Actually should not say that. I expect him to throw a lotta' baseballs...get K's and be up close to 100 pitches by the 5th-6th inning.

Being a pull hitter is not about location of the pitches that you hit. It is about where you hit them. Will has turned himself into a tremendous threat on pitches middle and middle in and while he did not come out of the minors as a pull hitter, he has developed into a hitter that crushes balls middle and middle in and for the most part crushes them to LF. He did not come up as a pull hitter but since he has learned how to turn on the ball he crushes anything middle to middle in and mainly crushes it to LF. Frankly now that he knows how to turn on the ball, making him a hitter that sprays the ball would be a tremendous waste of talent IMO. I have not seen a Sox hitter that turns on the ball like Will does in a long long time again once he learned how to do it.

He can make it and he should make it. I am concerned that they are pushing him to become an opposite field hitter and I think that is the wrong way to take him. We often mistake Pedey for a power hitter and he really is not a power hitter. He can hit for some power but he is not a power hitter. I love seeing Pedey take the ball to the opposite field. He knows when he should and how he should. WMB is a dead pull power hitter with the potential to be an absolute monster swinging at anything middle middle, middle in or on the inner third. He needs to learn how to lay off of pitches low and outside and breaking farther off the plate and either take pitches on the outer third with less than two strikes and/or foul them off with two strikes. I do not want to do anything to mess with that hammer he carries for mistake pitches middle to inside. I do not want to trade HR's and extra base hits for opposite field hits as trying to widen his strike zone is always going to mean that he swings and misses more than he should. Even when he makes contact he will often trade away the opportunity to drive extra bases and HR's for singles. I cannot think of a Red Sox player in recent memory with the pull power from the right side that WMB has. Fisk had a great pull swing a long time ago before catching robbed him of some of his power. For all the talk about the short porch in Fenway's LF, most of our power hitters through history have been LH hitters. Most of our great RH hitters have hit to all fields. Manny was outstanding. But he was not a pull hitter. Nomar even ranks high in any list of Red Sox RH pull, power hitters. Dewey Evans was not bad either. None of them had the raw potential pull power of WMB....not even close. WMB hitting in Fenway has the chance to be one of the great mistake pitch hitters, even all time for that matter. If you want to try to understand what kind of company he might be in.....in my time I would probably have to say that Hank Aaron is probably the greatest mistake pitch hitter I have ever seen. His ability to lay off of stuff that he could not drive or foul off stuff with two strikes was uncanny. Then he would take that one pitch per at bat that he would eventually get the pitcher to yield up and out of the ballpark. It is unlikely that WMB is the next coming of Hank Aaron. But he could be damn close to that.

Yup...that game was the 9th.....So it is Felix tomorrow. Would like to see the rotation get back to where it was. I really like the idea of sending Lester and Buch out there back to back.

Shoot you might be right cause of that flip flop. When the heck did Webster pitch that game? I am gonna' have to check...you might be right about that.

Nice stint by DeLaTore tonight. Another great start from Lester. If we can get another gem out of Buch tomorrow we might just get outta' here winning this series....take that your smugness...Mr Maddon!

All these runs tonight are very nice. However the joking aside that we did earlier, this is still not the offense we featured in April. If we don't go back to that, I just don't think we will generate that kind of offensive output we had in April.

Interesting comment about the traditional catchers mask vs the Hockey style full face and head mask. I am sure the hockey style is lighter. Maybe that is why it does not provide as much protection against concussion. You could tell those two balls that hit Ross just bored right in on him....very heavy blows that did not glance off at all. The traditional mask may look outdated but I can see why it would provide better protection.

Believe me I want to see WMB improve more than anybody. I have probably defended him more than anybody and have probably exercised more hyperbole than anybody about where he can end up as a ML hitter. But that is not the road to success for him.

Great...WMB swings and misses about 150 of those a month and hits one off the ninth guy at the end of the Rays Bullpen for a 1 run HR...will probably encourage him to swing at another 150. You just cannot make a living in this league swinging at pitchers pitches early in counts. Just does not work.

Once again Jon has a shaky 1st and then clamps down. There are many SP that struggle with the 1st inning. Just the way it is I think...especially on the road and especially if they are forced to go to the stretch before they have even worked up a sweat.