I remember everything
I knew all along we were pushing our luck
Back to Fenway....
(Before anything else, I'm a musician, "Meet Me at the Scene of the Crime" is one of my songs, and those are the opening lines. How could I resist?)
You will recall last season's surprising 27-14 getaway. Some people (that would be me, hello!) saw the soft early season schedule (no games with AL East opponents until mid-May) as a chance for a very young and untested pitching staff to find themselves before taking on the Beasts of the East. Most people, naturally enough, saw it as simply postpoNing the inevitable Day of Reckoning. They were right, and I was... actually, we'll never know. By the time they got to Boston, they weren't even close to half a million strong. Of the five pitchers who had begun the season in the rotation, two were disabled and one had been sent back to the minors. Brian Tallet, Brett Cecil, and Bobby Ray went up against the Red Sox. It didn't work out, although Tallet pitched a fine game. The Jays were swept by the Red Sox. They went on to Atlanta and were swept again, and then to Baltimore where they were swept yet again. The ghastly 0-9 road trip concluded with one of the season's more discouraging defeats, as Roy Halladay entrusted an 8-3 eighth inning lead to his bullpen. Jesse Carlson (mainly) and Scott Downs gave it all away, sending the game into extra innings. Aaron Hill homered to put the Jays ahead in the 11th, but Brian Wolfe allowed a three-run walkoff blast by Nolan Reimold to end the game, the road trip, and a whole lot else.
I saw it coming
I thought I'd better keep my big mouth shut
That was then, this is now. There won't be an 0-9 road trip this time around - the team already has a winning record for this road trip tucked into the bank (your 2010 Blue Jays, second best road record in the major leagues.... say what?)... and these Red Sox have yet to be the Red Sox most of us expected to see. There have been injuries in the outfield and on the mound, and David Ortiz.... well, Terry Francona has been platooning and pinch hitting at the designated hitter spot.
Which is not Terry Francona's normal method of operation, by the way. I decided it would be interesting to look at in-game substitutions and pinch-hitting in the AL - I mean, we all talk (myself included) about how Cito Gaston and other managers run their ships - do any of us actually know anything? Really? As Sherlock Holmes pointed out, it is a capital mistake to theorize in the absence of data. So I thought I'd actually get the data and give it an intense scrute. Alas, the scrutinizing is still going on. But I'll tell you this:
The 2010 Red Sox lead the AL in pinch hitters - Francona's used 23 pinch hitters in 32 games. At this rate, he'd use 116 pinch hitters over the course of the season, and lead the league by a fair margin. Over the course of his tenure in Boston, Francona has generally been right around the league average in pinch hitters used, with the notable exception of 2008 when he used the fewest pinch hitters of any team in baseball.
I've looked at pinch hitting in the AL since 1989, and in those 21 seasons just three teams have used 40 pinch hitters or less in a season. One of those teams was the 2006 Texas Rangers, who used just 38 pinch hitters all year long. The other two teams were both managed by Cito Gaston. They were, naturally, the Blue Jays of 1992 (32 pinch hitters) and 1993 (40 pinch hitters.) Anyway, more on this in a few days...
I was wondering how long we would go on like this...
You might think this would be a good time to face the Red Sox. You would be wrong - there is no good time to face the Red Sox. Despite their problems, they strolled into the Dome a few weeks back, and swept the Jays in three tight ball games. They may have saved a little dignity with last night's win, but still - they've just had their butts kicked, in their own house, by the Evil Empire. They will be in a foul frame of mind. Plus, I saw Dana Eveland pitch against them in Toronto. It was not attractive - he pitched like he was afraid of what might happen, and he may have been right. The line drives were just flying around the ball yard - even the outs were impressively struck.
And they're the freaking Red Sox.
So... be afraid! I know I am!
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20100510041241599