There’s a lot to say about this game, and there are a lot of things that presumptive AL manager of the year Joe Maddon screwed up pretty badly.
Matthew Carruth at Fangraphs:
Wheeler had pitched 3.1 innings back in game 2, when he had only four outings all season longer than four outs and the last one of those was on May 6. Wheeler simply didn’t have anything tonight and with the off day yesterday and one tomorrow, Maddon had pretty much his whole bullpen at his disposal. When J.D. Drew came up, I thought at the time that you had to have J.P. Howell or David Price ready for that situation. Secondly with two outs, none on and a one run lead in the bottom of the eighth, why isn’t Upton playing deeper in center field? You have to be playing back to avoid doubles there.
Absolutely nail on the head with both of those. And also let me just say, constantly seeing BJ Upton gliding after flyballs and then watching them fly over his head would have me torturing puppies if I were a Rays fan.
CSteinhardt on SoSH offers up some criticism of Gabe Gross, which I totally agree with:
I didn’t see the replays, but from the CF bleachers, it looked like Gross made three bad to awful plays in the last three innings. First, it looked like he could have caught Pedroia’s hit. Then, a good throw had a great shot at getting Kotsay at the plate, but he managed to many-hop the first baseman. And then finally, he broke in a liner straight at him hit by Drew.
You know, Maddon deserves some blame for this one too. When you have a 7-0 lead in the 7th inning, you have to have your best defensive team out there. Fernando Perez should have been in RF.
But the craziest thing to me is this, pointed out by paulftodd on SoSH:
Maddon made a critical mistake by assuming games was over in the 7th when he got up 7-0. With Upton at 2nd and nobody out, he suddenly put the brakes on his runners, not wanting to run up the score, and showing respect. Upton would have been the 8th run.
I didn’t notice it at the time (like I said, I was totally mentally checked out and Upton’s double was the absolute low point of the game), but he’s absolutely right. Papelbon was on the mound and paying zero attention to the runners. Upton could have taken third (and Pena probably could have taken second) easily. Maddon was trying to not run up the score. Unbelieveable. Longoria ended up grounding into a double play.
Okay, enough bashing on Joe Maddon. A few other little tidbits, just because I really don’t want to (and really can’t anyway) go to sleep yet.
John Tomase from the Herald:
Wow. The Rays had first and second with one out and Carlos Pena up against rookie Justin Masterson, who just induced the inning-ending double play. That’s quite an accomplishment for Masterson, because Pena only grounded into six double plays during the season. He had just three in 392 plate appearances vs. right-handed pitchers.
Carlos Pena, who isn’t exactly Carl Lewis, has only 6 GIDPs all year? Wow. He hits a ton of balls in the air with that severe uppercut.
And Coco’s at bat in the 8th against Wheeler was so awesome. Tito says:
Coco’s at-bat was probably the best at-bat he’s had as a Red Sox, because of the situation.
Yup.
Also noteworthy from this game: Curt Schilling threw out the first pitch. It was in the dirt.
It’s times like this I love the Yahoo! Sports photo gallery.
UPDATE: Joe Sheehan wrote a really good piece on Baseball Prospectus about this game. There’s so much good stuff I don’t want to quote all of it here. But I will note that he does agree with me re: where was Fernando Perez for Gabe Gross?