TORONTO -- When you're World Series champions, you let other people make excuses for you. Okay, so you've travelled from Fort Myers, Fla., to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Oakland, Calif., and on to Toronto. Eighteen days, four cities and 16,000 stinking air miles.
Someone asked Boston Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek how he felt yesterday after the club was swept out of Toronto with a 7-4 Blue Jays win.
"That doesn't matter," Varitek said. "We just need to pitch a little better and play a little better defence. The bats I don't worry about."
The thing about this game is you're never as good as you look when you're smoking hot and never as bad as you look when just getting the ball to first base is a challenge. At least, that's what Julio Lugo hopes after yesterday's error trifecta, the most errors by a Red Sox shortstop in a game since Damian Jackson made three on Sept. 25, 2003.
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Toronto infielder John McDonald is right when he says that even though it's early, the way the Blue Jays drove Josh Beckett's pitch count up in his first start of the year, the way they've run the bases and the timely hitting they've had, means some of his teammates have a right to at least consider that they might be a "pretty damned good team." But the better news is that there have been no surprises through the first turn of the rotation. It means something to the Blue Jays but, frankly, nothing to the Red Sox.
These three losses. Bundle them up and put them out on the curb this morning. Tomorrow, after one of the best earned off-days in recent history, they will open their home season at Fenway Park. They'll get their World Series rings. And as Kevin Youkilis noted so eloquently yesterday: "Thing about this time of the year is that the teams at the top of the division, well, you never know where they'll be."
Here's why the Red Sox won't panic, despite the fact that, after getting the Detroit Tigers at home for three games, they'll play the New York Yankees five of seven broken up by a two-game set with the team many observers have picked to win the American League, the Cleveland Indians. The Red Sox won't panic because the next time Beckett pitches, he'll be better than he was yesterday, which, you know, wasn't all that bad.
Beckett, who did not make the trip to Japan after being limited to just four spring appearances because of a lower back strain, was making his first start in a big-league game since a 13-1 win over the Colorado Rockies in the first game of the World Series. In those spring games, he faced Boston College, a bunch of Minnesota Twins minor-leaguers and took part in two minor-league intrasquad games. His last rehabilitation start came on April Fool's Day, when he pitched for the Gulf Coast League Red Sox against Single-A Lowell.
Yesterday, Beckett gave up a two-run shot to Vernon Wells in the fourth inning, then fell apart after getting two out in the fifth, giving up a single to Aaron Hill and back-to-back walks to Alex Rios and Wells. Frank Thomas came on and slammed Manny Delcarmen's first pitch for a grand slam home run. "It's a fine line you walk when you try to do what we did today," Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. "I wanted to get him [Beckett] through five [innings]. I thought he deserved it.
"I thought it went well. The only thing that didn't go well, I guess, is I thought his legs started to go on him. But that's normal."
Neither Varitek nor Beckett rushed to agree with Francona. Varitek said he wouldn't know, that Beckett would know better than anyone.
"It's hard for me to tell because he's such a bull out there," Varitek said.
Beckett was clearly unhappy with the quality of his outing and said he'd need a couple of days to think over what he needed to do to get better. But fatigue? "Nah, just normal stuff," he said dismissively. "Nothing I'm not used to."
Francona did not need to be reminded that the Blue Jays have now beaten the Red Sox in seven consecutive games.
"You don't like to look at losses from last year and roll them into this year, but they've played better than we have in games against us going back to last year," Francona said. "They did everything better than us this weekend, myself included. We need to figure it out, because we play these guys so often."
First, though, they just need to catch their breath.
