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Home » August 2009 Game CommentsAugust 2009 » Greenery

Greenery

Game 127: August 27, 2009
WinWhite Sox
9
W: John Danks (12-8)
64-64, 1 game winning streak
Red Sox5
L: Junichi Tazawa (2-3)
73-54, 1 game losing streak
Highlights: Tazawa showed the absent-minded side of the tanuki by forgetting how to pitch effectively. It was a typical greenhorn sequence of pitching starts, on one week and off the next. In between innings Tazawa was shown in the dugout with a rather elaborate shoulder gadget; if anything it just concentrated suckage around his arm.

The infield didn’t do Junichi Tazawa any favors. In the third, Jayson Nix, who has replaced Frank Catalanotto as the Inconsequential Player Who Does Inexplicably Well Against the Red Sox, sprayed a line drive to left. Mike Lowell cut off the ball to initiate the rundown of Nix between first and second. Kevin Youkilis threw a smidgen high to Dustin Pedroia (insert short joke here). Pedroia dropped the ball, chased it down, but had no play at first because neither Tazawa nor Victor Martinez covered the sack. Alexei Ramirez crossed the plate unhindered for the eighth run of the game.

With the Red Sox starter unable to go more than four innings and many bullpen arms unavailable, Nick Green was called on to pitch. For a shortstop with game-losing throwing errors under his belt, Green performed on the mound surprisingly well: 2 innings pitched, no hits, no runs, 3 walks, and no strikeouts.

Green’s outing was second only to Lenny Clarke and Denis Leary’s criss-crossing trajectories of their ceremonial tosses.

J.D. Drew and Alex Gonzalez went back-to-back with four-baggers in the fifth. That is not a typo.

With two out (a familiar refrain for the Red Sox these days) in the eighth, David Ortiz doubled off the wall to drive in Youkilis. Ortiz was in turn driven in by Jason Bay. With Bay at the keystone sack Terry Francona started warming Hideki Okajima. But when Casey Kotchman grounded out weakly to Nix, Green was called upon to close out the top of the ninth.

Drew led off the bottom of the ninth with another homer, but the next three batters couldn’t convert any of Bobby Jenks’s pitches into runs. I’m not convinced it was the White Sox closer’s stuff so much as it was his highly distracting and distasteful facial hair.

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