''I'm OK with this," Sox manager Terry Francona said, ''getting your legs under you a little bit before the circus starts. I don't think that's so bad. It was like they were the only team we played for a long time besides the Cardinals. That's all it was, the Yankees."
Second baseman Mark Loretta, who has spent his career playing for such outlanders as the Brewers, Astros (briefly), and Padres, said he is looking forward to his initiation to Sox-Yankees.
''People have said that there are no other games on the schedule," Loretta said.
He knows better, of course, especially after a three-city, nine-game trip from which the Sox hobbled their way home after losing two out of three in Toronto, Cleveland, and now here, after a 5-4 defeat yesterday to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Curious to see how the Sox measure up to the Bombers?
''No," said Curt Schilling after being charged with his first loss of the season, the Sox unable to overcome what he called a ''horrific mistake," the 0-and-2 pitch he grooved in the second inning to Devil Rays catcher Toby Hall, who hit it into the left-field seats for a two-run homer and a lead Tampa and lefty Scott Kazmir (7 IP, 10 K's, 2 runs) never relinquished. ''I just want us to start playing better. We're not playing well."
As much as he was determined to take the blame for the loss, one pitch, of course, didn't determine the outcome. Rudy Seanez hung an 0-and-2 breaking ball to Carl Crawford, who hit it into the right-field seats for his first home run of the season, a two-run job in the seventh that widened the Devil Rays' lead to 5-2. Seanez gave up just four home runs in 60 1/3 innings last season for San Diego. Crawford's home run was the third he's allowed in 9 1/3 innings this season.
The notoriously unreliable Devil Rays bullpen actually made that lead stand up, though not without the usual white-knuckle moments that will make new manager Joe Maddon choke a time or 20 on his postgame glass of wine.
