SEATTLE -- By virtue of making three starts this season, Kyle Snyder is a longtime member of the Red Sox family compared with Kason Gabbard, the kid scheduled to make his major league debut this afternoon. How familiar is Gabbard to manager Terry Francona?
``The one time I can remember him is I think he pitched the night game against the college team -- does that make sense?" Francona said of Gabbard's lone appearance in a spring training game. ``I think he pitched a couple of innings.
``Other than that, the only time I talked to him was in Applebee's, where I bought him a beer. [I was] sitting there waiting for my usual salad, having a beer or two while I wait, these three guys [Jim Buckley, him, and Chris Smith] came in. I knew he was a player, but I had no idea who he was. He was out of uniform. I had to apologize to him. I said, `I have no idea who you are.' "
When you're reduced to guessing the identity of your starting pitchers, or having to treat newcomers like Snyder as old-timers, the best way to keep winning is to obliterate whomever happens to be standing on the hill for the other club. That's precisely what the Sox did last night to 43-year-old Jamie Moyer, mashing five home runs -- by five players -- en route to a 9-4 victory over the Seattle Mariners before a sellout crowd of 46,025 in an unseasonably steamy Safeco Field.
David Ortiz (No. 33), Alex Gonzalez (No. 7), Jason Varitek (No. 10), Kevin Youkilis (No. 11), and Manny Ramírez (No. 26) connected off Moyer, the former Sox pitcher and Sudbury, Mass., country squire who in 505 career starts had never been subjected to the kind of beating administered by the Sox. Ortiz is the major league leader in home runs, while Ramírez is an old tormentor. Ramírez has 10 home runs off the Mariner mushballer, two more than he has against any other pitcher. (Worcester's Tanyon Sturtze, on the disabled list with the Yankees, is Manny's next favorite stoolie, having given up eight.)
The five home runs were the most by the Sox in a game this season; they'd hit four in a game five times -- the last time at Tampa Bay July 6 -- and all six games of four or more home runs have come on the road.
But the Sox had hardly been in muscle-flexing mode back home in the Fens, which made last night's power display on their first West Coast foray of 2006 all the more impressive.
The Sox hit just four home runs in their previous seven games, and had not hit more than one in their last 10 games before leaving the yard early and often in Safeco, where the game-time temperature (89 degrees) was more like Houston than the Pacific Northwest.
