KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- There might be icicles hanging from the gyroball this afternoon, but the change in atmospheric conditions here meant more to the Red Sox than just a precipitous drop in temperature.
The 42-degree game-time reading in Kauffman Stadium last night -- 37 degrees colder than it had been at game time two days earlier -- was more than offset by the thaw in the Sox' dugout after they posted their first win of 2007, a 7-1 beating of the Kansas City Royals.
Kevin Youkilis's two-run home run, Mike Lowell's two-run double, and two hits by J.D. Drew, including an RBI double, made an easy winner of Josh Beckett, who threw more balls (48) than strikes (46) in five innings but allowed just two hits and a run.
Beckett survived a rare double-bobble inning by third baseman Lowell, who had the first three-error game of his career, with the help of a terrific running catch by Drew, and was ably assisted by four scoreless innings of one-hit ball by the bullpen, which came into the season as a potential trouble spot.
"I think it's huge," Lowell said of the work turned in by Javier Lopez, Kyle Snyder, J.C. Romero, and Joel Pineiro, with the only hit a two-out single by Ross Gload off Lopez in the sixth. "We're going to rely on our starters big time, but we're going to rely on our pen big time, too. They all looked good, and that's a good sign. I think it gives you options, and that's important."
Lowell kicked two consecutive ground balls in the third, then threw a ball away in the ninth with two outs, his three errors representing half of the misplays he made last season. "I wanted to throw it out of the stadium," he said of the glove he smacked in disgust in the ninth. "But how could I get mad at the glove? It didn't do anything in the ninth."
Instead, he had an ice cream sandwich, an interesting dining option on a night so cold that second baseman Dustin Pedroia said he covered himself in Vaseline.
"You know what's hard? At-bats don't carry over in this weather," Sox manager Terry Francona said before the game. "Normally, you get a nice swing and you come up the next time and you feel good. In this weather, you can have a nice base hit, you come up the next time your bat feels like a stranger. The handle's cold, it seems thicker, it's hard to get in a groove.
"Then, if you hit one off the end or get jammed, you don't feel your hands for about two innings."
Beckett didn't have a