Whatever a furniture company has been paying this season to sponsor the playing of "Sweet Caroline" -- another Fenway tradition reduced to a price tag -- it could not match in value what Tim Wakefield gave the Red Sox last night.
With the Sox reeling from a weekend series in Baltimore bookended by walkoff losses, the 41-year-old knuckleballer held the Tampa Bay Devil Rays hitless for six innings and kept them off the scoreboard for eight in a 3-0 win before a sellout crowd of 36,808.
"I never saw that pitch moving that much," said Sox DH David Ortiz after Wakefield allowed just two singles to record his 14th win, which doubled his total from 2006 and drew him within three of his career high (17-8 in 1998). "That was disgusting."
Except for Julio Lugo, who singled and scored Boston's first run in the first and singled home Doug Mirabelli for the second run in the seventh, the most im pressive demonstration by the Sox offense for much of the night was the impromptu set of pushups Ortiz did after he found himself face-down at the plate when Devil Rays starter James Shields threw a pitch at his ankles in the sixth.
"I wouldn't consider that a set," said third baseman Mike Lowell, who kept Wakefield's bid for a no-no alive with a nice backhanded stab of Brendan Harris's smash with one out in the fifth. "But it was quite comical.
"I actually was hoping he would go deep."
Ortiz came close in the first inning, when his liner hit high off the wall in dead center for a run-scoring double.
"I'm never going to hit 20 home runs," Ortiz moaned. "Every time I swing and miss, my shoulder stings."
But not enough to keep him from knocking off two or three pushups.
"Those were short strokes," he said. "I did it to show it was a slider, that he wasn't throwing at me."
The Sox eased a bit of the pressure on their besieged bullpen by tacking on another run in the eighth, stringing together Manny Ramírez's ground single up the middle, a walk to J.D. Drew, and Lowell's single to center, a ball he hit off his fists, to make it 3-0.
There would be no grilling of Eric Gagné this night. He and the rest of the Sox bullpen got to watch Jonathan Papelbon finish off the Devil Rays for his 28th save, striking out two. The victory kept the Sox four games ahead of the Yankees in the AL East, and stopped the hyperventilating, at least temporarily.
"It was a good win for us," Lowell said, "just to get back on track. You know, I don't like to say games were big because of this or that. It was a nice dominant performance -- a little flair with the no-hitter thing. It was a close game, and we've really been getting good quality starts, especially the last four starts. That's a good sign for us."
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