Things can really turn around quickly in baseball, can't they? Everybody in Boston was in full smirk mode after Game 1, but with last night's 7-3 Cleveland victory, the Indians lead this one, 3-1, and can close it out tomorrow night.
But please don't think there's really anything odd about what's going on. The Cleveland Indians are good. They won 96 games, same as the Red Sox, and they did it with a nice finishing kick that included a head-to-head wipeout of their chief Central Division rivals, the Detroit Tigers. It was no shock when they dispatched the Yankees in four games and it would be no shock if they were to dispose of the Red Sox in five, either.
The Red Sox put themselves in Tim Wakefield's hands last night and for four innings he was a stud. The knuckleball was doing what it's supposed to do, and he was sitting on a one-hit shutout. At one point he threw 13 strikes in 15 pitches. He had fanned six. Things looked good.
It took one controlled swing of the bat for things to start looking not so good. Casey Blake took a strike and then he took a nice, easy swing at a knuckler that didn't drop far enough. He hit a lazy fly to left, and in this park, sometimes that's all you need. The ball fell onto that landing out there beyond the fence. "I got lucky there, hit one on the barrel," Blake said. That made it 1-0, and it was the start of a glorious inning for the Indians.
Make that a long, glorious inning for the Indians. Eleven more men would come to the plate and six would score before Manny Delcarmen, facing his sixth batter, finally struck out Kelly Shoppach to get his mates back into the dugout, seven runs in arrears.
