“I knew very well that this was a critical game, as far as our chances of advancing to the playoffs,’’ Matsuzaka said through interpreter Masa Hoshino. “So to allow what happened to happen so early in the game, I can really only apologize to my teammates and to the fans.’’
It was the walks, missed chances, and the long balls that allowed the Rays to clobber the Sox in a game that wasn’t as close as the final score indicated. Matsuzaka was not the only culprit. The two relievers that followed were equally abysmal. They only added to a parade of Rays running around the bases. The lowlight was a mammoth home run by Evan Longoria in the fifth.
But while it might have gone the farthest (it was last seen headed toward some cars parked in a Lansdowne Street lot), Longoria’s homer wasn’t the only one. After Matsuzaka had allowed two home runs, the relievers one-upped him, yielding three more before the end of the sixth inning. The five round-trippers were a season high for Tampa.
By that point, though, the adding-on hardly mattered. Matsuzaka allowed the game to get out of hand, allowing eight runs on eight hits and four walks in just 4 2/3 innings. There was no coming back from that.
“On a day like today, I didn’t have any life or bite or command on my pitches,’’ Matsuzaka said. “I’m sure that Victor [Martinez] felt that there wasn’t anything that he could try and do either.’’
Although he got through the first two innings unscathed before giving up a two-run homer to Ben Zobrist in the third, it was in the fourth that things started to fall apart.
“Lack of command caught up with him and kind of caught up in a hurry,’’ Francona said. “[Fourth] inning, we got walk, walk, bunt, and we’ve got bases loaded, nobody out. There was a lot of hits and some walks mixed in. That’s not a good combination.’’
