MLB: Day Seventy-Seven

Posted on | June 20, 2007 | No Comments

Wow, what a pitching duel we saw on Saturday in the Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants game. The only run in the entire game was a home run by Manny Ramirez in the bottom of the fourth inning. That earned the Red Sox the 1-0 win.

Dice-K did his job and then some on the mound for the Red Sox. He pitched seven innings and gave up only three hits and three walks. He struck out eight batters. The performance lowered his ERA to 4.18 and raised his record to 8-5. Jonathon Papelbon earned the save by pitching a perfect ninth.

Dice K has been effective this year but I’m not so sure he’s been quite as good as Boston had hoped he’d be. On Saturday he certainly was every bit as good as anyone could’ve hoped. If he can make it a habit to keep pitching that well then he’ll certainly add one heck of a one-two-three punch  – along with Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling – to Boston’s pitching staff.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself but imagine having to face those three in the playoffs? You’d have to beat each of them in order to win the series. That would be a tough order.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Brewers continue to try to recapture the type of play that vaulted them to the lead of the National League Central a couple months ago.

Suddenly the Brewers have rattled off four straight wins and they’ve regained a comfortable lead in their division. The closest team to them right now is the Chicago Cubs who are 6.5 games back. Just when it looked like the Brewers may be sliding all the way back to .500, they’ve turned things back around for the last few days.

I’d say they need to keep up the winning, but the reality is that the team that plays .500 ball will probably win the division. So, the Brewers can just keep playing at or a little below .500 from now until October and they’ll probably win the division.

Certainly the Chicago Cubs or the St. Louis Cardinals could be better than .500 teams but they’ve shown no signs of being really good teams yet. Of course, there’s still plenty of season to go and any team can turn things around within a two week period, as we’ve documented with the New York Yankees in previous posts.

Related posts:

1. MLB: Day Seventy-One
2. MLB: Day One Hundred and Seventy-Five
3. MLB: Day Seventy-Three
4. MLB: Day One Hundred and Seventy-Three
5. MLB: Day One Hundred and Seventy-Four

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