Billy Traber making a PawSox fan very happy. Photo by Kelly O'Connor/sittingstill.net and used with permission.
That guy in the photo above is Billy Traber. Red Sox fans should probably be thanking him today. Sure the Sox ended up coming back with six runs but John Smoltz allowed eight. What Traber did was save the bullpen from John Smoltz while probably taking a major hit to his own ego. The absolute definition of taking one for the team.
If you read any of the Boston sports sites today, be prepared to read about how last night’s game spells the end for the Red Sox.  Just from reading the headlines at Boston.com I literally laughed out loud. Hey, last night sucked and there’s no way to sugarcoat that. But CHB (who wrote “They’re sinking in the AL East.”, Amalie Benjamin (who wrote “…a night that could mean an early end to their season”) and Tony Massarotti (whose article about Jed Lowrie’s injury worries the Sox might have a problem at shortstop. Gee, Tony, took you this long to figure that one out?) all write like people wanting to make the Red Sox fans panic and turn on their team. Honestly, that was my first thought – “Here come the stories about how the Red Sox are a embarrassment and Theo hasn’t done enough with the team and oh don’t we miss Kotsay and Lugo now!”. An obvious want to trash the team (possibly coming from John Henry’s admonishing them for their Papi coverage?) is there.
There are no guarantees in life. You root for your team and you hope they play well. When they don’t it’s lousy and sometimes (like last night) even painful. But guess what? Until the end of September (or October if you’re lucky) there’s always another game to watch and hope they do well. Last time I checked, not only were there 55 more games to go in the regular season and three more to go in this series. Nothing is written in stone and just because we’re Red Sox fans that doesn’t give us an automatic trip to the playoffs. There are definitely concerns. I hope Lowrie isn’t hurt too badly. Ditto for Bay and Drew. I also hope whatever Papi has to say on Saturday takes some of the pressure off the team from dealing with the press on the PED stuff. But I’m not even CLOSE to “worrying” about where this team will land in October. It’s fun for the hacks to torture the fans, especially during a Yankees series, but I have no interest in reading that crap or spreading it (well, I guess I did spread it here a little but that was just to save you all from reading it in full over at boston.com and wanting to gouge your eyes out).
Beckett v Burnett at 7:05 tonight. I like the looks of this one.
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