Boston Red Sox: Give The Man Some Run Support

This Article Originally Published at GetOutofMyBallpark.com

O.K. so I said that I was going to comment on the Sox' experiment with the batting order after the first game of it. I lied. Because everybody sucked last night.

Ortiz was 1-for-3 with a walk and a double, and it is not his fault he was stranded on second after leading off the second inning with that double. At this point, it is impossible to see how the shift in the lineup went due to the fact that the guys couldn't score any runs and this time instead of leaving men on base, Ortiz was the one left on.

The more alarming trend is the propensity of our starting pitching staff to have that one bad inning. It may be that they all caught an STD from the same skank (and she got it from Matsuzaka), or it may just be the added innings load that some of them threw last season (hello Jon Lester's 210 innings last season, I'm looking at you), but they have all lapsed into the same issue that the Wiggler has always had.

It's not the whole game where they are giving up a steady stream of runs, or even one here and one there. It is the one bad inning that more often than not leads to Red Sox losses.

They can be cruising along and just "boom" a few bad pitches (like Morneau's three run bomb last night) and the Sox are down big. It's nothing new, but it is an alarming trend.

Lester's last two losses show much the same pattern as last night. The four run sixth in Seattle (when Lester couldn't get the DP and the inning extended) and the six run fifth in Tampa, and even the three run fifth against the Yanks in a game he won all show the pattern of the one inning with a crooked number.

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