Don't blame the kid

Thursday was a day that 22-year-old Josh Reddick won’t soon forget.

He fought a knuckling, diving line drive at his ankles, a ball that turned into the first run of the day against Clay Buchholz. He made a basket catch along the right field line when wind currents played tricks on him.

And he faced a starting pitcher in Justin Verlander who was throwing 100 miles an hour in the eighth inning, including on his 123rd and final pitch, a strikeout of Jason Bay.

“I don’t think I’ve faced anybody that’s thrown a 123rd pitch,” Reddick said of Verlander, who earned the win in Detroit’s 2-0 win over the Red Sox at Fenway. “I’ve only seen 101 one other time and that was in 2007 but it was about his 15th pitch of the game. That was amazing.”

That pitcher, by the way, was Milwaukee prospect Jeremy Jeffress, when both Reddick and Jeffress were in A-ball.

Reddick, who batted .277 with 13 homers in 63 games for Double-A Portland, started in place of J.D. Drew in right field and had the unenviable task of facing the Tigers flame-throwing ace. Reddick didn’t melt under the pressure. If anything, his approach was to take something off his swing and for the first three at-bats, it worked. He doubled down the right field line in the first inning and was robbed in the third on a one-hop bullet that was snared by Miguel Cabrera at first base.

“I’ve never seen anything really that hard before, and if I have, I haven’t definitely seen it in a while. He seemed to be getting stronger as he went along, especially in that last at-bat. He just seemed to amp it up and juiced it up there.”

He flew out to center in the fifth before striking out in the eighth with a runner on second.

“My first three at-bats, I didn’t make my effort level very high and then my fourth one, I tried to do way too much,” Reddick said. “And then it showed, my head was pulling and my hips were flying (open) but I tried to stay under control my first three at-bats and tried to put the barrel of the bat on the ball and it ended up working out for me.”

Then there was the defense. Miguel Cabrera hit a sinking liner to him in the fourth. It careened off his glove and then his left foot, allowing Cabrera to reach second on what was initially ruled a double. The call was changed to a single and an error, saving Buchholz an earned run, but a run just the same.

“I got a pretty good jump on it and then when I went down to catch it, as it was tailing, it kind of came back at the last second, started knuckling there at the end,” Reddick said. “So, luckily I was just happy to get a glove on it and it hit my foot and it didn’t get all the way to the wall. It didn’t end up doing very much good for us because that run scored.

“Buchholz pitched his butt off tonight but we just really didn’t do anything with the bats,” added Reddick.

Now, with Thursday’s experience in the past, it’s time to look ahead to Friday’s opener in Texas. The Rangers are battling neck-and-neck with the Sox for the A.L. wild card.

“It’s always exciting to be up here contending for anything, in my opinion,” Reddick said. “We need to go out there and win some ball games and hopefully not do what we did in New York.

“We all have to put it together. It just seems like whenever our hitting comes around (our pitching doesn’t) and then the next day our pitching does really well and Clay went out there and did really well today and our bats just didn’t show up for him. Verlander pitched a great game as well,” Reddick said.