Red Sox have way at Fenway
BOSTON – This time it wouldn’t have mattered if Curt Schilling had bled from the ears.
Ten runs in the first three innings will make a Big Game Pitcher out of anybody, and if the Red Sox have any leftovers, Daisuke Matsuzaka will take some tonight.
If he gets them and turns them into gold, the Red Sox will become the sixth team to wipe out a 3-1 American League Championship Series deficit and proceed to the World Series. On Saturday they won their sixth consecutive ALCS elimination game, a 12-2 bashing of Cleveland.
Tonight they play a Game 7 at Fenway Park for the first time since they finished another three-game winning streak and beat the Angels, 21 years ago.
Sure, they did lose a World Series Game 7 here to Cincinnati in 1975, but that was long before Fenway became Fantasyland.
These days, good things happen here for the Sox almost by demand, just like bad things used to happen here in defiance of the local will.
Fausto Carmona became the latest pitcher to wonder how this ballpark arranges its own rules.
Everywhere else, Carmona’s mean sinkers are nearly unchallenged. Not here. Carmona worked twice in Fenway as a reliever last year, and Saturday was his second start here in this series. He got through seven innings, total, for a 20.57 ERA, and is 0-3.
Carmona’s first inning lasted 29 minutes, or about half as long as an episode of “Boston Legal,” and it had manager Eric Wedge and pitching coach Carl Willis looking for an appeals court.
Carmona threw first-pitch balls to six of the eight Sox he faced, walked David Ortiz on a 3-2 pitch, loaded the bases with nobody out, and then watched disbelievingly as J.D. Drew belted a grand slam.
The young right-hander, who had walked 61 batters in 215 innings during his 19-win season, needed 36 laborious pitches in the first. The Tribe felt he got little help from home umpire Dana DeMuth.
Willis was once seen to throw up his hands in his dugout and exclaim, “We got no (expletive) chance,” and catcher Victor Martinez harangued DeMuth, at which point Wedge came out to rescue Martinez and then make his own points.
Lefty reliever Rafael Perez, another guy who had been almost spotless before he entered this greenhouse, faced five Red Sox and retired one.
“Fausto was excited out there,” Martinez said. “I tried to calm him down. The umpire didn’t have a great game. He missed a lot of pitches that changed the game. We threw a good pitch to Drew (on 2-1) and he called it a ball, and when it’s 3-1 with the bases loaded, you got to come after him. But those guys (umpires) have a tough job, they don’t have replay.”