Another baffling night in Boston for Rockies

BOSTON – One night, the Boston Red Sox win with 13 runs. The next, they win with six hits.

Any new ideas for the Colorado Rockies?

That would be Plan C. C for Coors Field. Maybe home can do what nothing else could the first two games of the World Series.

There was no reason for the Rockies to be embarrassed Thursday night (except maybe Matt Holliday getting picked off in the eighth inning). Just baffled.

How, precisely, do you beat these guys?

Whereas the Red Sox used a sledgehammer in Game 1, they pulled out the scalpel in Game 2 to win, 2-1.

This was delicate work, requiring five-plus willful innings from Curt Schilling, and then sterling bullpen duty from Hideki Okajima and Jonathan Papelbon.

So Kevin Youkilis, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez – the Bermuda Triangle lately for opposing pitchers – go a combined 1 for 10. And the Red Sox strand nine runners between the third and sixth innings.

Shouldn’t that sort of thing get a team beaten?

Most of the time, it would. But not Thursday night. Schilling, at the age of 40 and past his prime fastball, added another postseason win onto his October stockpile. That makes him 11-2.

“His will (is) to make sure the score ends up in our favor,” Terry Francona said. “I’ve been around him so long, I probably expect unfair things out of him.”

Okajima mowed down all six batters he faced and struck out four of them.

“The Papajima Show,” Schilling called it. “That was phenomenal to watch.”

In some ways, this was the Red Sox stealing a victory, and the Rockies are already running out of time to afford the larceny.

Now Colorado has 48 hours to ponder where its offense has gone. Two runs in 18 innings. One hit in 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position. Or how they’ve had 11 hits, but struck out 22 times. An ominous ratio.

“In a billion-dollar organization,” Schilling said, “it comes down to the little things.”

So the Rockies are finding out how many different ways they can lose to Boston. Too bad, because they nearly had a folk hero.

That’d be Ubaldo Jimenez, the 23-year-old who stood in front of the Boston locomotive and made it stop. At least for a while.

When Schilling pitched his first major league game, Jimenez was 4 years old back in the Dominican Republic. But if not equal in resume, they were equal Thursday night in score, at least into the fifth with a 1-1 tie, as Jimenez kept the big Boston bats silent.

But it was dangerous, exhausting work, ducking one near-miss after another.

This is what it’s like against the Red Sox, as they huff and puff and try to blow the house down:

Overall, the Colorado pitchers held together. No 13-run egg on the face this night.

The Red Sox left two runners on in the third, two more in the fourth, the bases loaded in the fifth, two more in the sixth.

What the Rockies needed was a rally. None came.

So here are the facts of life. Fifty teams have taken a 2-0 lead in the World Series. Only 11 teams did not end up champions.

“We’ve done a lot of things people haven’t expected us to do,” manager Clint Hurdle said. “We’ve been down to one strike.”

To overcome such history, the Rockies must win four of the next five games.

And at least one of them is going to be pitched by Josh Beckett.