Chronicles of the Lads

MESS
Last night's loss was somewhat frustrating in that it were our alleged strengths -- pitching and defense -- that let us down, while the offense got on track and delivered eight runners to home plate.

John Lackey started off the disappointment with a vintage outing. Here is one part of his evening:

IP  H  HR  SO  BB  HBP  R  ER
 3  4   0   4   1   0   0   0

And here is another:

IP  H  HR  SO  BB  HBP  R  ER
 1  5   1   0   0   1   5   5

You may recall that Big John's Achilles Heel in 2003 and 2004, as well as April of 2005, was a susceptibility to the big inning. Does last night's outing portend evil?

I don't know; after the Johjima home run, he allowed a seeing-eye single past a diving Orlando Cabrera a blooper to right to Yuniesky Betancourt, and Legs Figgins stood idly by as a Vlad throw skipped past him, allowing Betancourt to move to second. It's when adversity and bad luck turned against him that Lackey used to struggle, so it's somewhat worrisome that he followed this up by hitting Ichiro!'s foot with an errant slurve.

But it's just one game, so let's reserve judgment. Same thing for our defense, which in committing four errors looked like a bunch of little Kansas City Royals out there.

Where I will not reserve judgment is in respect to Esteban Yan. The word out of Spring Training was that Yan was throwing well and had never looked better; he backed it up by throwing 11 2/3 scoreless innings, striking out 12, walking 2, and allowing only six hits.

But as we all know by now, Esteban Yan sucks, and last night his return to form may have cost us the game. Yeah yeah, one of his four runs allowed was unearned, but while I don't want to excuse Adam Kennedy's ridiculous error, all it did was put a man on first with one out, a situation that doesn't require Houdini-like skills to escape. Yan had already allowed Richie Sexson to dispatch a three-run homer before the error, so the damage was done.

Hector Carrasco looked pretty decent in his three innings of work; the unearned run he allowed was caused more directly by The OC's error, which put a runner on third, who was in position to score on a subsequent groundout. Though I'm a bit of a skeptic of the Carrasco signing, I wouldn't mind seeing him take more innings from Yan as the season progresses.

Anyway, it's just one loss, and our defense is unlikely to melt down like that again. And if we win today, we can still take this thing wire-to-wire!