Just how difficult of a night was this?
It was tough. Sitting through that wasn't a whole lot of fun. We've been on the other side. When it happens to you, you've got to get through it the best you can, and we'll need to regroup as quickly as we can.
Can you talk about Timmy's performance tonight?
You know, the first inning, he left some balls up. The balls he left up got whacked pretty good. Second inning he goes out and has a four-pitch inning. In the third inning he's four pitches in, gets two outs, 0-2 count, get the squiber, then a home run. In a night that was filled with a lot of things that didn't go right, that was a huge turn in the game for us.
Are you as amazed as the rest of us that against a really good pitching staff, this team can swing the bat the way they have for the last three games?
Well, I hope you're not asking me that a couple days from now. We certainly need to figure it out. The quicker we get to our bullpen, we're making it harder on ourselves. We'll try to take tomorrow, get some guys some hacks if they need it, get the pitchers to get loose, but then we need Daisuke to get us deep and effective. We've had a difficult time. We have not had an answer for a lot of things.
The fact that you were in the same situation last year, can your team draw anything from that, or is that irrelevant to this season?
I hope it's relevant. I mean, I think every year is different. But rather than burden ourselves with what we look at four days from now, we'll set our sights on our next game and we'll come packed. That's, I think, the best way to go about it.
Can you talk about Ray's starting pitching this series, please?
Again, tonight is probably what's most relevant. Sonnanstine, he threw a back-door cutter to our lefties. To our righties he threw in enough within the two-seam movement to keep them off the plate, threw the slider, the cutter. He's got a lot of deception in his delivery, but what he does really well -- there's a lot of movement in that delivery, and he keeps it intact. He throws a ball or two and starts to get out of whack, he gathers himself, stays over the rubber, and he's obviously very confident against us right now. You can tell he feels good about himself, as he should.
Last couple nights Upton really came out big. Can you talk about Crawford's performance tonight and not being able to stop him?
We had a very difficult time. Because of his legs, he gets the hit I was talking about earlier, hits the ball in the gap, shoots the ball the other way. Again, when you get into your bullpen that early, you have no ability to match up against anybody. There wasn't a whole lot of places to put anybody, and they made us pay for it.
With the bullpen you had to go to Masterson early. Was that to try to contain the damage right then and there, or was that a matter of Masterson being able to warm up quickly and you could get him in there rather swiftly?
We warmed him up in the first. If we had gotten to Bartlett, we were going to go to him. Once that -- we got through that, he was the guy that was hot, and he was the guy at that point we felt like could give us -- when I say length, two-plus, get us to a manageable part of the game. Again, it's not a very good situation, and he did a pretty good job. But again, we were in a difficult spot.
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The onus of this 1-3 calamity is on Francona. The Sox had all the momentum in Tampa Bay after winning decisively with Dice-K, and then leading more than once in the 2nd game. But Francona compounded his mistake of leaving a struggling Beckett in too long by "surrendering" the game inserting Mike "Washed-Up" Timlin. His stupid sense of loyalty and respect for both pitchers will likely send the team home early this season.
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